Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World

Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World PDF

Author: Garrett W. Cook

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0826353185

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Based on more than thirty years of ethnographic fieldwork in Highland Guatemala, this study of Maya diviners, shamans, ritual dancers, and religious brotherhoods describes the radical changes in traditional Maya religious practice wrought by economic globalization and political turmoil. Focusing on the primary participants in the annual festival in the K'iche' Maya village of Santiago Momostenango, the authors show how older religious traditionalists and the new generation of "cultural activist" religious practitioners interact within a single local community, and how their competing agendas for adapting Maya religiosity to a new and continually changing political economy are perpetuating and changing Maya religious traditions.

Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds

Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds PDF

Author: C. James MacKenzie

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2016-04-07

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 160732394X

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Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds examines tension and conflict over ethnic and religious identity in the K’iche’ Maya community of San Andrés Xecul in the Guatemalan Highlands and considers how religious and ethnic attachments are sustained and transformed through the transnational experiences of locals who have migrated to the United States. Author C. James MacKenzie explores the relationship among four coexisting religious communities within Highland Maya villages in contemporary Guatemala—costumbre, traditionalist religion with a shamanic substrate; “Enthusiastic Christianity,” versions of Charismaticism and Pentecostalism; an “inculturated” and Mayanized version of Catholicism; and a purified and antisyncretic Maya Spirituality—with attention to the modern and nonmodern worldviews that sustain them. He introduces a sophisticated set of theories to interpret both traditional religion and its relationship to other contemporary religious options, analyzing the relation among these various worldviews in terms of the indigenization of modernity and the various ways modernity can be apprehended as an intellectual project or an embodied experience. Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds investigates the way an increasingly plural religious landscape intersects with ethnic and other identities. It will be of interest to Mesoamerican and Mayan ethnographers, as well as students and scholars of cultural anthropology, indigenous cultures, globalization, and religion.

Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya

Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya PDF

Author: Andrew K. Scherer

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2015-11-15

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1477300538

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From the tombs of the elite to the graves of commoners, mortuary remains offer rich insights into Classic Maya society. In Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya: Rituals of Body and Soul, the anthropological archaeologist and bioarchaeologist Andrew K. Scherer explores the broad range of burial practices among the Maya of the Classic period (AD 250–900), integrating information gleaned from his own fieldwork with insights from the fields of iconography, epigraphy, and ethnography to illuminate this society’s rich funerary traditions. Scherer’s study of burials along the Usumacinta River at the Mexican-Guatemalan border and in the Central Petén region of Guatemala—areas that include Piedras Negras, El Kinel, Tecolote, El Zotz, and Yaxha—reveals commonalities and differences among royal, elite, and commoner mortuary practices. By analyzing skeletons containing dental and cranial modifications, as well as the adornments of interred bodies, Scherer probes Classic Maya conceptions of body, wellness, and the afterlife. Scherer also moves beyond the body to look at the spatial orientation of the burials and their integration into the architecture of Maya communities. Taking a unique interdisciplinary approach, the author examines how Classic Maya deathways can expand our understanding of this society’s beliefs and traditions, making Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya an important step forward in Mesoamerican archeology.

Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity

Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity PDF

Author: Kaylee R. Spencer

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2015-05-01

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0826355803

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Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity privileges art historical perspectives in addressing the ways the ancient Maya organized, manipulated, created, interacted with, and conceived of the world around them. The Maya provide a particularly strong example of the ways in which the built and imaged environment are intentionally oriented relative to political, religious, economic, and other spatial constructs. In examining space, the contributors of this volume demonstrate the core interrelationships inherent in a wide variety of places and spaces, both concrete and abstract. They explore the links between spatial order and cosmic order and the possibility that such connections have sociopolitical consequences. This book will prove useful not just to Mayanists but to art historians in other fields and scholars from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, geography, and landscape architecture.

Understanding Climate Change Through Religious Lifeworlds

Understanding Climate Change Through Religious Lifeworlds PDF

Author: David L. Haberman

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0253056039

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How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change? Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld, edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges. People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.

In this Body

In this Body PDF

Author: Servando Z. Hinojosa

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0826335233

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This account of life in one highland Maya community shows how, among Kaqchikels, spirit expresses itself fundamentally through the body, and not as something entirely separate from the body.

