‘It Was Simply Their Word’

Abstract

This essay builds on a critique of anthropological knowledge production of ‘the Maya’ in order to ethnographically analyze the party politics of Maya identity in Yucatán, Mexico. The central question that links these two parts of the article is a questioning of the politics and possibilities of respect of and for indigenous/subaltern peoples such as the Maya who continue to live under (neo-)colonialist conditions that create a wholesale lack of respect for colonized and subaltern peoples. The article is written in a schizophrenic voice of a doubly Maya-Non-Maya, anthropologist-postcolonialist who narrates a divinatory story of ethnographic realities as a post-Maya Chilam Balam (roughly, ‘priest’). Exploring the trendiness of and fashion for ‘being Maya’, this ethnographic foray might seem to be an ‘experimental ethnography’ or even an ‘autoethnography’, but is instead just as much a critique of this new academic pretension as it is of the Mexican political system that manipulates ‘Maya’ identity.