A Month to Conjure the Modern/Pre-Modern Divide

At the risk of you-all becoming sick of me posting....A response to today's New York Times article, "A Month to Conjure Luck With Sacrifices in Fire."

Link to the original piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/world/americas/21witch.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Let me know if you think I'm overreacting...


On August 1st, a few days before I returned to the U.S., my co-father and his brother bundled up and headed to the cumbre [mountain top] to perform a misa/mesa [offering] to the Pachamama [mother earth], because she's especially hungry in August; her mouth is open. I met two dear friends for lunch that day -- one of them a dirigente [union leader] for The National Federation of Indigenous and Peasant Women "Bartolina Sisa." Her first question: have you done your Misa/Mesa yet?

Later that night I met friends Cleo, Ely and Anali (Ely’s daughter) to do a Misa/Mesa: pijchar coca (chew coca leaves), ch’allar (offer libations), reflect on our antepasados [ancestors], talk about the various challenges we are facing in our lives, and burn the mix of herbs, purple, yellow and orange–dyed wool, and sweets molded into the shape of animals that represent wisdom and life journeys (our mesa did not include llama fat or a llama fetus as they sometimes do). It was a time to reflect on the year, our shared and individual struggles, and to offer gratitude to Pachamama and the achachilas, awichas, and antepasados in our lives.

I’ve participated in mesas/misas aimed at reconciling Catholic, evangelical and Aymara members of the UMAVIDA network I used to facilitate, and at other ecumenical gatherings; mesas with a group of Aymara women who have organized a cooperative for fair trade export; and I’ve watched friends consult yatiris (wise healer, practitioner of traditional medicine) and do mesas/misas at the Boca del Sapo (mouth of the toad) at Lake Titikaka.

Now the August mesas/misas are getting coverage in the New York Times. But while I’m always glad to see Bolivia getting news coverage, I also worry about what that coverage conveys. For example, I’m not happy with journalist Simon Romero’s emphasis on “luck” in this article. It reduces the mesas to a kind of Bolivian rabbit’s-foot and diminishes the extent to which such community and familial rituals are deeply ingrained in people’s everyday lives and ways of thinking about human and non-human relationships, as well as the social and political critiques that are often implicit in the practice. The article exoticizes the mesa (Llama fetuses! Witches’ market! Oooo!), rather than illuminating the meaning of those practices and the roles they play in peoples’ lives.

While the August and other mesas/misas are important and widespread practices, I’m always a little anxious about what stories like this one do, what kind of representational patterns they perpetuate. In their accounts of conflict in Bolivia, North American policy makers and political commentators frequently fall back on categories like modernity (reason) and pre-modernity (irrationality/emotionality/religion). They have not seen indigenous protests as the stuff of rational actors reflecting on policies they find inimical to their personal or national interests. Instead, indigenous protesters are infantilized and portrayed as hyper-emotional, irrational. On the other hand, Bolivians working to forge alliances with larger social and environmental movements outside of the country have been romanticized, exoticized and spiritualized in ways that may inadvertently reinforce that same rational/irrational divide. The American news media has tended to depict Bolivia’s indigenous and peasant protests as “an expression of mindless passion ” rather than hearing and taking seriously protests as rational and legitimate critiques of unjust policies. One of my professors at Harvard Divinity School, anthropologist Michael Jackson argues

"not only against the false dichotomy of reason and unreason, but the way these terms have been used to distinguish between two different kinds of society, and two classes of humanity, conventionally labeled civilized and savage, or modern and pre-modern. This language game, in which reason is assigned to oneself and unreason to the other (though we are careful now days to euphemize unreason as cosmology, myth, religion, folklore, cultural values, traditionalism, fundamentalism or spirituality) is a strategy for denying coevalness and, when applied to entire societies, has no empirical justification. All human beings think and act rationally and irrationally, depending on circumstance, and to consider oneself intrinsically or wholly reasonable is itself a form of irrationalism" (Jackson, 372-373)

Enganchada

One of my favorite concepts from Feminist – particularly Mujerista and Womanist (black feminist) – theology (yeah, theology) is the “community of accountability”: that those of us working in academia must have communities that hold us accountable for our work and that keep us grounded – that prevent us from floating away on clouds of theory that don’t relate to real people’s lives.

