Cultural logics and global economies: Maya identity in thought and practice

Abstract

Edward F. Fischer, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001, xii + 320 pages (paper).Reviewer: Marilyn Gates Simon Fraser UniversityWe (Westerners) tend to view the contemporary Maya with a romantic gaze, as remnants of a long-ago high culture. We think of majestic cities and temples shrouded in the rain forest, hieroglyphs guarding their secrets, such as the riddle of the sudden Classic Maya collapse. We see the descendants of these ancient Maya today as clinging to only vestiges of their illustrious past, glimpsed in stubbornly persistent languages, arcane religious ceremonies, time-tested agricultural practices, colourful costumes and other folk crafts, perfect for tourist souvenirs. Guatemala's relatively small Spanish-speaking ladino (non-Indian) elite, historically have viewed the Mayan majority through much less rose-coloured glasses, aiming at assimilation in the nation-state under the modernization model of dependent capitalism, via civilizing and educating them, or disappearing those perceived as a threat to national security. Despite these concerted efforts, however, the Maya have not vanished, constituting one of the largest concentrations of indigenous peoples in the Americas. They are also one of the poorest and most divided. Edward Fischer argues that, paradoxically, the current surge of globalization provides a window of opportunity for marginalized and fractured ethnic groups such as the Maya to re-imagine and re-assert their identity and distinctiveness vis-a-vis the dominant Hispanic society.In Cultural Logics and Global Economies: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice, Edward Fischer explores the dynamics of ethnic-identity construction among the Guatemalan Maya in the new world-system context of postindustrial core countries and offshore production and assembly in the periphery. Drawing on recent theories in interpretive ethnography, cognitive studies, and political economy, Fischer applies a multilayered and finely textured analysis to tease out the international, national and local factors that have opened up new venues of pan-Mayan expression, especially since the waning of the civil war in the late 1980s and the rapid expansion of neoliberal free-market economic policies. Fischer maintains that these macro-level economic changes are ...closely correlated in time and space to the rise of identity politics and various forms of hyphenated nationalism in peripheral areas. Indeed, it appears that ethnicity has eclipsed the importance of class identity in stimulating struggles of resistance. (p. 24)Fisher examines the apparently successful colonization of this postmodern identity space by uncovering the tensions and synergies that arise at the intersection of national pan-Maya identity politics and the lived experiences of Maya in the Kaqchikel towns of Tecpan and Patzun. Taking a constructionist stance, building on Bourdieu's model of the habitus and Giddens's theory of structuration, Fischer is able to navigate smoothly from the macro-level to the micro-level to show how open-ended cultural logics as shared predispositions linked both to the underlying substrate and to a dynamic articulation with global relations of political economy condition the ways in which both Maya leaders and the rural masses creatively express their identity. Maya leaders seek to unite Indian groups long divided by rugged terrain, geographic rootedness and local custom in order to attain a greater political voice after centuries of oppression. However, they are constrained in the creation of a new pan-Maya identity by the need to stay true to norms that emerge from everyday lived experiences, as idiosyncratic internalizations of received culture remain firmly embedded in broader continuities and commonalities.After reviewing the global and national processes which impinge on pan-Maya identity politics, Fischer zeros in on the movement itself and on Maya identity as lived experience in Tecpan and Patzun. …