This paper asks what mestizaje as presently conceived could have meant in colonial Latin America ... more This paper asks what mestizaje as presently conceived could have meant in colonial Latin America before modern notions of race, nation, state, or culture. It explores the term ladino in contemporary Chiapas and Guatemala that refers to people of mixed descent who identify as ‘not Indian.’ More than a substitute for mestizo, ladino represents a descent ideology that stresses parentage over race in pursuit of relative advantage within a stratified, postconquest society. This descent ideology in turn derives from the ‘republics’ of Spaniards and Indians – and African slaves – in colonial Guatemala, and post-Reconquest Iberian ideals of ‘purity of blood’ based on, not race, but legitimate birth to a Christian family going back to before the Muslim conquest of Spain. The vagaries of genealogical reckoning inherent in descent ideologies help to rationalize why from the bottom up ‘mestizo’ identities came to depend as much on behavior as appearance, and from the top down, they provoked blanket phenotypic exclusions that eventually, but not primordially, found validation in biologized conceptions of race.
Linguistic data from Mam, a contemporary Mayan language spoken in western Guatemala, is used to c... more Linguistic data from Mam, a contemporary Mayan language spoken in western Guatemala, is used to construct a cognitive model of Mayan cosmology. Terms for the directions, verb paradigms and the demarcation of time periods reveal a conception of space and time in which directionality, motion and time are inextricably linked to the movement of the sun. In Mam terms, direction does not exist independently of motion. Cardinal directions are defined as vectors rather than as fixed points in space. East and west become moments of reversal in the sun's diurnal oscillation between the horizons, and up and down are the only other, non-invertible spatial directions. Also modelled on the passage of the sun through the heavens, time is embodied as this movement between the eastern and western horizons. Comparison of this cognitive model with ethnographic as well as archaeological evidence suggests that a similar structure underlies all Mayan cosmologies.
Greetings involving exchanges of ritualized sexual gestures are a common form of interaction amon... more Greetings involving exchanges of ritualized sexual gestures are a common form of interaction among adult male baboons, although relatively little attention has been paid to them. In this study, we investigate how greetings reflect important aspects of the male's social relationships, including dominance rank, age/residence status, and cooperative tendencies. The results are based on over 600 greetings among 12 adult males recorded during a 4-month study of a troop of wild olive baboons near Gilgil, Kenya. Four of the adult males were older, lower-ranking, long-term residents, which frequently formed coalitions to take estrous females away from the eight young, higher-ranking males. Virtually all dyads greeted: greetings occurred more than twice as often as other types of male-male interactions; and nearly all greetings occurred in a neutral context, in which there was no resource at stake. The percentage of greetings completed, the frequency with which different gestures were employed, and the roles adopted by each male varied significantly across old-old, old-young, and young-young dyads. Greetings between young adult males were often interrupted or actively resisted, consistent with their unstable and ambiguous dominance relationships. Greetings between old-old dyads were usually completed and appeared consistent with their cooperative relationships. One pair of old males formed a stable, reciprocal coalition against young males, and this pair's greetings showed remarkable symmetry of roles. Greetings, we hypothesize, function to allow males to negotiate important aspects of their relationships, including cooperation.
