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.

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala
Author: John P. Hawkins
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2021-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826362265

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.

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.

The Soul of Development

The Soul of Development
Author: Amy L. Sherman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 1997-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195355482

Ever since Max Weber started an argument about the role of Protestantism in jump-starting northern Europe's economic development, scholars have clashed over the influence of religion and culture on a society's (or an individual's) economic prospects. Today, many wonder whether the "explosion" of Protestantism in Latin America will effect a similar wave of growth and democratization. In this book, Sherman compiles the results of her field study and national survey of 1000 rural Guatemalan households. She offers persuasive evidence that, in Guatemala and throughout the region, religious world-views significantly influence economic life. Sherman explains how the change in attitude and behavior that accompanies conversion from animism to a Biblically orthodox world-view has improved the domestic welfare and economic status of many families. Further, she asserts that this new attitude, sympathetic to democratic-capitalism, has created a "moral cultural soil" in which freedom, personal empowerment, an enhanced status for women, and a desire to get ahead can be nurtured.

Maya Resurgence in Guatemala

Maya Resurgence in Guatemala
Author: Richard Wilson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1999-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780806131955

Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheaval--religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Q’eqchi’-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity. He finds that their rituals of fertility and healing--abandoned in the 1970s during Catholic and Protestant evangelizations--have been reinvented by an ethnic revivalist movement led by Catholic lay activists, who seek to renovate the earth cult in order to create a new pan-Q’eqchi’ ethnic identity.

Contemporary Maya Spirituality

Contemporary Maya Spirituality
Author: Jean Molesky-Poz
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2009-06-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0292778627

An authoritative study of the indigenous religion still practiced in Guatemala based on extensive original research and participant observation. Jean Molesky-Poz draws on in-depth dialogues with Maya Ajq’ijab’ (keepers of the ritual calendar), her own participant observation, and inter-disciplinary resources to offer a comprehensive, innovative, and well-grounded understanding of contemporary Maya spirituality and its theological underpinnings. She reveals significant continuities between contemporary and ancient Maya worldviews and spiritual practices. Molesky-Poz opens with a discussion of how the public emergence of Maya spirituality is situated within the religious political history of the Guatemalan highlands, particularly the pan-Maya movement. She investigates Maya cosmovision and its foundational principles, as expressed by Ajq’ijab’. At the heart of this work, Ajq’ijab’ interpret their obligation, lives, and spiritual work. Molesky-Poz then explores aspects of Maya spirituality, including sacred geography, sacred time, and ritual practice. She confirms contemporary Maya spirituality as a faith tradition with elaborate historical roots that has significance for individual, collective, and historical lives, reaffirming its own public space and legal right to be practiced.

Re-Enchanting the World

Re-Enchanting the World
Author: C. Mathews Samson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2007-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0817354271

In considering the interplay between contemporary Protestant practice and native cultural traditions among Maya evangelicals, this work documents the processes whereby some Maya have converted to different forms of Christianity and the ways in which the Maya are incorporating Christianity for their own purposes.

Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds

Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds
Author: C. James MacKenzie
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2016-04-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 160732394X

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.

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.