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As the Christian world prepares for the coming of the second millennium,
the Maya world in Mesoamerica is also preparing for a momentous
new stage in the unfolding of the temporal dimension. The year
2012 A.D. will mark the beginning of a new era, with the
initiation of new 13-stage cycle of 400-year units which defines
the 5200-year Long Count of the Maya. According to Maya belief,
the current era begun in what the Christian calendar would define
as the year 3114 B.C.1,
long before any human beings had ever conceived of a Christian
world view.
I would assume that these very basic details about Maya culture
and world view are unfamiliar to generally well educated readers,
and even to those who may have had a long- standing interest in
Central America. There has been a long history of obfuscation
which has hidden the Maya world from our view. This history begun
with the first arrival of the Spaniards and their war of conquest
against the Maya population in the 16th century. The written record
of the Maya, which was quite extensive, and which we need to assume
contained historical, religious and scientific information in
the codices found by the Spaniards, was systematically
obliterated in an effort to carry out a full scale cultural genocide.
Of the thousands of codices that had been preserved by
the post-classic Maya intelligencia, only four have survived to
the present day. One of the results of this devastating challenge
to the integrity of Maya culture was that a unique writing system,
one of only five independently developed in the history of humankind,
was lost to the world for the past four hundred and fifty years,
with the result that a formerly literate community was rendered
almost universally illiterate.
An important outgrowth of this cultural genocide was that the
Maya did not enter into the generalized consciousness of the modern
world as co-equal participants with other cultures. The Maya came
to be seen as a long extinct population, gaining renown for being
significantly more exotic if not as antique as many of the defunct
societies of the ancient Mesopotamian world. This perception was
aided by the early European and U.S. "discoverers" of
the classical era city states, such as Tikal and Palenque. Under
the influence of 19th century teleological values which saw Western
civilization as the pinnacle of human development, other societies
came to be seen as at best precursors in the Western path towards
dominance. Even cultures that had had a continuous interaction
with Western societies dating back to the ancient world, such
as North African civilizations, were cast in the exotic light
of the pre-modern, an attitude which the Palestinian-American
literary and cultural critic, Edward Said, has denominated as
"orientalism." This attitude of orientalism extended
beyond the geographic orient, and came to encompass Native American
societies such as the Maya and the Aztec. The influence of orientalist
thought was such that many artifacts of what is considered the
most ancient of Mesoamerican civilizations, the Olmecs, were actually
classified as being of Chinese origin.
Because the Maya had been driven into a condition of social
and cultural subjugation, nobody could imagine that the illiterate
and down-trodden peasants that inhabited areas of contemporary
Guatemala and southern Mexico were actually the descendants of
the people who built the tallest structures in the Americas until
the construction of the 20th century skyscrapers. The classical
Maya were relegated to a mythical past that supposedly had no
connection to the present. Learned scholars wondered why the Maya
had disappeared. Lacking the tools to interpret the Maya monumental
carvings, which in the past had communicated volumes regarding
Maya history and culture, Mayanists postulated the existence of
a civilization of philosopher priests engaged in a study of the
cosmos and revering time as a deity, with no involvement with
the day-to-day concerns of building powerful city states and providing
for large urbanized populations. The naivete of these scholars
is outstanding when one considers that they did not bother to
ask very basic questions, such as who quarried the enormous stones
that went into the construction of the massive temples at Tikal;
how was this population fed and housed; what created the social
bond that made this epic labor meaningful; and, what happened
to all these people once the authority of the rulers of the city
states collapsed? These questions largely went unasked as an image
of the exotic and vanished Maya was promulgated in the scholarly
and popular literature.
The veil of exoticism that was placed over classical Maya culture
further helped to obscure the extant Maya population from view.
If thought of at all, the present-day Maya came to be subsumed
under the general category of the Central American peasant, assumed
to be predominantly mestizo not only in her or his physical
characteristics, but also culturally. It has generally been taken
for granted, for example, that the Maya are a Christianized population,
who may maintain certain rituals and may hold certain beliefs
that might appear bizarre to the mainstream of Christian society,
but who are nonetheless fully assimilated into the Western fold
through their common investment in the divinity of Jesus Christ.
I would claim that this perception on the part of outsiders is
another instance in the long history of displacing real live Maya
culture from the contemporary world. If the Maya can be defined
as a Christian population then there is no need to come to terms
with truly Maya values and perceptions as a component of the modern
world.