Repeatedly throughout my visit, people I interviewed expressed their frustration and hurt at the number of researchers – especially foreign researchers – who conduct interviews, promise to keep in touch, and then disappear. They are viewed as aprovechando (taking advantage) and as personalista (ego driven by their own careers). People express their suspicion that I will do the same. Anthropologist Silvia Rivera has a scathing critique of Euro and American scholars working in the Americas – whom she views as elitist and co-opting postcolonial knowledge generated by Bolivia’s social movements to advance their careers in academia. As such, scholars are engaged in a kind of colonial enterprise themselves, mining Bolivia for knowledge and escaping off to their own enclaves.

Of course, people make similar critiques of NGO workers and other foreign aid programs that seem short-lived, paternalistic/neo-colonial, and self-interested. Political geographer Juan Arbona, who works in El Alto, recently told me about a project he and other Alteños are developing to try to prevent that pattern from repeating – creating a forum for foreign researchers to present their work back to the communities where they have worked, and demanding of those researchers a kind of compact to translate and return their work to Bolivia, where it can be discussed, critiqued, interpreted, found useful, appropriated or challenged and rejected.

I’ve been thinking about these issues as I find myself increasingly enganchada (hooked in) to friends’ lives through the compadrazgo system I described in an earlier post – particularly as a godmother of baptism now for two children (Mao and Sofia) and a godmother of rutucha (first haircut) for a third.

I’m also thinking about the challenges of maintaining those ties and cumpliendo mis responsabilidades (coming through on my responsibilities) as a godmother, friend and researcher in an era of multi-sited ethnography and as my own research interests may lead me to work in other regions of Bolivia and perhaps even in other countries…

I love Wikis.

I recently posted some preliminary maps and analysis on our project wiki, and I'll repeat it here so you all can enjoy the wonders of El Palmar as part of the Landscape Succession Project. For the preliminary project wiki, visit: The Landscape Succession Project.

Introduction to El Palmar

El Palmar is a large site, located 4 km east of El Zotz and about 17 km west of Tikal, situated on the southwestern edge of a very large cival. PAEZ members visited the site in 2007 and completed a sketch map of one of the main plazas. In 2008, the site was the focus of mapping and excavation by James Doyle and Varinia Matute.

Figure 1. Locations of El Zotz and El Palmar.

Site Layout

Preliminary mapping indicates that the core of El Palmar covers approximately half a square kilometer and includes at least three major plaza groups, several large platforms, and many platforms and structures approaching the edge of the cival. The map was produced with tape, compass, and more than 100 GPS points using a Garmin handheld unit.

Figure 2. Preliminary Map of El Palmar.

Group 1 in the northern area of the site consists of four structures arranged around a large plaza, with a large pyramid to the west and large range structure to the east. Structure 1, a pyramid with a height of 23m and a square base of approximately 60m, is likely a radial pyramid with large masks, typical of the architectural groups that have been categorized as “E-Groups,” after Group E at Uaxactun (Aimers and Rice 2006; Aveni et al. 2003; Estrada-Belli 2006; Guderjan 2006; Hansen 1998; Ricketson 1928).

Figure 3. El Palmar Group 1.

A preliminary contour map of Structure 1 with approximately 1-m resolution was produced from survey with a TopCon total station, resulting in a 3-dimensional view of the eastern and southern faces of the pyramid.

Figure 4. El Palmar Structure 1. Height = 23m.

Test pit excavations EP 6-B-1 and EP 6-B-2, located on the western and eastern edges of the Group 1 plaza, respectively, revealed 2 plaza floors above bedrock and a ceramic chronology suggesting a Late Preclassic occupation, with sherds from the Polvero, Sierra, Sibal and Flor groups. Although unexcavated at present, Structure 3, the range structure to the east of the plaza consists of three elevated structures organized around a sunken patio, to be closer mapped and investigated in 2009.

The significance of the E-Group at El Palmar is potentially great because if its proximity to Tikal and Uaxactun, those groups that have been identified as the earliest of this type of architectural complex (Aimers and Rice 2006). The similarity in dimensions between El Palmar Structure 1 and Structure 5D-54 in the Mundo Perdido complex also suggests similarities in chronology, a hypothesis to be tested in the next season (Laporte and Fialko 1995). Furthermore, the possible abandonment of a site in the Early Classic so close to El Zotz and Bejucal carries wider implications about the transition to the Early Classic in a politically active region of the Maya Lowlands.