Local concepts of Catholic saints in the Mam (Maya) town of Santiago Chimaltenango in the western... more Local concepts of Catholic saints in the Mam (Maya) town of Santiago Chimaltenango in the western highlands of Guatemala reveal that syncretism there represents not an indiscriminate seamless fusion of Maya and Christian religiosity but a highly differentiated recombination of conventional forms that serves primarily to articulate the moral and physical—and thus ethnic—boundaries of the community. The symbolic reassortment of saints with other local images of community, in particular ancestors and "earth lords," shows syncretism to be an essential property of local identity, not simply a quaint or arbitrary survival of the Maya past. Contrasts with antecedent saint cults in 16th-century Spain demonstrate the "Mayanness" of this syncretism; comparison with saint cults in other Maya communities relates syncretism more closely to local contexts of community morality than to enduring "deep structures" of some primordial Maya culture or to a "false consciousness" born of persistent colonialist oppression. [Maya religion, religious syncretism, saint cults, Guatemala, ethnic identity]
Moving beyond the ecological functionalism of Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Rappaport's subsequent ... more Moving beyond the ecological functionalism of Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Rappaport's subsequent work on ritual explored how the "obvious aspects" of ritual's formalism and the need to perform it literally embody in its performers expressions of sanctity and truth that counter the threats of lying and alternative inherent in symbolic communication. He recognized that symbolic meaning and truth presuppose social cooperation and trust between individuals, and ritual serves uniquely to reaffirm this mutuality at the level of both individual behavior and conventional meaning. Through a study of male greetings among olive baboons (Papio cynocephalus anubis), this paper illustrates how ritual in Rappaport's sense may indeed intensify cooperation in socially complex but nonlinguistic contexts by establishing a behaviorally transparent means of certifying otherwise opaque individual intentions. Thus, not only may ritual sanctify symbolic communication, but it also may have played a crucial role in its evolution. [ritual, sociocultural evolution, religion and society, symbolic communication, olive baboons, primate social behavior]
This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nin... more This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nineteenth-century western Guatemala. Rooted in face-to-face encounters between departmental jefes poln &ticos (departmental governors) and local Maya communities, this procedural culture emerged from routines of governance such as annual municipal inspections, ethnic struggles for municipal control, and local e!orts to title community lands that led Maya and state o$cials to develop contrasting understandings of each other and their relations. Far from precipitating a national identity of mutual belonging, state formation here intensi"ed the racism and political violence that would rend Guatemala during the century to come.
Current conceptions that treat hegemony as the virtual condition of political struggle rather tha... more Current conceptions that treat hegemony as the virtual condition of political struggle rather than the actual exercise of power confuse the term with culture, favor disembodied discourses over meanings actually conveyed, and risk over-generalizing domination and resistance into inescapable imperatives of state power and individual agency. These problems become particularly acute when historians and anthropologists seek to write cultural histories from below drawn from historical sources written largely from above. An approach centered on "procedural cultures" that views hegemony as culturalized ideology and culture as contingent understandings embedded in ongoing dialogues both within and across boundaries of difference might serve better than hegemony in discerning meaning, power, and agency in otherwise culturally opaque historical sources. Administrative records from late 19th-century western Guatemala exemplify such a procedural culture and how it may help us read historical documents for the everyday cultural others we seek in the past.
This commentary addresses ethnographic and theoretical problems in the recent debate over lineage... more This commentary addresses ethnographic and theoretical problems in the recent debate over lineages and houses in Classic Maya society. On the one hand, proponents of segmentary lineage models miss ambiguities between filiation and descent, residential and corporate groups in the Maya ethnographies they use for their analogies. On the other hand, supporters of Lévi-Strauss's house model fail to appreciate the relative instead of absolute differences between descent theory and alliance theory that underlie lineage and house models and make it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between them archaeologically. Both look to descriptive, largely static types derived from elsewhere and then argue which best fits Classic Maya society rather than build models that define the relevant components of social organization—filiation, descent, alliance, residence—and then theorize how differently patterned relations between these components might yield the institutional groupings we find on (or in the case of archaeology, in) the ground.
Any inquiry into the evolution of human sociality must specify what exactly has evolved, how far,... more Any inquiry into the evolution of human sociality must specify what exactly has evolved, how far, and with what consequences. The human capacity for and dependence on language, and by implication culture, represent an obvious choice for such inquiry. Discussion, however, often turns on how broadly or narrowly to define language and culture. This in turn usually reflects what investigators already think on empirical or theoretical grounds about the uniqueness (or not) of human sociality. Empirically, the impossibility of directly observing early hominid behavior means that evidence for the evolution of human sociality must depend largely on comparison, most often with living nonhuman primates as the closest analogues we have for the capacities and conditions from which human sociality derived. For those who define language and culture broadly, the contrasts here remain a matter of degree; for those who define them narrowly, a matter of kind, especially in the capacity to recognize, use, and create symbols. To see here only continuities or discontinuities, however, belies the evolutionary process itself (cf. King 1999) because Darwin's notion of "descent with modification" clearly demands that we attend to both.
