Author: Garry G. Sparks Publisher: University Press of Colorado ISBN: 1607329700 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 445
Book Description
In Rewriting Maya Religion Garry Sparks examines the earliest religious documents composed by missionaries and native authors in the Americas, including a reconstruction of the first original, explicit Christian theology written in the Americas—the nearly 900-page Theologia Indorum (Theology for [or of] the Indians), initially written in Mayan languages by Friar Domingo de Vico by 1554. Sparks traces how the first Dominican missionaries to the Maya repurposed native religious ideas, myths, and rhetoric in their efforts to translate a Christianity and how, in this wake, K’iche’ Maya elites began to write their own religious texts, like the Popol Vuh. This ethnohistory of religion critically reexamines the role and value of indigenous authority during the early decades of first contact between a Native American people and Christian missionaries. Centered on the specific work of Dominicans among the Highland Maya of Guatemala in the decades prior to the arrival of the Catholic Reformation in the late sixteenth century, the book focuses on the various understandings of religious analyses—Hispano-Catholic and Maya—and their strategic exchanges, reconfigurations, and resistance through competing efforts of religious translation. Sparks historically contextualizes Vico’s theological treatise within both the wider set of early literature in K’iche’an languages and the intellectual shifts between late medieval thought and early modernity, especially the competing theories of language, ethnography, and semiotics in the humanism of Spain and Mesoamerica at the time. Thorough and original, Rewriting Maya Religion serves as an ethnohistorical frame for continued studies on Highland Maya religious symbols, discourse, practices, and logic dating back to the earliest documented evidence. It will be of great significance to scholars of religion, ethnohistory, linguistics, anthropology, and Latin American history.
Author: Jean Molesky-Poz Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 0292778627 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
An authoritative study of the indigenous religion still practiced in Guatemala based on extensive original research and participant observation. Jean Molesky-Poz draws on in-depth dialogues with Maya Ajq’ijab’ (keepers of the ritual calendar), her own participant observation, and inter-disciplinary resources to offer a comprehensive, innovative, and well-grounded understanding of contemporary Maya spirituality and its theological underpinnings. She reveals significant continuities between contemporary and ancient Maya worldviews and spiritual practices. Molesky-Poz opens with a discussion of how the public emergence of Maya spirituality is situated within the religious political history of the Guatemalan highlands, particularly the pan-Maya movement. She investigates Maya cosmovision and its foundational principles, as expressed by Ajq’ijab’. At the heart of this work, Ajq’ijab’ interpret their obligation, lives, and spiritual work. Molesky-Poz then explores aspects of Maya spirituality, including sacred geography, sacred time, and ritual practice. She confirms contemporary Maya spirituality as a faith tradition with elaborate historical roots that has significance for individual, collective, and historical lives, reaffirming its own public space and legal right to be practiced.
Author: Sarah Newman Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226826384 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
Explores the concept of waste from fresh historical, cultural, and geographical perspectives. Garbage is often assumed to be an inevitable part and problem of human existence. But when did people actually come to think of things as “trash”—as becoming worthless over time or through use, as having an end? Unmaking Waste tackles these questions through a long-term, cross-cultural approach. Drawing on archaeological finds, historical documents, and ethnographic observations to examine Europe, the United States, and Central America from prehistory to the present, Sarah Newman traces how different ideas about waste took shape in different times and places. Newman examines what people consider to be “waste” and how they interact with it, as well as what happens when different perceptions of trash come into conflict. Conceptions of waste have shaped forms of reuse and renewal in ancient Mesoamerica, early modern ideas of civility and forced religious conversion in New Spain, and even the modern discipline of archaeology. Newman argues that centuries of assumptions imposed on other places, times, and peoples need to be rethought. This book is not only a broad reconsideration of waste; it is also a call for new forms of archaeology that do not take garbage for granted. Unmaking Waste reveals that waste is not—and never has been—an obvious or universal concept.
Author: Douglas T. Peck Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1456850415 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 165
Book Description
And in this book Colonel Peck reveals the current view of Maya religion is also appallingly inaccurate. The sophisticated Maya religion, which closely followed the pattern of contemporary Eurasian religions, originated in ancient times with a matriarchal “Goddess of Creation” and evolved into a patriarchal “First Father” concept in the Classic period preceding Spanish conquest. Current historians have failed to recognize that fact because of the naïve belief that the writings of colonial period folklore, which picture Maya religious concepts as crude, primitive, and often grotesque fables, represented Maya religion rather than the true, sophisticated, and realistic religious concepts expressed in their prehistoric writing and art as documented in this book.
