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Author: Garrett W. Cook
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292782519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Each year in the Highland Guatemala town of Santiago Momostenango, Maya religious societies, dance teams, and cofradías perform the annual cycle of rituals and festivals prescribed by Costumbre (syncretized Maya Christian religion), which serves to renew the cosmic order. In this richly detailed ethnography, Garrett Cook explores how these festivals of Jesucristo and the saints derive from and reenact three major ancient Maya creation myths, thus revealing patterns of continuity between contemporary expressive culture and the myths, rituals, and iconography of the Classic and Postclassic Maya. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the 1970s and renewed in the 1990s, Cook describes the expressive culture tradition performed in and by the cofradías and their dance teams. He listens as dancers and cofrades explain the meaning of service and of the major ritual symbols in the cults of the saints and Jesucristo. Comparing these symbols to iconographic evidence from Palenque and myths from the Popol Vuh, Cook persuasively argues that the expressive culture of Momostenango enacts major Maya creation myths—the transformative sunrise, the representation of the year as the life cycle of anthropomorphized nature, and the erection of an axis mundi. This research documents specific patterns of continuity and discontinuity in the communal expression of Maya religious and cosmogonic themes. Along with other recent research, it demonstrates the survival of a basic Maya pattern—the world-creating vegetative renewal cycle—in the highland Maya cults of the saints and Jesucristo.
Author: Garrett W. Cook
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292782519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Get Book Here
Book Description
Each year in the Highland Guatemala town of Santiago Momostenango, Maya religious societies, dance teams, and cofradías perform the annual cycle of rituals and festivals prescribed by Costumbre (syncretized Maya Christian religion), which serves to renew the cosmic order. In this richly detailed ethnography, Garrett Cook explores how these festivals of Jesucristo and the saints derive from and reenact three major ancient Maya creation myths, thus revealing patterns of continuity between contemporary expressive culture and the myths, rituals, and iconography of the Classic and Postclassic Maya. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the 1970s and renewed in the 1990s, Cook describes the expressive culture tradition performed in and by the cofradías and their dance teams. He listens as dancers and cofrades explain the meaning of service and of the major ritual symbols in the cults of the saints and Jesucristo. Comparing these symbols to iconographic evidence from Palenque and myths from the Popol Vuh, Cook persuasively argues that the expressive culture of Momostenango enacts major Maya creation myths—the transformative sunrise, the representation of the year as the life cycle of anthropomorphized nature, and the erection of an axis mundi. This research documents specific patterns of continuity and discontinuity in the communal expression of Maya religious and cosmogonic themes. Along with other recent research, it demonstrates the survival of a basic Maya pattern—the world-creating vegetative renewal cycle—in the highland Maya cults of the saints and Jesucristo.
Author: Allen J. Christenson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477309977
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
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.
Author: Scott R. Hutson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351029568
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 995
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Book Description
The Maya World brings together over 60 authors, representing the fields of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, geography, and ethnography, who explore cutting-edge research on every major facet of the ancient Maya and all sub-regions within the Maya world. The Maya world, which covers Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador, contains over a hundred ancient sites that are open to tourism, eight of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and many thousands more that have been dug or await investigation. In addition to captivating the lay public, the ancient Maya have attracted scores of major interdisciplinary research expeditions and hundreds of smaller projects going back to the 19th century, making them one of the best-known ancient cultures. The Maya World explores their renowned writing system, towering stone pyramids, exquisitely painted murals, and elaborate funerary tombs as well as their creative agricultural strategies, complex social, economic, and political relationships, widespread interactions with other societies, and remarkable cultural resilience in the face of historical ruptures. This is an invaluable reference volume for scholars of the ancient Maya, including archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.
Author: Garrett W. Cook
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826353185
Category : Cofradías (Latin America)
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
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.
Author: Lewis Spence
Publisher: New York : AMS Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 80
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Book Description
Author: Karl Taube
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292781306
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 84
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Book Description
The myths of the Aztec and Maya derive from a shared Mesoamerican cultural tradition. This is very much a living tradition, and many of the motifs and gods mentioned in early sources are still evoked in the lore of contemporary Mexico and Guatemala. Professor Taube discusses the different sources for Aztec and Maya myths. The Aztec empire began less than 200 years before the Spanish conquest, and our knowledge of their mythology derives primarily from native colonial documents and manuscripts commissioned by the Spanish. The Maya mythology is far older, and our knowledge of it comes mainly from native manuscripts of the Classic period, over 600 years before the Spanish conquest. Drawing on these sources as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavations and research, including the interpretation of the codices and the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing, the author discusses, among other things, the Popol Vuh myths of the Maya, the flood myth of Northern Yucatan, and the Aztec creation myths.
Author: Eric Hoenes del Pinal
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816547033
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
In communities in and around Cobán, Guatemala, a small but steadily growing number of members of the Q’eqchi’ Maya Roman Catholic parish of San Felipe began self-identifying as members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Their communities dramatically split as mainstream and charismatic Catholic parishioners who had been co-congregants came to view each other as religiously distinct and problematic “others.” In Guarded by Two Jaguars, Eric Hoenes del Pinal tells the story of this dramatic split and in so doing addresses the role that language and gesture have played in the construction of religious identity. Drawing on a range of methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, the author examines how the introduction of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in the parish produced a series of debates between parishioners that illustrate the fundamentally polyvocal nature of Catholic Christianity. This work examines how intergroup differences are produced through dialogue, contestation, and critique. It shows how people’s religious affiliations are articulated not in isolation but through interaction with each other. Although members of these two congregations are otherwise socially similar, their distinct interpretations of how to be a “good Catholic” led them to adopt significantly different norms of verbal and nonverbal communication. These differences became the idiom through which the two groups contested the meaning of being Catholic and Indigenous in contemporary Guatemala, addressing larger questions about social and religious change.
Author: John Major Jenkins
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 158542823X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
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.
Author: Servando Z. Hinojosa
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826335233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
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.
Author: Sarah Newman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226826392
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
"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"--
