Maya Apocalypse: Seventeen Years with the Women of a Yucatan Village (review)

Goodman's Maya Apocalypse provides a richly detailed account of daily life among members of an apostolic congregation in a small town in Yucatán. The volume traces the history and evolution of this congregation from its establishment in 1960 through a dramatic apocalyptic crisis in 1970 and continues until the death of Goodman's principal informant in 1986. Experiential forms of worship, especially trancing and glossolalia (speaking in tongues), are principal themes. The book represents the culmination of the author's years of ethnographic research and caps her active career of publication on Pentecostal religious practice. Goodman's long involvement in the town she calls "Utzpak" yields a portrayal of rare depth that will be of particular interest to specialists studying the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America.

Organized chronologically into chapters reflecting distinct periods of fieldwork from the summer of 1969 through December 1986, the body of the book is a running ethnographic record, punctuated at irregular intervals by brief analyses. With a quote from Goethe in the introduction, Goodman eschews theory as "gray" and proclaims her commitment to recording daily life (p. xix). She describes her style of ethnographic research and writing, in the words of her dissertation adviser, as "'vacuum-cleaner anthropology'" (p. xx). While this style is not without merit, Maya Apocalypse suffers from a lack of focus and theoretical grounding. The sparse review of scholarly literature dealing with evangelical Christianity in Latin America in the "context" chapter does not engage deeply with contemporary debates. For instance, Goodman shows scant interest in arguments concerning political or economic features of the tremendous spread of Pentecostalism in the region in the late twentieth century. While Goodman occasionally mentions trends within and among Pentecostal denominations, she does not make connections with other historical developments in society. Her analyses focus almost exclusively on local events and closely observed details of experiential worship, such as the physiological patterns produced in trance and the rhythmic regularities of utterances during glossolalia. Maya Apocalypse would have benefited greatly from substantial pruning and more thorough editing towards thematic organization. The index cannot overcome this deficiency. The only way to mine the book without reading it cover-to-cover is to flip through in search of thematic chapter subheadings that were, for some unfathomable reason, left out of the table of contents. The saddest part of such laissez-faire editing is that the length and diffuse character of the work are likely to discourage potential readers. Few scholars can afford to indulge in languorous exploratory reading in excess of five hundred pages in order to discover hidden treasures.

Despite these weaknesses, Goodman's ethnographic chronicle offers vivid representations of people in practice and imparts a powerful sense of daily life. The report of the apocalyptic crisis is especially gripping. By writing in a manner that is in places reminiscent of Bronislaw Malinowski's diary (1967), Goodman moreover demystifies the practice of fieldwork. The reader is drawn sensually into Utzpak through Goodman's account of her own experiences. I sympathized with her horror of giant flying cockroaches and recognized the often awkward process of adjusting to social life in a rural place in the tropics. The intimacy of Goodman's relationships with her main informants is also clear from the conversations she recounts. I felt and shared Goodman's appreciation for the immediate warmth and steady hospitality of doña Eus, her key informant and great friend. As an ethnographer of rural Yucatán, I recognized voices similar to those of women I interviewed and with whom I lived in another small town further south. The intimate view of the ebbs and flows in the drama of social life in Utzpak constitutes the central pleasure of reading Goodman's book.

In its wealth of detail, Maya...