Ruins, Caves, Gods, and Incense Burners: Northern Lacandon Maya Myths and Rituals by Didier Boremanse (review)

Didier Boremanse has done extensive work with the Lacandon since the early 1970s, and in this volume has put together a large collection of Lacandon myths and prayers collected over the last 5 decades. This in itself is an impressive feat. As anyone who has done similar work knows, recording such stories, translating them, checking translations with local collaborators, and then exploring the symbolism in the wording requires tremendous perseverance and a level of endurance that I could rarely muster in my own 4 decades of work in the same communities. So I want to start this review by acknowledging the effort required to collect and present this material. Boremanse has compiled a useful collection of texts for scholars interested in Mayan folklore. He provides the Mayan transcriptions of the stories and describes in detail the ritual settings in which he heard them.

On the other hand, this is a very old-fashioned piece of work. In particular, it reminds me of work by Paul Radin, in which Radin presented extensive ethnographic information but only for the purpose of reporting it. While Boremanse invokes Clifford Geertz' notion of thick description in chapter 4 (p. 103), and in chapter 9 provides a structural analysis of a folktale in the style of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the majority of Boremanse's work is actually most similar to Victor Turner's work with Ndembu ritual symbolism (without Turner's exploration of the properties of symbols). Consequently, the absence of a coherent theoretical framework results in a work that lacks continuity from one chapter to the next. Further, there is little information here that is not already covered by other authors.

Like most ethnographers in the last hundred years, Boremanse focuses exclusively on Lacandon non-Christian religion. Because those religious practices were exclusively the activity of male heads of households, the book isn't really about Lacandon myths and rituals. It is about the stories told by a few elderly ritual leaders. While this is not bad, Boremanse's material may be of limited use in folklore studies because he makes no attempt to describe the performative aspects of many of these tales, such as their recitation in couplets or the audience's participation. Further, while Boremanse acknowledges the variation in one individual's performance of prayers, he does not account for the variation in these stories over time. Many elements of these tales have changed since the 1970s and early 1980s when we were recording Lacandon myths. Documenting and explaining these changes could be a valuable contribution to folklore studies, especially when Lacandon interactions with missionaries, ethnographers, and archaeologists may be contributing to those changes.

Another old-fashioned element of Bore-manse's book is his romantic view of Lacandon culture, which he implies somehow existed in a purer form in the 1970s when he started his work. He discusses some of the cultural changes in the last few decades disapprovingly and argues that acculturation has destroyed Lacandon culture. It is Boremanse's opinion that young Lacandon adults, whom he describes as "young mestizos with a strong leaning towards global culture," are no longer really Lacandon (p. 13).

I am surprised that an anthropologist in 2020 would make such a claim. If nothing else, it should be obvious that cultures change. I was born in 1955. American culture has changed dramatically since 1955, but young people in the United States today are no less culturally American than I am, even though the digital world in which they were raised is very different from the world in which I grew up. Why should the Lacandon be any different?

Boremanse deserves credit for his detailed reporting of Lacandon curses. The use of the term "curse" is mine, but a Lacandon man praying to his gods may mention the activity of someone in the community to draw a god's attention...