Chol Ritual Language
with Terrence Lee Folmar, Heidi Altman, Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, and Bernardo Pérez Martínez
©1996 J. Kathryn Josserand and Nicholas A. Hopkins

Additional Activities

During the field season, two trips were made to the area of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, to observe other examples of ceremonial activity in towns similar to Tila. On the weekend of May 27-28, project personnel observed the festival of change of mayordomos of the Virgin of Guadalupe in San Juan Chamula. Later that day, in the neighboring community of Zinacantán, we attended a mayordomo ritual in the chapel of Esquipulas (like the Señor de Tila, a Black Christ associated with caves). On the weekend of June 24-25, we returned to San Juan Chamula to observe the festival of the patron saint. These ceremonies involve ritual speech and group performances including dancing, exchange of staffs and other symbols of office, and the public display of ritual paraphernalia, in a context of symbolic activity that parallels that of elite protagonists seen on Classic Period monuments.

From June 20-22, some project personnel attended an international conference in México City, the meeting of the Latin American Indigenous Literatures Association, and delivered professional research papers, one of which was based in part on this research. Kathryn Josserand discussed the literary structure of the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs, Palenque; Nick Hopkins analyzed the text structure of the Creation text of Stela C, Quiriguá. Heidi Altman presented an analysis of evidentiality markers in modern Chol texts, based on her 1994-95 research and interviews carried out during the 1995 field work in Tila. (These markers, phrases like "they say" and "I heard," distance the speaker from the actions narrated, and are a device for marking different genres of narrative, from tales of ancient mythological times to stories of personal experiences.)

Analysis and further processing of field data was continued in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, and Palenque, Chiapas, during the end of June and until July 8, when the field work phase of the project was closed down and all materials packed for transfer to the United States. Some project personnel then attended the Tercer Congreso Internacional de Mayistas (Third International Congress of Mayanists) in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, July 10-12.  Josserand and Hopkins presented a joint paper in the plenary session on Maya hieroglyphic writing, chaired by Dr. Maricela Ayala of the Centro de Estudios Mayas (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). This session also featured Victoria Bricker (Tulane University), Linda Schele (University of Texas) and Yuri Knorozov (Institute of Sciences, Moscow); the international prominence of the latter, a pioneer epigrapher, resulted in considerable press coverage of the papers in the Mexican and local Quintana Roo newspapers.

By mid July, all members of the research team had returned to the United States, where field data continue to be analyzed.

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