This book collects essays I have written over the last ten years. Some were contributions to collections of essays, others were presented at national and international conferences. Many of the ideas expressed in these essays first took form when I wrote a column for the Guatemalan newspaperSiglo Veintiuno. Taken together they present critical points of view about three issues facing Maya people in Guatemala today: issues of identity, representation, including the right to self-representation, and Maya leadership. Although the essays deal with cultural, political, or spiritual matters rather than the economic aspects of Maya culture, I believe that these...

The atmosphere of stability hoped for as a result of the signing of the peace accords in 1996 seemed to offer an opportune moment for relations between Mayas and ladinos to become more harmonious and mutually respectful. But in actuality, ethnic relations have not improved, and have even deteriorated into a climate of violence and political stalemate. Our attention is currently focused on the unjust, discriminatory, and racist relations that have long characterized ethnic relations in Guatemala. Historically and on all levels, discrimination has always existed between the Maya and ladinos, and the latter group has promoted this as something...

Understanding the dynamics of change and continuity in Maya culture is of great interest in current Maya studies research. This research, however, has centered mainly on the ancient Maya and has paid relatively little attention to the struggle of contemporary Maya to redefine themselves in the modern, capitalist world system. Although interest in the modern Maya is secondary to interest in their ancestors, Maya scholars insist that the modern and ancient Maya are equally relevant if one wants to understand the dynamics of their culture and its strategies for survival (Montejo 1993a; Cojti Cuxil 1994). Over the last five hundred...

Following the current debates and new developments in the field of anthropology, postmodern ethnography has become an influential and useful tool for native intellectual critics of older anthropological studies. InWriting Culture(1986), Clifford and Marcus call this an experimental moment in ethnography. Marcus and Fisher argue that in the postmodern world we must deal with postmodern everything. But “the part of these conditions in which we are more interested is what we call a crisis of representation” (Marcus and Fisher 1988:8). James Clifford (1988:23), speaking of postmodern ethnography, says:

It is more than ever crucial for different peoples to...

The promise of anthropologists to understand themselves more critically while portraying and representing non-Western cultures (Marcus and Fisher 1986) has not been fulfilled. In most parts of the Americas, anthropologists have continued to represent indigenous people as “primitives” and as objects of study (Tierney 2000), although their rhetoric and academic terms have shifted to more relativistic modes (e.g., from informants to collaborators).¹ Most talk about the postcolonial and postmodern eras, but from a local or regional perspective we can see that most indigenous people are still living in a colonized world. Others with more resources live in a neo-colonized world...

Despite anthropology’s critical view of itself as a discipline, dealing mainly with the problems of representation and misrepresentation of indigenous cultures, once again here we are engaged in the same problem. In terms of the truth, anthropologists have tended to impose their own views on indigenous people and not to respect the indigenous people’s truth on its own terms. It is the practice of anthropologists to search for the truth, and some expect that it will come in only one version. But with human cultures and behavior, the situation is different, and there may be as many interpretations of events...

There is no doubt that the Maya, under the direction of political leaders, spiritual guides, military strategists, and extraordinary intellectuals, constructed one of the most brilliant civilizations in human history (Morley 1983). We, like millions of other tourists, can admire their achievements in the remnants of their classic cities. But it is difficult to speak with any certainty about pre-Hispanic Maya leadership because we still lack so much knowledge about past Maya civilization. Archaeologists, epigraphers, and historians, through the study of Maya art, architecture, and iconography, have told us something of the Maya rulers whose portraits appear carved on stelae...

Although the Maya culture is important in Guatemala, there has been little sociological, political, or ethnographic literature on Maya leadership. What studies exist are primarily analytical ones of the Maya movement by foreign scholars (Smith 1991; Perera 1993; Fisher and Brown 1996; Warren 1998a; Nelson 1999b). It is not a subject yet developed by Maya writers. Introspection and self-analysis are necessary if the Maya revitalization movement is to understand its current contributions and its limitations. Maya leadership in Guatemala, in spite of its present form and strength of expression, is a subject that has not been addressed in depth. This...

In every native community of our continent, the elders have complained about the difficulties of performing their sacred rituals and of preserving native knowledge in the face of modernization. But even with the invasion of the modern world, the elders have managed to continue and to transform their identities within the dominant culture that has ruptured native worldviews and cosmologies. Despite the small spaces left for the expression of their own ways of life, they have managed to pass on their oral histories and help younger generations to root their identities in the land.

As a Jakaltek Maya, I have...

To be a Maya intellectual is in many ways to isolate oneself from the world and inevitably move in epistemological circles revolving around books and the production of knowledge. These circles are often closed and marginalized since many people care more about their daily lives in their communities than they do about feasible cultural models for the future. By definition, the work requires academic preparation, a formidable goal, especially since access to higher university education has been very difficult for Mayas to obtain. It is necessary for intellectuals to move within the capitalist world of print and publication, with all...

The struggle of indigenous people for their rights and self-determination, and the polemics that this basic issue represents for those who historically have dominated them, dates back to the Spanish conquest of the early sixteenth century. Early advocates for indigenous rights and freedom, including Bartolomé de Las Casas, have long insisted that indigenous people are humans and that their basic and natural rights must be respected (Hanke 1974). Unfortunately, racist and biologically based theories of alleged indigenous inferiority prevailed, and more dangerous identities and images were imposed on indigenous people. These images have ranged from the passive images and stereotypes...

For the Maya, as for all indigenous peoples of the continent, the supposed celebration of the quincentenary (1492–1992) was a wake-up call for those who had been sleeping until then to organize a cultural and militant resistance against the celebration held in the colonized countries. The opposition of indigenous leaders was so strong that they managed to avert a euphoric, unthinking celebration of genocide in the Americas. At the same time, however, the term “500 years” was abused to the point of ridiculousness, and many arguments became empty. In these discourses, both Maya and ladino leaders of the popular...