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Mayan Catholicism in Chichicastenango
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12066 |
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CULTURE
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12 / 1987 |
3,910 Words |
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Merlinda Fournier
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Despite a history of enforced political and economic submission to the Spanish, the Guatemalan Indian descendants of the Maya have clung with remarkable tenacity to their religious ethics and cultural integrity. Some three hundred ethnic groups, speaking variations of at least seventeen distinct Mayan languages, persist to this day. From the ancient pyramid-temples of Tikal to the modern folk Catholicism of Santo Tomas Chichicastenango, their long pilgrimage is visible. Under successive military regimes in this century (civilian rule was restored in Guatemala only in January 1986), these highlanders were again under siege.
The backbone of this contemporary confrontation is a land-tenure system through which the ladinos (westernized Guatemalans) still dominate the indigenous peoples. Approximately 70 percent of Guatemala's arable land is held by 20 percent of the population, according to statistics cited by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The Mayan Indian farmers live on a subsistence level from one year to the next. Mountain villagers often burn jungle bush to create new fields for their crops. Rain is crucial, but uncertain. It does not always come. Such vagaries of fate are believed to be the work of the gods, who can be either beneficent or malevolent.
To the Indian, land is sacred. It is more than just the means necessary to produce maize for survival; Land is believed to be loaned to a man by his ancestors. It therefore forms the base upon which both the individual's family life and the community's socioreligious structure can stand.
For this reason, land reform was the promise most often held out by Marxist guerrillas when they solicited peasant aid for the insurgency that expanded throughout the sixties and seventies. "For each guerrilla shooting there are ten Indians working behind him" became the government view, and every peasant became suspect. Guatemalan army massacres of civilians became a standard counterinsurgency tactic. By the army's own admission, anti-guerrilla campaigns left some 440 villages destroyed and more than thirty thousand natives dead.
A military presence is still very visible in the country, but these political troubles have at least made the government more aware of those Mayan needs that were previously exploited by the guerrillas.
What the textbooks say on Mayan religion comes into surprising focus. Recalling that the Mayan cosmos is neutral, and that the forces of nature and destiny are capricious and must be propitiated with sacrifice, some Maya will undoubtedly have interpreted these latest massacres, including the violent earthquake of 1976, as retributions for their sins.
THE MAYAN WORLDVIEW
Multiple aspects of a single deity are common in Mayan thought. Itzamna, god of the Mayan elite and their cities, is also the god, or rather gods, of the earth's four corners. Itzamna's long, serpentine bodies, snaking outward from the cardinal points, form the heavens just as the four walls of a pyramid form the temple. The earth's four corners are so significant in Mayan cosmology that even Tikal's vast network of ancient structures was oriented on that basis. The "city" of
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