Challenging the orthodoxy of a unified ethnic identity called “The Maya,” this book reckons with the meaning of material remains, language and hieroglyphs, oral history, ethnography, and contemporary cultural critique. Ambitious in temporal scope, some chapters delve deeply into the past while others contemplate the impact of constructs about the past on the present. In a manner that is characteristic of Maya studies, the book is remarkably inter-disciplinary and includes eleven chapters written by ethnographers, historians, archaeologists, linguists, epigraphers, and a bioarchaeologist. The diversity of critical perspectives on identity and ethnicity creates a critical mass of scholarship that hopefully will topple the apocryphal notion that an identity called Maya—past or present—ever existed in the monolithic fashion that is entrenched in archaeological prose.
A welcome contribution to this book on “the only true people” is the voice of Juan Castillo Cocom, in Chapter 3, who, with fellow co-authors, calls for an ethnoexodus or escape from the straitjacket of “Mayaland,” that imposes a National Geographic-style timeless Maya ethnicity on contemporary peoples who have deep taproots in this part of the world. Although he is not the first to talk about ethnoracialized stereotyping as repressive ascription that results in a loss of self-representation, the inclusion of a critique-from-the-inside in an edited book on Maya culture and archaeology indicates that Maya archaeological praxis is becoming more reflexive and inclusive. In an artful inversion of the anthropological schema of Maya cosmology that emphasizes four quadrants of a plane with a ceiba tree at the center, authors model the four quadrants as the Western-knowledge juggernaut of linguistics, history, anthropology, and archaeology that together produce a ceiba called Maya culture and identity (p. 54). Instead of this monolithic edifice, the authors suggest the concept of iknal—indicative of a social agency that includes “perspective, presence, action, and attitudes” (p. 50)—as a way to exit the trap of ethnoracialization that harms both descendant peoples and scholarship.
“The Only True People” begins with an introduction by Bethany Beyyette, in which ethnogenesis is linked with political factors such as colonization and oppressive regimes. From this perspective, bounded ethnic identities—specifically in the Maya region—could exist as a response to sixteenth-century colonialism (and its aftermath) or a phenomenon that occurs whenever salient political factors are in play. Given the tremendous linguistic diversity that exists in the southern highland portions of the Maya region, it is easy to see why the concept of ethnolinguistic groupings is often invoked by ethnographers. In Chapter 2, ethnographer C. Mathews Samson begins with a broad look at identity across the Maya region and observes that pronounced diversity in the extent to which ethnicity is invoked and mobilized—particularly for political resistance—is dependent, to a large extent, upon local engagement with the nation-states with which ethnolinguistically Mayan groups find themselves in negotiation. In Maya Cultural Heritage: How Archaeology and Indigenous Communities Engage the Past (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), I echo this point in reference to claims on ancestral places. Samson emphasizes that the multiple faces of identity—including an evangelical Christian identity—are probably more salient to people's lives today than the unified identity that is projected in the political arena.
In Chapter 4, linguist Charles Hofling presents an analysis of the distribution of lowland Mayan language groups. Employing lexical similarities and differences, Hofling concludes that the Itzaj and Mopan ethnolinguistic groups—now restricted to southern Petén and southern Belize—are derived from a proto-Yukatekan language. A lack of any necessary linkage between language and ethnicity is asserted in Chapter 5 by Matthew Restall and Wolfgang Gabbert. In an argument that has been rehearsed in other publications, Restall and Gabbert note that the term Maya is conspicuously absent from historical records. Sources for Yucatán do indicate, however, that Maya senses of identity generally revolve(d) around the local community (cah) and a wider, spidery network of lineage connections (chibal). Early colonial evidence suggests that the term Maya was used in reference to residents of Postclassic Mayapan, located in northern Yucatán. Over time, the term was borrowed by linguists, ethnographers, and archaeologists for shorthand notation of an alarmingly large area. Thus, although critiques of the term Maya in Chapters 3 and 5 begin at very different places, they converge on the same conclusion.
Combining linguistics with epigraphy, Martha Macri, in Chapter 6, suggests that Classic Maya royal courts participated in a social network that was larger and more diverse than previously thought. Although the term hybridity is seldom invoked in reference to royal courts, the intermingling of Ch'olan and Yucatekan words in hieroglyphic texts, the inclusion of a Nahua term for high nobility, and the use of terms for stranger in reference to nobility all suggest a porous community, which correspondingly implies that variable identities coexisted within Classic period royal courts (another nail in the coffin).
Chapters 7 to 10 turn to strictly archaeological approaches to identity. Lisa LeCount, in Chapter 7, focuses on the upper Belize valley—the interstices between the Petén heartland of kings and the eastern Caribbean seaboard, where rulership, if present, was expressed in a less orthodox fashion. She suggests that hegemonic processes, which so often lead to ethnic boundaries, were present at this interface but shies away from asserting that ethnogenesis was the resulting condition. Turning to the Classic royal court of Palenque in Chapter 8, Damien Marken, Stanley Guenter, and David Freidel comment on the singularity of Palenque (in reference to architecture, ceramics, and patron deities). Many now recognize that patron deities and their shrines—specific to place—provided critical social integration that crosscut widespread horizontal networks that produced and reproduced royal courts.
In Chapter 9, Marcello Canuto and Ellen Bell consider the farthest southeastern extent of the network of royal courts—located in the Copan Valley and contiguous areas during Classic times. Authors focus on the construction of proximate centers that were built in very different architectural styles, e.g., El Paraíso, constructed in emulation of the restricted access characteristic of Copan, and El Cafetal, which was built with large, open-access plazas. Pushing back the ethnolinguistic boundary known to have existed in this region since the sixteenth century, the authors suggest that ethnogenesis indeed may have been an operative concept for understanding architectural and artefactual differences. Focusing on humans buried at the Classic site of Copan and also Preclassic K'axob (located in northern Belize), Rebecca Storey, in Chapter 10, presents a study of dental characteristics that suggest no significant differences between the two burial populations despite pronounced contrasts in mortuary treatment and burial accouterments. By way of concluding comments, Edward Schortman, in Chapter 11, considers the fragility inherent in a royal court structure in which vertical group integration via sacred propositions must be balanced with horizontal political networks of paramount importance. Finally, he observes that books such as “The Only True People” call for “deep probing of disciplinary habitus” (p. 273), which is only one of the reasons this book should be read by all students of Maya archaeology, of ethnicity, and of postcolonial racialization.