There are very specific interests both within and outside of
Guatemala, and more recently Mexico, which would find it advantageous
to hide the true nature of Maya culture. If we consider, for example,
the ferocious attacks which the Guatemalan army levied against
the indigenous population in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we
can identify on the one hand the extreme fear which the prospect
of a Maya uprising engendered in the ladino elite, and
on the other hand we can see how a racially and culturally motivated
war was capable of being translated into the ideology of the Cold
War precisely because international awareness of the integrity
of the Maya community had not yet been generated. As a point of
contrast we may look at the comparative restraint that the Mexican
army has had to maintain in the face of an indigenous challenge
in the south after the light of public scrutiny had already been
focused on the plight of the Maya through, among other efforts,
the well-publicized life of the Maya-K'iche' Nobel Peace Laureate,
Rigoberta Menchú..
Currently in the Guatemalan press there is a lively debate
being waged regarding the nature of Guatemalan national identity,
and in particular the identity of the Maya population. Many ladino
intellectuals, among them some who in the tumultuous conflicts
of the post-Arbenz era actively participated in left-wing organizations,
are putting into question the integrity of Maya cultural identity
by referring to such issues as the assimilation by the Maya of
Christian religious values, or even the inadmissibility of using
the term Maya to refer to a population that is a thousand years
removed from grandeur of Maya civilization. If the Maya are really
taken seriously as a cultural and ethnic group numbering perhaps
some eight to ten million people, then ladino hegemony
in Guatemala and parts of Mexico would be seriously put into question.
Not wishing to come forth sounding sanctimonious, I need to
confess that my own notions regarding the Maya until relatively
recently had been shaped by the ideas that I now reject. Not having
had an opportunity to travel to Guatemala until the summer of
1993, I had assumed what has been the predominant perception on
the part of outsiders, and many insiders, and had framed in my
own mind the notion that upon visiting Guatemala I might find
a syncretic culture, basing myself on my previous studies of Caribbean
culture and the type of syncretism between Christian and African
religious culture which one finds in places such as Haiti and
Cuba. However, after spending a year in Guatemala, visiting many
highland communities, talking with Maya intellectuals, and deepening
my studies on the evolution of Maya culture, I have come to hold
a very different opinion. There is a Maya spirituality which is
contemporaneous in the modern world. The strength of this spirituality
has maintained social bonds which have allowed Maya culture to
survive more than four centuries of subjugation. Some of the key
elements of this spirituality are associated with a belief in
the cyclical nature of time. For the Maya, unlike the principal
conceptions in Western thought, time is not a straight line, and
the past is not something to be transcended, but rather something
to be tapped, much as a tree taps into the nutrients of the soil
when it extends its roots underground.
This alternative conception of time, if it were made an aspect
of modern thought, would potentially lead to a profound re-articulation
of the dichotomy between tradition and modernity. It is in good
part this rootedness and centerdness of Maya culture in a conception
of tradition as a living force which has allowed Maya communities
to survive into modern times. This is an aspect of Maya spirituality
which may offer valuable assistance to the very contemporary need
for redefining our conception of progress. The models available
within the Western tradition for understanding our place within
a temporal framework have for the most part led us to an epistemological
dead end. The conservative religious tradition continues to postulate
a cataclysmic orgy of divine retribution. The liberal capitalist
world view offers a hedonistic orgy of consumerism. Neither conception
will allow us to address the multiplicity of human needs that
currently confront us. The radical tradition for its own part,
in classical Oedipal fashion, has been blinded by its hubris and
its belief that progress will redeem us. We are desperately in
need of a world view that will help us to abandon our conception
of time as an irreversible straight line so that we can stop and
take stock of the multiplicity of world cultures which have evolved
over time and which share our contemporary world, both physically
and spiritually. The Maya conception of cyclical time can help
us formulate such a perspective.
More than that, however, if we are able to lift the veil of
obscurity which has been draped over the Maya, we may be able
to engage in a dialogue with a cultural tradition which has its
roots deeply implanted in the most ancient cultural soil of the
Americas. Such a process would open up a rich vein of cultural
energy which could create the possibilities for engendering a
deeply American cultural Renaissance, whereby the values of Native
American societies begin to count once again among the revered
traditions of humanity. This reaching back into an autochthonous
American past would not be an attempt to reconnect with the mythic
pre-history of our continent, but rather would tap into the efforts
of the present-day Maya to develop a political awareness and organizational
capabilities which would allow them to make new claims from the
vantage point of the most ancient extant tradition. For those
of us who inhabit the American soil this re-implanting in the
traditions of the land could begin to heal the spiritual wounds
created by the genocidal ideology of progress that our Western
tradition inflicted.
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