Group 2 consists of an elevated platform containing at least five major structures arranged around a small courtyard. A large pyramid (Structure 5) lies on the western edge, with small structures erected on the northern, southern, and eastern edges. A fifth, small mound lies in the center of the platform (Structure 9) and a large staircase descends to the plaza below the northern edge.

Figure 5. El Palmar Group 2.

Test pit excavation EP 6-A-1 was placed in the Group 2 plaza near Structure 5 and Structure 9. The preliminary ceramic analysis from this excavation and from surface finds indicates a Late Preclassic date for the original occupation, including the presence of Usulutan red-over-orange, Polvero Black, and Sierra Red sherds. A Late Classic Chaquiste Impressed sherd and other possible later types may indicate that a Late Classic population may have occupied Group 2.

Test pit excavation EP 6-A-2, located to the north of the large stairway uncovered sherds that possibly indicate occupation in the transitional period between the Late Preclassic and Classic periods, including sherds of the Sierra and Polvero groups in the same levels as Dos Arroyos Polychrome, Aguila Orange, and Triunfo Striated. Furthermore, the presence of obsidian from the highland source of San Martin Jilotepeque is consistent with the Late Preclassic period (Zachary Hruby, personal communication). Architecture exposed by looters at the top of the staircase also contains red-panted stuccoed apron molding, typical of the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods (Hansen 1998).

A third major group at El Palmar, Group 3, lies to the south of the site and consists of at least 5 structures on a very tall platform rising from the edge of the cival. More investigation is necessary to determine the chronology of this group and its relation to the other public architecture at El Palmar. Preliminary survey indicates possible land modification for water management in the form of maintained arroyos near this group, also a focus of future investigations.

Figure 6. El Palmar Group 3.

A number of small platforms and structures are located in close proximity to the cival, including Structure 12, profiled in 2007 by Juan Carlos Meléndez and Fabiola Quiroa. More investigations into the structures close to the cival will hopefully reveal key information about agriculture or water management practices of the inhabitants of El Palmar.

Figure 7. El Palmar Structure 12. East and South profile of looters’ trench.

Environmental Implications

The cival itself merits attention in coming seasons because of potential information contained in the sediments of the seasonal swamp, including human activity during the Holocene era. El Palmar and its accompanying body of water are an ideal place to test hypotheses set forth on the role of water management and sedimentation in the Late Preclassic period, possibly leading to abandonment of many centers (e.g. Wahl et al. 2006).

Figure 8. View of Cival from El Palmar Structure 12.

Conclusion

Future seasons of archaeological, topographical, and environmental investigations at El Palmar will hopefully yield insights into a Late Preclassic community located very close to Tikal on a large seasonal swamp. More information from El Palmar and the early occupations of Bejucal and El Zotz will shed light on the transitional period from the Late Preclassic to Early Classic in a region that developed to be very important in the Early Classic sociopolitical milieu in the central Peten.

References

Aimers, James J. and Prudence M. Rice
2006 “Astronomy, Ritual, and the Interpretation of Maya ‘E-Group’ Architectural Assemblages.” Ancient Mesoamerica. 17. 79-96.

Aveni, Anthony F., Anne S. Dowd, and Benjamin Vining
2003 “Maya Calendar Reform? Evidence from Orientations of Specialized Architectural Assemblages.” Latin American Antiquity. 14 (2). 159-178

Estrada-Belli, Francisco
2006 “Lightning Sky, Rain, and the Maize God: The Ideology of Preclassic Maya Rulers at Cival, Peten, Guatemala.” Ancient Mesoamerica. 17. 57-78.

Guderjan, Thomas H.
2006 “E-Groups, Pseudo-E-Groups, and the Development of the Classic Maya Identity in the Eastern Peten.” Ancient Mesoamerica. 17. 97-104.

Hansen, Richard D.
1998 “Continuity and Disjunction: The Pre-Classic Antecedents of Classic Maya Architecture.” In Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture. Ed. Stephen Houston. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. 49-122.

Laporte, Juan Pedro and Vilma Fialko
1995 “Un reencuentro con undo Perdido, Tikal, Guatemala.” Ancient Mesoamerica 6 (1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 41-94.

Ricketson, Oliver
1928 “Notes on Two Maya Astronomic Observatories.” American Anthropologist. 30 (3). 434-444.

Wahl, David, Roger Byrne, Thomas Schreiner, and Richard Hansen
2006 “Holocene vegetation change in the northern Peten and its implications for Maya prehistory.” Quaternary Research. 65. 380-389.

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