Author: Charles River Charles River Editors Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN: 9781984014917 Category : Languages : en Pages : 72
Book Description
*Includes pictures of art depicting Mayan gods and goddesses. *Explains the Mayan calendar, ball game, sacrifice rituals, and other religious tenets. *Explains the evolution of the religion after the arrival of the Spanish. *Includes a Bibliography for further reading. "More than a collection of quaint mythology and exotic rituals, [Maya] religion was an effective definition of the nature of the world, answering questions about the origin of humanity, the purpose of human life on earth, and the relationship of the individual to his family, his society, and his gods. It is a religion which speaks to central and enduring problems of the civilized human condition: power, justice, equality, individual purpose, and social destiny." - A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya In the years leading up to 2012, there has been much interest in the Maya calendar. Largely, this is because the calendar will complete its 5,200-year cycle on December 21, 2012, and this auspicious event has been misinterpreted as signaling the end of the world. For the Maya, the endings of calendar period of all lengths (cycles ranged from 20 days to centuries in length) were very important and required various types of rituals and offerings to be properly recognized. Often, the best acceptable "offering" was human blood, and Maya elites engaged in autosacrificial bloodletting to appease the deity presiding over the transition in question. Combined with the detailed Maya knowledge of astronomy, the calendar system functioned as a way for Maya priests and elites to know which particular god in their crowded pantheon was ruling at a particular moment. The Maya believed that each interval of time, embedded in units like the day, the night, the solar year, the k''atun (20 year cycle), the lunar cycle, and Venus''s cycle, was governed by a certain deity. Such knowledge was considered vital in Maya cosmology and allowed the elites to maintain and consolidate power, effect political change, and lend religious veracity to monumental building projects. The blending of technologies and religion extended to writing for the Maya, who used a writing system to codify and standardize religio-political beliefs. It''s also important to remember that though the Maya mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the last millennium, their culture survived and was passed down among peoples in the region. As a result, the religion has also evolved, and the conflation of traditional Maya religious beliefs has largely involved a shift from animistic polytheism to quasi-monotheism with continuing aspects of animism. The forest surrounding ancient Maya settlements was considered to be filled with spirits, some malevolent and some benign, and to protect their settlements, modern Maya villagers set a cross and a balam or "jaguar" spirit at each of the four entrances to the village. This demonstrates a clear blending of Catholic symbols (the cross) and Maya spiritual beliefs (the balam guardians) and cosmology (the four directions). The onset of Catholic religious hegemony influenced all aspects of Maya society, including religious life, and in a move that is typically Mesoamerican, Maya practitioners included aspects into Maya religious practices. Ritual sacrifice continued long after the arrival of the Spanish, and colonized Maya incorporated crucifixion as a method of human sacrifice. Also, though the last recorded Maya human sacrifice occurred in 1868, animal sacrifice continues to this day, and some Maya continue to make ritual offerings of animals (usually chickens), food, and drinks at mountain or cave shrines. Religions of the World: The Religion of the Maya examines the history and evolution of the Mayan religion, including its main tenets, the similarities it shares with other religions and the differences that make it unique. Along with pictures of important figures and places, you''ll learn about the Maya religion like never before.
Author: Rady Roldán-Figueroa Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004515917 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 545
Book Description
Adding to the momentum of Lascasian Studies, this interdisciplinary effort of seventeen scholars offers sophisticated explorations of colonial Latin American and early modern Iberian studies.
Author: Mark Z. Christensen Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806191341 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
The Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the Final Judgment: the Apocalypse is central to Christianity and has evolved throughout Christianity’s long history. Thus, when ecclesiastics brought the Apocalypse to native audiences in the Americas, both groups adapted it further, reflecting new political and social circumstances. The religious texts in Aztec and Maya Apocalypses, many translated for the first time, provide an intriguing picture of this process—revealing the influence of European, Aztec, and Maya worldviews on portrayals of Doomsday by Spanish priests and Indigenous authors alike. The Apocalypse and Christian eschatology played an important role in the conversion of the Indigenous population and often appeared in the texts and sermons composed for their consumption. Through these writings from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century—priests’ “official” texts and Indigenous authors’ rendering of them—Mark Z. Christensen traces Maya and Nahua influences, both stylistic and substantive, while documenting how extensively Old World content and meaning were absorbed into Indigenous texts. Visions of world endings and beginnings were not new to the Indigenous cultures of America. Christensen shows how and why certain formulations, such as the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, found receptive audiences among the Maya and the Aztec, with religious ramifications extending to the present day. These translated texts provide the opportunity to see firsthand the negotiations that ecclesiastics and natives engaged in when composing their eschatological treatises. With their insights into how various ecclesiastics, Nahuas, and Mayas preached, and even understood, Catholicism, they offer a uniquely detailed, deeply informed perspective on the process of forming colonial religion.
Author: Pamela Beattie Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000641627 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
Time, Space, Matter in Translation considers time, space, and materiality as legitimate habitats of translation. By offering a linked series of interdisciplinary case studies that show translation in action beyond languages and texts, this book provides a capacious and innovative understanding of what translation is, what it does, how, and where. The volume uses translation as a means through which to interrogate processes of knowledge transfer and creation, interpretation and reading, communication and relationship building—but it does so in ways that refuse to privilege one discipline over another, denying any one of them an entitled perspective. The result is a book that is grounded in the disciplines of the authors and simultaneously groundbreaking in how its contributors incorporate translation studies into their work. This is key reading for students in comparative literature—and in the humanities at large—and for scholars interested in seeing how expanding intellectual conversations can develop beyond traditional questions and methods.
Author: Garry G. Sparks
Author: Iris Estafanía Ana Gareis
Author: Jean Molesky-Poz
Author: Michael Edwin Kampen
Author: Sarah Newman
Author: Douglas T. Peck
Author: Charles River Charles River Editors
Author: Rady Roldán-Figueroa
Author: Mark Z. Christensen
Author: Pamela Beattie