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Mayan living ruins: The hidden places of interlocking temporalities
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In: Living Vestiges. Contemporary Native Voices on Ruins, Remnants of the Past and Cultural Heritage in Mesoamerica, Amazonia, and the Andes ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03508235 ; Erikson, Philippe; Vapnarsky, Valentina. Living Vestiges. Contemporary Native Voices on Ruins, Remnants of the Past and Cultural Heritage in Mesoamerica, Amazonia, and the Andes, University of Colorado Press, In press, Living Vestiges. Contemporary Native Voices on Ruins, Remnants of the Past and Cultural Heritage in Mesoamerica, Amazonia, and the Andes (2022)
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Abstract:
International audience ; This chapter deals with the way present-day Yucatec Maya people relate to vestiges, mostly consisting of old stones, ranging from plain circular rock arrangements marking relatively recent burials to full-fledged ruins forming small mounds or imposing structures, including major temples and buildings where tourists now flock. Some are just left to decay in the forest, others are visible but barely noticed, and others are objects of great attention. Analysis of historical and biographical local Mayan narratives concerning such places, as well as careful scrutiny of the daily and ritual practices surrounding them, shows that each of them is liable to activate specific links between past and present times. For instance, the most mundane of these vestiges, the ancient mounds found in cultivated plots – conceived as living houses of the guardian-spirits – embody the tenuous and generative relationships uniting human beings of previous and present-day times. Although ritually essential with regard to the issue of land use, such relationships, however, are not based on the idea of continuous presence and exchange, but rather on ruptures of different kinds: historical, ontological and interactional. From a Mayan point of view, such ruptures are absolute prerequisites for the ascription of significance and salience to these places. Conversely, they account for the eagerness of some Mayan communities to protect imposing ruins from being explored, studied, rebuilt or turned into touristic attractions.The chapter is based on long term ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork in villages of the Eastern region of the Yucatan Peninsula, where Colonial powers had relatively little direct influence on the architectural landscape. It also stems from first-hand observation of the reactions and reinterpretations of a group of Maya villagers who, in 2015, discovered for the very first time Mayan temples arranged according to the standards of the cultural heritage and tourist industries. Overall, the paper invites a fresh look at Mayan conceptions of permanence, continuity and cyclicity, as well as to the way cultural landscapes and historicity are forged by daily and ritual interactions with various types of beings.
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Keyword:
[SHS.ANTHRO-SE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Social Anthropology and ethnology; [SHS.LANGUE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Linguistics; [SHS.MUSEO]Humanities and Social Sciences/Cultural heritage and museology; [SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences; Cruso'ob; cultural heritage; Maya; Quintana Roo; ruins; spiritual beings; time; Yucatan
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URL: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03508235
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From Silence to Renaissance: The Politics of Cultural Production in Yucatan and the Maya Literary Revival ...
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From Silence to Renaissance: The Politics of Cultural Production in Yucatan and the Maya Literary Revival
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"Tu táan yich in kaajal" [On The Face of My People]: Contemporary Maya-Spanish Bilingual Literature and Cultural Production from the Yucatan Peninsula ...
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One Nation, Many Borders: Language and Identity in Mayan Guatemala and Mexico
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In: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1337984066 (2012)
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Person prominence and relation prominence ; on the typology of syntactic relations with praticular reference to the Yucatec Maya
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Jag_Rab_KGP_01 ; KGP tells the story about Jaguar and Rabbit
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IntCul_CK_02 ; CK interview on Lacandón culture
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Suzanne Cook. - : The Language Archive, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
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Song_Pom_AM_01 ; AM sings a song about pom, the resin (copol) used in ritual offerings to the gods
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