Maya Crosses Dressed, Fed, Alive. A Case Study on Maya Animism

Abstract

Maya crosses have always inspired a sense of wonder in the modern observer, because they have been considered animate persons with whom people establish and maintain intersubjective relationships and whom they cherish and nurture. In this study, drawing on my ethnography of “dressing the cross”, an Easter ceremony, I suggest that what separates Maya traditionalism from globalizing modern Maya Spirituality is a particular form of “hierarchical animism”.