Working with peasants: reconsidering representations of the Maya

Claiming a post-1960 "revolution" in Maya studies, Mayanists have seemingly relegated the era between 1924 and 1960 (the culture-historical period in Americanist archaeology) to the methodological past, arguing that with the advent of the "New Archaeology" and substantial decipherment of the ancient Maya writing system, the misconceptions and misunderstandings of pre-1960's Mayanists have now been corrected. In reconsidering representations of the Maya produced between 1924 and 1960,1 investigate the origins and development of an objectivist model of the ancient Maya, the so-called "Morley-Thompson" model, that still persists despite both contradictory evidence in the archaeological record, and Mayanists'claims that the model has been abandoned. This study investigates the consequences of the intense and intimate interactions between Mayanists and Maya working together in the field. This interdependence of Mayanists and the Maya embodied the canonical model's inequitable distributions of power, and mirrored another layer of hierarchic power. I contend that Mayanists' interventions in pan-American identity formation explored the fears and desires of a U.S. middle class whose government sought to establish, then consolidate its economic and political hegemony in the hemisphere. I suggest that Mayanists' often ambiguous and even paradoxical representations, ostensibly of the ancient Maya, reflected ambivalence toward an indigenous group that appeared both extraordinarily like, and disturbingly unlike, popular conceptions of a U.S. national "character." I argue that Maya studies, beginning in 1924, developed a powerful trajectory based in ambiguous feelings of recognition, desire and fear of the American indigenous Other that was processed and articulated through Mayanists' representations. I argue, moreover, that the conditions that contributed to Mayanists' canonical claim for an ancient Maya class hierarchy also remain in force, embedded in Mayanists' motivations for the relationships they cultivate with the contemporary Maya when they undertake the work of representing the ancient Maya.Arts, Faculty ofArt History, Visual Art and Theory, Department ofGraduat