Cultural Logic and Maya Identity: Rethinking Constructivism and Essentialism [and Comments and Reply]

Tourism in the Mundo Maya: Inventions and (Mis)Representations of Maya Identities and Heritage

“…In academia, such claims of cultural continuity have been contested by constructivists, who argue that the defining elements of contemporary Maya identity result from historical contexts, such as colonialism, the Caste war, and henequen plantations. The lively exchange over cultural continuity has produced nuanced viewpoints that move beyond the constructivist/essentialist dichotomy, acknowledging both continuity and discontinuity (e.g., Castañeda 1996;Fischer 1999). The Mundo Maya, however, markets the Maya through unreconstructed essentialism, glossing over the discontinuities between contemporary and prehispanic Maya people.…”

‘It Was Simply Their Word’

“…anthropology has invented culture because it has been foremost in using this category as the central idiom to think about and experience otherness. (1996: 14; see also See additional analyses of the 'invention of the Maya', 'Maya essentialism' and 'mystery' by Casaúz Arzú (2001), Fischer (1999), Gabbert (2004), Hervik (1999, Himpele and Castañeda (1997), Jones (1989: 1-2), Restall (2004), Schele and Miller (1986: 18-33), Warren (2001 , synthesizes the ambiguity of the nationalistic doctrine of the PRI. This guiding principle was characterized by its ambivalent application, which depended upon the prevailing international contexts and on diverse historical moments.…”

Words and things in Yucatán: poststructuralism and the everyday life of Mayan multiculturalism

“…The various contributors documented how this politicized engagement with indigenous identity coalesced into an essentializing vision of ‘Mayanness’ based on cross‐ethnic and cross‐community solidarities that were less common in the experience of older forms of regional and community‐based identity. Such well‐intentioned academic observation by scholars who were very sympathetic to the politicized Maya movement was cited in print by elements of the Guatemalan Right that sought to discredit the primordialist claims of the indigenous activists, creating some tensions between Mayan intellectuals and foreign scholars (Fischer 1999; Hale 1999; Warren 1998: 69‐85; Yashar 2005; see also Spivak 1987). What function as progressive critiques of representation in the university can have a very different political resonance amidst the realpolitik of multiculturalism and ethnic conflict (see also Ahmad 1991; Povinelli 2002).…”

“…As I spent more time speaking to self‐identified Maya people in rural Yucatán, the particular ways in which my friends and informants articulated narratives of Mayan identity seemed to offer some solutions to the tensions between theoretical critique and identity politics that had emerged in Guatemala. Phrases such as ‘Maya culture’ and other ethnological abstractions that had made a relatively recent appearance in local repertoires reflected rural Yucatecans' appropriation of Western anthropological discourse and forms of ‘strategic essentialism’ discussed by a number of authors (Fischer 1999; Spivak 1987; Warren 1998). But, as I will demonstrate below, there were just as many cases in which everyday narratives about ethnic identity articulated by self‐identified Maya people were not just a strategic iteration of discourses that had been legitimated by foreign anthropologists, but statements that were grounded in the experience of words and things that had much deeper local roots, and that might not necessarily be intelligible to outsiders.…”