This paper asks what mestizaje as presently conceived could have meant in colonial Latin America ... more This paper asks what mestizaje as presently conceived could have meant in colonial Latin America before modern notions of race, nation, state, or culture. It explores the term ladino in contemporary Chiapas and Guatemala that refers to people of mixed descent who identify as ‘not Indian.’ More than a substitute for mestizo, ladino represents a descent ideology that stresses parentage over race in pursuit of relative advantage within a stratified, postconquest society. This descent ideology in turn derives from the ‘republics’ of Spaniards and Indians – and African slaves – in colonial Guatemala, and post-Reconquest Iberian ideals of ‘purity of blood’ based on, not race, but legitimate birth to a Christian family going back to before the Muslim conquest of Spain. The vagaries of genealogical reckoning inherent in descent ideologies help to rationalize why from the bottom up ‘mestizo’ identities came to depend as much on behavior as appearance, and from the top down, they provoked blanket phenotypic exclusions that eventually, but not primordially, found validation in biologized conceptions of race.
Linguistic data from Mam, a contemporary Mayan language spoken in western Guatemala, is used to c... more Linguistic data from Mam, a contemporary Mayan language spoken in western Guatemala, is used to construct a cognitive model of Mayan cosmology. Terms for the directions, verb paradigms and the demarcation of time periods reveal a conception of space and time in which directionality, motion and time are inextricably linked to the movement of the sun. In Mam terms, direction does not exist independently of motion. Cardinal directions are defined as vectors rather than as fixed points in space. East and west become moments of reversal in the sun's diurnal oscillation between the horizons, and up and down are the only other, non-invertible spatial directions. Also modelled on the passage of the sun through the heavens, time is embodied as this movement between the eastern and western horizons. Comparison of this cognitive model with ethnographic as well as archaeological evidence suggests that a similar structure underlies all Mayan cosmologies.
Greetings involving exchanges of ritualized sexual gestures are a common form of interaction amon... more Greetings involving exchanges of ritualized sexual gestures are a common form of interaction among adult male baboons, although relatively little attention has been paid to them. In this study, we investigate how greetings reflect important aspects of the male's social relationships, including dominance rank, age/residence status, and cooperative tendencies. The results are based on over 600 greetings among 12 adult males recorded during a 4-month study of a troop of wild olive baboons near Gilgil, Kenya. Four of the adult males were older, lower-ranking, long-term residents, which frequently formed coalitions to take estrous females away from the eight young, higher-ranking males. Virtually all dyads greeted: greetings occurred more than twice as often as other types of male-male interactions; and nearly all greetings occurred in a neutral context, in which there was no resource at stake. The percentage of greetings completed, the frequency with which different gestures were employed, and the roles adopted by each male varied significantly across old-old, old-young, and young-young dyads. Greetings between young adult males were often interrupted or actively resisted, consistent with their unstable and ambiguous dominance relationships. Greetings between old-old dyads were usually completed and appeared consistent with their cooperative relationships. One pair of old males formed a stable, reciprocal coalition against young males, and this pair's greetings showed remarkable symmetry of roles. Greetings, we hypothesize, function to allow males to negotiate important aspects of their relationships, including cooperation.
