Renewing the Maya World: Expressive Culture in a Highland Town

Notes

Notes chapter 1 1. Here and below in this section I am relying on the interpretations of my mentor Robert Carmack (1995: 7, 1981: 53) and my colleague and friend John Fox (1987: 181) to reconstruct the late Postclassic situation when the Epigonal-Toltec Quiché conquest state expanded in the highlands. For a more detailed interpretation of the Quichean sociopolitical system at the time, see Fox and Cook (1996: 811–815). 2. Terms that lack accurate and commonly used English cognates and that reappear in the manuscript are given in Quiché or Spanish. For convenience , and to allow for fuller treatment, they are listed and defined in the glossary. As a stylistic convention, the plurals of Quiché nouns are formed according to the rules of English usage; for example, porobals rather than porobalab . The only exception is in the case of a few proper nouns like ‘‘Tzulab Dance,’’ in which ‘‘Tzulab’’ is used rather than ‘‘Tzuls,’’ or in citing a term given in the translation of a transcribed text. 3. The description of the colonial period social organization of Momos here, and in an expanded version in chapter 2, is based on Carmack 1995. A clear description of the very similar Cakchiquel pattern of the seventeenth century has also been published (see Hill 1992: 38–47). Hill’s description calls attention to the problems of social integration that developed during the seventeenth century when independent amaks were thrown together in the congregacio ́n process to form pueblos. Carmack’s work focuses more on the political struggles during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the traditional caciques in the parcialidades were increasingly opposed in effective political struggles by commoner political blocs utilizing the centralized cabildo government of the pueblo as a springboard to power. 4. The Popol Vuh first came to the attention of European civilization when a copy and Spanish translation was made by Father Francisco Ximénez at Chichicastenango (Ch’uwila) in the early eighteenth century. This copy remained unknown to a larger public until it was independently rediscovered in the University of San Carlos archives in Guatemala and published by Carl Scherzer and Abbe Etienne Brasseur de Bourborg, the latter with a new French translation from the Spanish, in the mid-nineteenth century (See Recinos 1950: 16–61, Edmonson 1971: viii, Tedlock 1985: 28–30, Himelblau 1989: 1–15). The most influential subsequent translations, all made from the Quiché, have been those of Adrian Recinos, originally in Spanish in 1947, the Spanish later translated into English by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley (Recinos 1950), and those of Munro Edmonson (1971) and his student Dennis Tedlock (1985), both translated directly into English. I have relied primarily on the Recinos and Tedlock translations, though Edmonson’s discovery that the Popol Vuh makes extensive use of couplets is one of the major breakthroughs in its literary interpretation, and the supplementary dictionary that he compiled (Edmonson 1965) is an invaluable reference for critical reading of the translations. Dennis Tedlock, responding to those who have found evidence for syncretism in some of the Popol Vuh’s motifs, has argued persuasively that the Popol Vuh, though written ‘‘within Christendom,’’ represents a distinctive Maya alternative to the biblical creation account and should be considered as an expression of aboriginal culture (D. Tedlock 1986). The troubling thesis that the Popol Vuh was written by a Spanish cleric, Domingo de Vico (Acuña 1975, 1983), is effectively refuted by the discussion of motifs in Dennis Tedlock’s hermeneutical approach (1986) and by the detailed morphological analysis of Jack Himelblau (1989). The Popol Vuh is thus here considered to represent a Quiché-Maya cosmogonic and historical account intended to preserve the traditional knowledge of Quichean origins so they would not be lost, in spite of the loss of their traditional media of expression, under Spanish rule. 5. A successful adaptation always refers to conditions in the past. When environmental, demographic, or economic conditions do not permit the maintenance of a traditional way of life, it will change. Cultural crystallization, a term coined by George Foster (1960: 227–234) to refer specifically to the colonial cultures of the Americas, refers to the process of institutionalization in which a new, but subsequently stable, and eventually ‘‘traditional’’ way of life precipitates out of historical tumult. 6. Oliver La Farge (1940, 1956) suggested a workable framework for the sequence of Maya cultural ‘‘crystallizations’’ in Guatemala, although he did not use that term. He postulated a nativistic Recent Indian...