From saints to shibboleths: image, structure, and identity in Maya religious syncretism

Abstract

Local concepts of Catholic saints in the Mam (Maya) town of Santiago Chimalten‐ango in the western highlands of Guatemala reveal that syncretism there represents not an indiscriminate seamless fusion of Maya and Christian religiosity but a highly differentiated recombination of conventional forms that serves primarily to articulate the moral and physical—and thus ethnic—boundaries of the community. The symbolic reassortment of saints with other local images of community, in particular ancestors and “earth lords,” shows syncretism to be an essential property of local identity, not simply a quaint or arbitrary survival of the Maya past. Contrasts with antecedent saint cults in 16th‐century Spain demonstrate the “Mayan‐ness” of this syncretism; comparison with saint cults in other Maya communities relates syncretism more closely to local contexts of community morality than to enduring “deep structures” of some primordial Maya culture or to a “false consciousness” born of persistent colonialist oppression. [Maya religion, religious syncretism, saint cults, Guatemala, ethnic identity]