<p>Hach Winik may be the last comprehensive study of traditional Lacandon Maya society based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork. Long isolated, culturally conservative, and bearing a mystique of Mesoamerican "primitivism," the Lacandon now live on the brink of cultural disintegration. Their habitat is all but destroyed by lumbering and by the large-scale invasion of other Maya peoples in search of land. In the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Didier Boremanse collected cultural data and textual materials from two groups of Lacandon who still remained relatively isolated. Hach Winik describes and compares the cultural traditions of these two groups. Topics presented in this volume include the history of Lacandon contact with other peoples as well as settlement patterns, life cycle, social control, residence and marriage, the kinship system, and the ritual expression of these social domains. Statistical data are balanced by a wealth of descriptive detail concerning events and individuals. A number of oral narratives are also presented and include many words and utterances in the original language with English glosses.</p>

Hach Winik: The Lacandon Maya of Chiapas, Southern Mexico (IMS Monograph)

History

Boremanse, Didier

Americas

Institute for Mesoamerican Studies

<p><div>The Lacandon Maya are a small-scale forest society currently on the brink of extinction. Small groups of Northern Lacandon escaped evangelization by dispersing into the jungle, moving from the Guatemalan Petén to Chiapas in southern Mexico during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Several groups maintained their traditional religion until the late twentieth century.<br /> &nbsp;<br /> Their cult of incense burners, based on the veneration of Maya ruins and funerary caves and the deities these effigy censers represented, remained free of any Christian influence. Some ceremonies were vestiges of more complex rituals believed to date back to pre-Columbian times. In this volume, Didier Boremanse explores Lacandon beliefs and traditions he observed during the many months of fieldwork he did, spanning four decades.<br /> &nbsp;<br /> Throughout the book Boremanse makes Lacandon values and worldviews accessible to readers from western cultures. Rituals are described and explained with extracts of the celebrants' prayers that were tape-recorded, transcribed, and translated. Other elements of religious oral tradition are included, including incantations, chants, and the myths and beliefs that sustain the rites. Boremanse also discusses how larger social change influences religious change, both through economic means and outside influences. Most of the myths retold in this book have never been published in English. Photographs show rites that are no longer performed and shrines that no longer exist.</div></p>

Ruins, Caves, Gods, and Incense Burners: Northern Lacandon Maya Myths and Rituals

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

University of Utah Press

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