Maya and Catholic Cultures in Crisis

Maya and Catholic Cultures in Crisis
Author: John D. Early
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2016-11-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813059917

"A landmark achievement that will no doubt be cited again and again for years to come. It is a thoroughly-researched and authoritative work."--Allen J. Christenson, author of Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community "While this book explains what brought about the Maya uprisings in Chiapas and Guatemala and answers questions about the role of the Catholic Church in the development of the uprisings, the heart of the book is about the Mayan quest to live with dignity as Maya in the modern world."--Christine Gudorf, author of Catholic Social Teaching on Liberation Themes In his most recent book, The Maya and Catholicism: An Encounter of Worldviews, John Early examined the relationship between the Maya and the Catholic Church from the sixteenth century through the colonial and early national periods. In Maya and Catholic Cultures in Crisis, he returns to delve into the changing worldviews of these two groups in the second half of the twentieth century--a period of great turmoil for both. Drawing on his personal experiences as a graduate student, a Roman Catholic priest in the region and his extensive archival research, Early constructs detailed case histories of the Maya uprisings against the governments of Guatemala and Mexico, exploring Liberation Catholicism’s integral role in these rebellions as well as in the evolutions of Maya and Catholic theologies. His meticulous and insightful study is indispensable to understanding Maya politics, society, and religion in the late twentieth century.

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.

Encyclopedia of Christianity in the Global South

Encyclopedia of Christianity in the Global South
Author: Mark A. Lamport
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 1119
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1442271574

Christianity has transformed many times in its 2,000-year history, from its roots in the Middle East to its presence around the world today. From the mid-twentieth century onward the presence of Christianity has increased dramatically in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the majority of the world’s Christians are now nonwhite and non-Western. The Encyclopedia of Christianity in the Global South traces both the historical evolution and contemporary themes in Christianity in more than 150 countries and regions. The volumes include maps, images, and a detailed timeline of key events. The phrases “Global Christianity” and “World Christianity” are inadequate to convey the complexity of the countries and regions involved—this encyclopedia, with its more than 500 entries, aims to offer rich perspectives on the varieties of Christianity where it is growing, how the spread of Christianity shapes the faith in various regions, and how the faith is changing worldwide.

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.

Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World

Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World
Author: Garrett W. Cook
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2013-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826353193

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.

Mayan Voices for Human Rights

Mayan Voices for Human Rights
Author: Christine Kovic
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2013-08-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292749554

In the last decades of the twentieth century, thousands of Mayas were expelled, often violently, from their homes in San Juan Chamula and other highland communities in Chiapas, Mexico, by fellow Mayas allied with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). State and federal authorities generally turned a blind eye to these human rights abuses, downplaying them as local conflicts over religious conversion and defense of cultural traditions. The expelled have organized themselves to fight not only for religious rights, but also for political and economic justice based on a broad understanding of human rights. This pioneering ethnography tells the intertwined stories of the new communities formed by the Mayan exiles and their ongoing efforts to define and defend their human rights. Focusing on a community of Mayan Catholics, the book describes the process by which the progressive Diocese of San Cristóbal and Bishop Samuel Ruiz García became powerful allies for indigenous people in the promotion and defense of human rights. Drawing on the words and insights of displaced Mayas she interviewed throughout the 1990s, Christine Kovic reveals how the exiles have created new communities and lifeways based on a shared sense of faith (even between Catholics and Protestants) and their own concept of human rights and dignity. She also uncovers the underlying political and economic factors that drove the expulsions and shows how the Mayas who were expelled for not being "traditional" enough are in fact basing their new communities on traditional values of duty and reciprocity.

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 Maya and Catholicism

The Maya and Catholicism
Author: John D. Early
Publisher:
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2006
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780813030258

Mayan ethnographer John Early examines the centuries-long speculation about why the ritual calendars of the Mayan Indians in Guatemala and the regions of Chiapas and Yucatan in Mexico revolve around festivals in honor of the Catholic saints. During these festivals, at the insistence of the Maya, a Catholic priest comes to their villages to celebrate mass and baptize newborns. Refuting the often-repeated thesis of a "spiritual conquest" by the Spaniards or their post-colonial successors in which the Maya were converted to Christianity, Early argues that the Maya identify with Catholicism despite their failure to embrace the religion in any orthodox sense. The author explains the paradox by showing that, as is often the case in conversion attempts, the Maya adapted elements of Catholicism into their existing beliefs. Drawing on historical and ethnographic materials to discover the cultural logics with which the Maya interpret their ritual behavior, Early offers a detailed description of all the elements of the Mayan festivals for the saints and of the pre-Columbian Maya worldview about rituals and the theological concepts behind them. Considering the sixteenth-century worldview of the Spanish royalty, the conquistadors, and the Catholic priests to reveal the Spanish mindset before and during their encounters with the Maya, the author also cites the testimony of the Maya. Early provides a unique synthesis of archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and theological data that shows the use of Catholic elements is completely understandable in terms of the traditional Mayan worldview dating from pre-Columbian times.

Reformations

Reformations
Author: Carlos M. N. Eire
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 914
Release: 2016-06-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300220685

This fast-paced survey of Western civilization’s transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the two-hundred-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone, but continues to shape our world and define who we are today. The book focuses on the vast changes that took place in Western civilization between 1450 and 1650, from Gutenberg’s printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years’ War. Eire devotes equal attention to the various Protestant traditions and churches as well as to Catholicism, skepticism, and secularism, and he takes into account the expansion of European culture and religion into other lands, particularly the Americas and Asia. He also underscores how changes in religion transformed the Western secular world. A book created with students and nonspecialists in mind, Reformations is an inspiring, provocative volume for any reader who is curious about the role of ideas and beliefs in history.