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Maya Intellectual Renaissance

Author: Victor D. Montejo

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0292778651

When Mayan leaders protested the celebration of the Quincentenary of the "discovery" of America and joined with other indigenous groups in the Americas to proclaim an alternate celebration of 500 years of resistance, they rose to national prominence in Guatemala. This was possible in part because of the cultural, political, economic, and religious revitalization that occurred in Mayan communities in the later half of the twentieth century. Another result of the revitalization was Mayan students' enrollment in graduate programs in order to reclaim the intellectual history of the brilliant Mayan past. Victor Montejo was one of those students. This is the first book to be published outside of Guatemala where a Mayan writer other than Rigoberta Menchu discusses the history and problems of the country. It collects essays Montejo has written over the past ten years that address three critical issues facing Mayan peoples today: identity, representation, and Mayan leadership. Montejo is deeply invested in furthering the discussion of the effectiveness of Mayan leadership because he believes that self-evaluation is necessary for the movement to advance. He also criticizes the racist treatment that Mayans experience, and advocates for the construction of a more pluralistic Guatemala that recognizes cultural diversity and abandons assimilation. This volume maps a new political alternative for the future of the movement that promotes inter-ethnic collaboration alongside a reverence for Mayan culture.

Mayalogue

Author: Victor Montejo

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-10-01

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1438485778

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In Mayalogue, Native Mayan scholar Victor Montejo provides an alternative reading and interpretation of cultures, challenging Western ethnocentric approaches that have marginalized Native knowledge and worldviews in the past. He proposes instead a methodology for studying culture as a unified whole, a radical departure from the compartmentalized sections of knowledge recognized by Western scientific tradition. Offering a strong critique of traditional anthropological studies, with its terms and categories that have denigrated Indigenous cultures throughout the centuries, Montejo's postcolonial work aims to dismantle the colonialist construction of Indigenous cultures, giving way to a Native approach that balances insider and outsider descriptions of a particular culture. Developed from an Indigenous Maya perspective, Mayalogue is a contribution to the dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, students, and general audiences in the social sciences and humanities, and will be an essential text in decolonizing the minds of those who engage in the study of cultures anywhere in the world in the twenty-first century.

The Maya

Author: Megan E. O’Neil

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2022-07-06

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1789145511

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An illuminating look at the myriad communities who have engaged with the ancient Maya over the centuries. This book reveals how the ancient Maya—and their buildings, ideas, objects, and identities—have been perceived, portrayed, and exploited over five hundred years in the Americas, Europe, and beyond. Engaging in interdisciplinary analysis, the book summarizes ancient Maya art and history from the preclassical period to the Spanish invasion, as well as the history of outside engagement with the ancient Maya, from Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century to later explorers and archaeologists, taking in scientific literature, visual arts, architecture, world’s fairs, and Indigenous activism. It also looks at the decipherment of Maya inscriptions, Maya museum exhibitions and artists’ responses, and contemporary Maya people’s engagements with their ancestral past. Featuring the latest research, this book will interest scholars as well as general readers who wish to know more about this ancient, fascinating culture.

The 2012 Story

Author: John Major Jenkins

Publisher: Penguin Group

Published: 2010-10-14

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 158542823X

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From the pioneering author who helped introduce the question of 2012 into the global spiritual community comes an epic exploration of the authentic origins and meaning of this portentous date. Drawing from his own groundbreaking research (including his involvement in the modern reconstruction of Mayan 2012 cosmology), John Major Jenkins has created the crucial guide to 2012, surveying its roots in Mayan cosmology, modern astronomy, ancient prophecy, and metaphysical philosophy and exploring why it has become a focal point for millions today.

The Ancient Maya

Author: Jennifer Fretland VanVoorst

Publisher: Capstone

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 50

ISBN-13: 0756545641

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Describes the Ancient Mayan civilization, including their religious views, intellectual achievements, and everyday life.