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala PDF

Author: John P. Hawkins

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2021-05-01

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0826362265

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Mayas, and indeed all Guatemalans, are currently experiencing the collapse of their way of life. This collapse is disrupting ideologies, symbols, life practices, and social structures that have undergirded their society for almost five hundred years, and it is causing rapid and massive religious transformation among the K’iche’ Maya living in highland western Guatemala. Many Maya are converting to Christian Pentecostal faiths in which adherents and leaders become bodily agitated during worship. Drawing on over fifty years of research and data collected by field-school students, Hawkins argues that two factors—cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion—explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed. Guatemala serves as a window on religious change around the world, and Hawkins examines the rapid pentecostalization of Christianity not only within Guatemala but also throughout the global South. The “pentecostal wail,” as he describes it, is ultimately an acknowledgment of the angst and insecurity of contemporary Maya.

Unmaking Waste

Unmaking Waste PDF

Author: Sarah Newman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-05-26

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0226826392

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"In Unmaking Waste, Sarah Newman asks what happens when there are disagreements about what constitutes waste and what one should do with it, both at singular moments in time (for example, when ideas about waste collide in emerging colonial contexts) and across time (such as between those who left things behind in the past and the archaeologists who recover them). Newman examines ancient Mesoamerican understandings of waste, Euro-American perceptions of waste in New Spain, and early modern European ideals of civility and Christian understandings of good and bad, expressed metaphorically through cleanliness and filth. These differing perceptions, Newman argues, demands that we rethink centuries of assumptions imposed on other places, times, and peoples: so long as "waste" remains a category misunderstood to be common-sensical and stable, archaeological methods will prove unequal to their task. Newman instead proposes "anamorphic archaeology," an approach that emphasizes the possibility that archaeological objects have multiple physical and conceptual lives"--

The Burden of the Ancients

The Burden of the Ancients PDF

Author: Allen J. Christenson

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1477310266

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In Maya theology, everything from humans and crops to gods and the world itself passes through endless cycles of birth, maturation, dissolution, death, and rebirth. Traditional Maya believe that human beings perpetuate this cycle through ritual offerings and ceremonies that have the power to rebirth the world at critical points during the calendar year. The most elaborate ceremonies take place during Semana Santa (Holy Week), the days preceding Easter on the Christian calendar, during which traditionalist Maya replicate many of the most important world-renewing rituals that their ancient ancestors practiced at the end of the calendar year in anticipation of the New Year’s rites. Marshaling a wealth of evidence from Pre-Columbian texts, early colonial Spanish writings, and decades of fieldwork with present-day Maya, The Burden of the Ancients presents a masterfully detailed account of world-renewing ceremonies that spans the Pre-Columbian era through the crisis of the Conquest period and the subsequent colonial occupation all the way to the present. Allen J. Christenson focuses on Santiago Atitlán, a Tz’utujil Maya community in highland Guatemala, and offers the first systematic analysis of how the Maya preserved important elements of their ancient world renewal ceremonies by adopting similar elements of Roman Catholic observances and infusing them with traditional Maya meanings. His extensive description of Holy Week in Santiago Atitlán demonstrates that the community’s contemporary ritual practices and mythic stories bear a remarkable resemblance to similar cultural entities from its Pre-Columbian past.

Urban Life

Urban Life PDF

Author: George Gmelch

Publisher: Waveland Press

Published: 2018-01-03

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 1478636904

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More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. What are their lives like in very different global and globalizing cities? How can urban anthropologists study and understand the diverse and complex experiences of urban dwellers all over the globe? The latest edition of Urban Life explores questions about how to study urban lives and examines experiences of urban inhabitants in cities across the globe. Authors ask questions such as, how can one study the activities in a huge fish market in Tokyo? How do elderly residents benefit from urban agriculture in New York City? How do people maneuver ever-present traffic jams in Istanbul? How do low-income residents in Cairo manage their lives drawing on neighborhood social networks? How do immigrants fight for green spaces in Paris? How do families manage transnational ties between New York City and Ecuador? The book is organized into six parts: Urban Fieldwork; Communities; Urban Structure, Inequality, and Survival; Immigrants, Migrants, and Refugees; Changing Cities; and Current Topics in Urban Anthropology. The last part addresses issues at the forefront of anthropological research and broader political debates, like environmental justice, disability and accessibility, and access to water supplies. Each part includes an introduction and each chapter is preceded by notes about its context and relevance. The rich ethnographic content of the chapters makes them highly accessible to students while addressing relevant topics and themes.

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