[Aztlan] why "the maya"

[Jules Siegel]

In "Maya Ethnogenesis," Matthew Restall writes, "Colonial-era evidence 
shows that the native inhabitants of the peninsula, whom modern scholars 
identify as "Maya," did not consistently call themselves that or any 
other name that indicated they saw themselves as members of a common 
ethnic group. Nor did Spaniards or Africans in colonial Yucatan refer to 
the Mayas as 'Mayas.'"

He argues very convincingly that the term Maya may have been in use 
prior to the Conquest but, if so, it probably referred only to the 
people (and possibly language) of Mayapan. Restall asserts that the 
people now called Maya did not have any real sense of nationalism. 
Loyalty was a very localized phenomenon, restricted to family, 
community, and, to a lesser extent, other broader kinship factors and 
hierarchal alliances.

According to Restall, colonial indigenes occasionally referred to 
themselves as Maya in official petitions as a self-deprecating 
rhetorical device to show humility, or used Maya to describe other 
communities, and sometimes to designate objects as their kind rather 
than the Spanish kind. After the Revolution, it was used as a kind of 
conscious-raising nationalist label designed to unify the Maya-speaking 
peoples into a cohesive population group for political reasons. A 
similar phenomenon occurred in Guatemala in the 1920s.

---Begin quoted text---

Inventing Mayas

[Excerpted from "Maya Ethnogenesis," by Matthew Restall, The Journal of 
Latin American Anthropology 9(i):64-89, copyright © 2004, American 
Anthropological Association]

Were the Mayas of Colonial Yucatan actually Mayas? In terms of both the 
identities they claimed and those assigned to them, they were not. 
Colonial-era evidence shows that the native inhabitants of the 
peninsula, whom modern scholars identify as "Maya," did not consistently 
call themselves that or any other name that indicated they saw 
themselves as members of a common ethnic group. Nor -- did Spaniards or 
Africans in colonial Yucatan refer -- to the Mayas as "Mayas."

Nevertheless, the term "Maya" was in use in Yucatan in colonial times 
and most likely in the post-classic period too (if it is rooted, as I 
argue below, in the toponym "Mayapan"). Today it is the conventional 
term used in all languages to refer to a broad swathe of peoples in the 
so-called "Maya area" of southern Mesoamerica. The term has acquired 
considerable baggage, much of it contested, though arguably 
insufficiently so. In Edward Fischer's words, "Maya scholars and 
peasants alike continue to assert the legitimacy of an essentialist 
cultural paradigm, arguing that there is a metaphysical quality to 
Maya-ness that transcends the minutia of opportunistic construction" 
(2001: 243).

Fischer is willing neither to embrace nor dismiss views of "Maya 
identity as nothing more than the product of counterhegemonic resistance 
or the romantic musings of anthropologists" (2001: 243); his compromise 
is "to view Maya culture as an historically continuous construction that 
adapts to changing circumstances while remaining true to a perceived 
essence of Maya-ness" (2001: 246;lso see 15-19). Quetzil Castañeda's 
position is somewhat less compromising; for him, "categories of Maya, 
Maya culture, and Maya civilization are not at all empty of meaning or 
reality, but ... are fundamentally contested terms that have no 
essential entity outside of the complex histories of sociopolitical 
struggles" (1996: 13).

The presupposition of this article is that the issues surrounding "Maya" 
as a "contested term" are relevant to the colonial period, and vice 
versa; the article's purpose is to approach this debate from the 
perspective of the colonial period, and to contribute to it by 
demonstrating how colonial-period evidence disproves the commonly made 
assumption that in previous centuries Mayas shared a sense of common 
ethnic identity.

In the introduction to The Invention of Ethnicity Werner Sollors refers 
to Ernest Gellner's argument that "nationalism is not the awakening of 
nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not 
exist" (1989: xi); my position is that modern Maya ethnogenesis had to 
invent Maya ethnic identity because there was no Maya ethnic 
self-consciousness in pre-modern times to which Mayas could awake.

-- 
JULES SIEGEL Apdo. 1764, 77501-Cancun, Q. Roo, Mexico
http://www.cafecancun.com/bookarts

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