Chiapas Maya Awakening

Author: Sean S. Sell

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2017-01-13

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 0806157801

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Mexico’s indigenous people speak a number of rich and complex languages today, as they did before the arrival of the Spanish. Yet a common misperception is that Mayas have no languages of their own, only dialectos, and therefore live in silence. In reality, contemporary Mayas are anything but voiceless. Chiapas Maya Awakening, a collection of poems and short stories by indigenous authors from Chiapas, Mexico, is an inspiring testimony to their literary achievements. A unique trilingual edition, it presents the contributors’ works in the living Chiapas Mayan languages of Tsotsil and Tseltal, along with English and Spanish translations. As Sean S. Sell, Marceal Méndez, and Inés Hernández-Ávila explain in their thoughtful introductory pieces, the indigenous authors of this volume were born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, a time of growing cultural awareness among the native communities of Chiapas. Although the authors received a formal education, their language of instruction was Spanish, and they had to pursue independent paths to learn to read and write in their native tongues. In the book’s first half, devoted to poetry, the writers consciously speak for their communities. Their verses evoke the quetzal, the moon, and the sea and reflect the identities of those who celebrate them. The short stories that follow address aspects of modern Maya life. In these stories, mistrust and desperation yield violence among a people whose connection to the land is powerful but still precarious. Chiapas Maya Awakening demonstrates that Mayas are neither a vanished ancient civilization nor a remote, undeveloped people. Instead, through their memorable poems and stories, the indigenous writers of this volume claim a place of their own within the broader fields of national and global literature.

Mayan Folktales, Cuentos folklóricos mayas

Author: Susan A. Thompson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2007-08-30

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0313090815

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Discover the traditional stories of the Mayan people of Mexico and Central and South America, and learn about Mayan culture. In this collection you'll find such tales as Uncle Rabbit, Uncle Coyote, How the Serpent was Born, The Moon, The Screamer of the Night, and more than 25 other tales ranging from trickster tales and tales of ghosts and witches to moral tales and tales of the underworld, presented in Spanish and English. A brief history, color photographs of the land, people, and traditional arts, and recipes accompany the tales, placing them within a cultural context. Grades K-12.

Philosophy of the Ancient Maya

Author: Alexus McLeod

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-12-26

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1498531393

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This book investigates some of the central topics of metaphysics in the philosophical thought of the Maya people of Mesoamerica, particularly from the Preclassic through Postclassic periods. This book covers the topics of time, change, identity, and truth, through comparative investigation integrating Maya texts and practices—such as Classic Period stelae, Postclassic Codices, and Colonial-era texts such as the Popol Vuh and the books of Chilam Balam—and early Chinese philosophy.

The Maya: a Very Short Introduction

Author: Matthew Restall

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-08-13

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 0190645024

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The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control. There was never a single, unified Maya state or empire, but always numerous, evolving ethnic groups speaking dozens of distinct Mayan languages. The people we call "Maya" never thought of themselves as such; yet something definable, unique, and endlessly fascinating - what we call Maya culture - has clearly existed for millennia. So what was their self-identity and how did Maya civilization come to be "invented?" With the Maya historically subdivided and misunderstood in so many ways, the pursuit of what made them "the Maya" is all the more important. In this Very Short Introduction, Restall and Solari explore the themes of Maya identity, city-state political culture, art and architecture, the Maya concept of the cosmos, and the Maya experience of contact with including invasion by outsiders. Despite its brevity, this book is unique for its treatment of all periods of Maya civilization, from its origins to the present.

The Order of Days

Author: David Stuart

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0385527276

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The world's foremost expert on Maya culture looks at 2012 hysteria and explains the truth about what the Maya meant and what we want to believe. Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilizations End. The World Cataclysm in 2012. 2012: The return of Quetzalcoatl. According to many of these alarmingly titled books, the ancient Maya not only had a keen insight into the mystical workings of our planet and the cosmos, but they were also able to predict that the world will end in the year 2012. David Stuart, the foremost scholar of the Maya and recipient of numerous awards for his work, takes a hard look at the frenzy over 2012 and offers a fascination (and accurate) trip through Mayan culture and belief. Stuart shows how the idea that the "end of the Mayan calendar," which supposedly heralds the end of our own existence, says far more about our culture than about the ancient Maya. The Order of Days explores how the real intellectual achievement of ancient Maya timekeeping and worldview is far more impressive and remarkable than any of the popular, and often outrageous, claims about this advanced civilization. As someone who has studied the Maya for nearly all of his life and who specializes in reading their ancient texts, Stuart sees the 2012 hubbub as the most recent in a long chain of related ideas about Mesoamericans, the Maya in particular, that depicts them as somehow oddball, not "of this world," or as having some strong mystical link to other realms. Because the year 2012 has no prominent role in anything the ancient Maya ever actually wrote, Stuart takes a wider look at the Maya concepts of time and their underlying philosophy as we can best understand them. The ancient Maya, Stuart contends, were worthy of study and admiration not because they were strange but because they were altogether human, and they developed a compelling vision of time unlike any other civilization before or since.