Making a Place for the Future in Maya Guatemala

Making a Place for the Future in Maya Guatemala
Author: John P. Hawkins
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826366619

In 1998, Hurricane Mitch pounded the isolated village of Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán in mountainous western Guatemala, destroying many homes. The experience traumatized many Ixtahuaquenses. Much of the community relocated to be safer and closer to transportation that they hoped would help them to improve their lives, acquire more schooling, and find supportive jobs. This study followed the two resulting communities over the next quarter century as they reconceived and renegotiated their place in Guatemalan society and the world. Making a Place for the Future in Maya Guatemala shows how humans continuously evaluate and rework the efficacy of their cultural heritage. This process helps explain the inevitability and speed of culture change in the face of natural disasters and our ongoing climate crisis.

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala
Author: John P. Hawkins
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2021
Genre: Mayas
ISBN: 0826362257

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.

Making a Place for the Future in Maya Guatemala

Making a Place for the Future in Maya Guatemala
Author: John P Hawkins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826366603

"A groundbreaking long-term study of climate disaster, internal migration, sociocultural change, and identity transformation in the K'iche'-speaking Maya Highlands of Guatemala."--James H. MacDonald, author of Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala: Indigenous Responses to a Failing State In 1998, Hurricane Mitch pounded the isolated village of Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán in mountainous western Guatemala, destroying many homes. The experience traumatized many Ixtahuaquenses. Much of the community relocated to be safer and closer to transportation that they hoped would help them to improve their lives, acquire more schooling, and find supportive jobs. This study followed the two resulting communities over the next quarter century as they reconceived and renegotiated their place in Guatemalan society and the world. Making a Place for the Future in Maya Guatemala shows how humans continuously evaluate and rework the efficacy of their cultural heritage. This process helps explain the inevitability and speed of culture change in the face of natural disasters and our ongoing climate crisis.

Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity

Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity
Author: Kaylee R. Spencer
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0826355803

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.

Time and the Highland Maya

Time and the Highland Maya
Author: Barbara Tedlock
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1992
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780826313584

Described as a landmark in the ethnographic study of the Maya, this study of ritual and cosmology among the contemporary Quiché Indians of highland Guatemala has now been updated to address changes that have occurred in the last decade. The Classic Mayan obsession with time has never been better known. Here, Barbara Tedlock redirects our attention to the present-day keepers of the ancient calendar. Combining anthropology with formal apprenticeship to a diviner, she refutes long-held ethnographic assumptions and opens a door to the order of the Mayan cosmos and its daily ritual. Unable to visit the region for over ten years, Tedlock returned in 1989 to find that observance of the traditional calendar and religion is stronger than ever, despite a brutal civil war. ". . . a well-written, highly readable, and deeply convincing contribution. . . ." --Michael Coe

Mayan Tales from Chiapas, Mexico

Mayan Tales from Chiapas, Mexico
Author: Robert M. Laughlin
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2014-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826354491

The forty-two stories presented in this book were told to Robert Laughlin in Tzotzil by Francisca Hernández Hernández, an elderly woman known as Doña Pancha, the only speaker of Tzotzil left in the village of San Felipe Ecatepec in Chiapas, Mexico. Laughlin and Doña Pancha’s running conversation is the source for the stories, which means they are told in much the same way that stories are told in traditional native settings. Doña Pancha is bilingual in Tzotzil and Spanish, and the stories are presented here in English, Tzotzil, and Spanish. They range from mythological sacred stories to quasi-historical legends to historical accounts of life in the twentieth century.

Guatemala Journey Among the Ixil Maya

Guatemala Journey Among the Ixil Maya
Author: Susanna Badgley Place
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2013-05-01
Genre: Guatemala
ISBN: 9780988487604

For over two millennia, the Ixil Maya communities of northwestern Guatemala have fought to preserve their unique language and cultural identity. The ancient homelands of these mountain Maya encompass 2,324 square kilometers of magnificent cloud forests, gushing waterfalls, secluded valleys and the townships of Nebaj, Chajul, and Cotzal in the rugged Sierra de los Cuchumatanes. This unconventional guide invites Guatemalan and international travelers to discover the extraordinary beauty and rich culture of the Ixil Region through its history of struggle and resilience, local knowledge, heartfelt conversations, and hands-on experience of ancestral cultural traditions, economic innovations, and social transitions.

The Ancient Spirituality of the Modern Maya

The Ancient Spirituality of the Modern Maya
Author: Thomas Hart
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2008
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0826343503

The myth and ceremony of Maya beliefs have been sustained for over five hundred years in spite of massacres, persecution, and discrimination.

The Maya World of Communicating Objects

The Maya World of Communicating Objects
Author: Miguel Angel Astor-Aguilera
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Ceremonial objects
ISBN: 9780826347633

Astor-Aguilera argues that the western concept of religion and religious objects is not the framework for understanding Mayan cosmology or practice.

The Mayan in the Mall

The Mayan in the Mall
Author: J. T. Way
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2012-04-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0822351315

This twentieth-century history of Guatemala begins with an analysis of the Grand Tikal Futura, a postmodern shopping mall with a faux-Mayan facade that is surrounded by a landscape of gated subdivisions, evangelical churches, motels, Kaqchikel-speaking villages, and some of the most poverty-stricken ghettos in the hemisphere.