Local concepts of Catholic saints in the Mam (Maya) town of Santiago Chimaltenango in the western... more Local concepts of Catholic saints in the Mam (Maya) town of Santiago Chimaltenango in the western highlands of Guatemala reveal that syncretism there represents not an indiscriminate seamless fusion of Maya and Christian religiosity but a highly differentiated recombination of conventional forms that serves primarily to articulate the moral and physical—and thus ethnic—boundaries of the community. The symbolic reassortment of saints with other local images of community, in particular ancestors and "earth lords," shows syncretism to be an essential property of local identity, not simply a quaint or arbitrary survival of the Maya past. Contrasts with antecedent saint cults in 16th-century Spain demonstrate the "Mayanness" of this syncretism; comparison with saint cults in other Maya communities relates syncretism more closely to local contexts of community morality than to enduring "deep structures" of some primordial Maya culture or to a "false consciousness" born of persistent colonialist oppression. [Maya religion, religious syncretism, saint cults, Guatemala, ethnic identity]
Moving beyond the ecological functionalism of Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Rappaport's subsequent ... more Moving beyond the ecological functionalism of Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Rappaport's subsequent work on ritual explored how the "obvious aspects" of ritual's formalism and the need to perform it literally embody in its performers expressions of sanctity and truth that counter the threats of lying and alternative inherent in symbolic communication. He recognized that symbolic meaning and truth presuppose social cooperation and trust between individuals, and ritual serves uniquely to reaffirm this mutuality at the level of both individual behavior and conventional meaning. Through a study of male greetings among olive baboons (Papio cynocephalus anubis), this paper illustrates how ritual in Rappaport's sense may indeed intensify cooperation in socially complex but nonlinguistic contexts by establishing a behaviorally transparent means of certifying otherwise opaque individual intentions. Thus, not only may ritual sanctify symbolic communication, but it also may have played a crucial role in its evolution. [ritual, sociocultural evolution, religion and society, symbolic communication, olive baboons, primate social behavior]
This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nin... more This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nineteenth-century western Guatemala. Rooted in face-to-face encounters between departmental jefes poln &ticos (departmental governors) and local Maya communities, this procedural culture emerged from routines of governance such as annual municipal inspections, ethnic struggles for municipal control, and local e!orts to title community lands that led Maya and state o$cials to develop contrasting understandings of each other and their relations. Far from precipitating a national identity of mutual belonging, state formation here intensi"ed the racism and political violence that would rend Guatemala during the century to come.
Current conceptions that treat hegemony as the virtual condition of political struggle rather tha... more Current conceptions that treat hegemony as the virtual condition of political struggle rather than the actual exercise of power confuse the term with culture, favor disembodied discourses over meanings actually conveyed, and risk over-generalizing domination and resistance into inescapable imperatives of state power and individual agency. These problems become particularly acute when historians and anthropologists seek to write cultural histories from below drawn from historical sources written largely from above. An approach centered on "procedural cultures" that views hegemony as culturalized ideology and culture as contingent understandings embedded in ongoing dialogues both within and across boundaries of difference might serve better than hegemony in discerning meaning, power, and agency in otherwise culturally opaque historical sources. Administrative records from late 19th-century western Guatemala exemplify such a procedural culture and how it may help us read historical documents for the everyday cultural others we seek in the past.
This commentary addresses ethnographic and theoretical problems in the recent debate over lineage... more This commentary addresses ethnographic and theoretical problems in the recent debate over lineages and houses in Classic Maya society. On the one hand, proponents of segmentary lineage models miss ambiguities between filiation and descent, residential and corporate groups in the Maya ethnographies they use for their analogies. On the other hand, supporters of Lévi-Strauss's house model fail to appreciate the relative instead of absolute differences between descent theory and alliance theory that underlie lineage and house models and make it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between them archaeologically. Both look to descriptive, largely static types derived from elsewhere and then argue which best fits Classic Maya society rather than build models that define the relevant components of social organization—filiation, descent, alliance, residence—and then theorize how differently patterned relations between these components might yield the institutional groupings we find on (or in the case of archaeology, in) the ground.
Any inquiry into the evolution of human sociality must specify what exactly has evolved, how far,... more Any inquiry into the evolution of human sociality must specify what exactly has evolved, how far, and with what consequences. The human capacity for and dependence on language, and by implication culture, represent an obvious choice for such inquiry. Discussion, however, often turns on how broadly or narrowly to define language and culture. This in turn usually reflects what investigators already think on empirical or theoretical grounds about the uniqueness (or not) of human sociality. Empirically, the impossibility of directly observing early hominid behavior means that evidence for the evolution of human sociality must depend largely on comparison, most often with living nonhuman primates as the closest analogues we have for the capacities and conditions from which human sociality derived. For those who define language and culture broadly, the contrasts here remain a matter of degree; for those who define them narrowly, a matter of kind, especially in the capacity to recognize, use, and create symbols. To see here only continuities or discontinuities, however, belies the evolutionary process itself (cf. King 1999) because Darwin's notion of "descent with modification" clearly demands that we attend to both.
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Papers by J. Watanabe
movement between the eastern and western horizons. Comparison of this cognitive model with ethnographic as well as archaeological evidence suggests that a similar structure underlies all Mayan cosmologies.
movement between the eastern and western horizons. Comparison of this cognitive model with ethnographic as well as archaeological evidence suggests that a similar structure underlies all Mayan cosmologies.