The Sense of Tranquility: Bodily Practice and Ethnic Classes in Yucatán

Abstract

While bodily practice has become a major area of investigation in cultural anthropology, its connection to ethnicity remains to be explored. Among Yucatec Maya, however, one cultural value, tranquility, is enacted through bodily practices and also serves as an axis for ethnic distinction. Moreover, a specific logic associating tranquility with morality serves as an incisive critique of wealthier Others, all more important as Maya are incorporated into global economy at bottom of class hierarchy. An understanding of ethnicity is incomplete without an ethnography of bodily practice and an investigation into how ethnic identity emerges daily in relation to embodied experiences. (Mexico, Maya, ethnicity, social class, embodiment) ********** Visitors to Mayan village of Dzitnup, in Yucatan, Mexico, are told by virtually they meet that Dzitnup is a wonderful place because it is tranquil, and that everyone gets along here. These repeated assertions are puzzling in view of fact that village has two political factions, people argue over national political parties, and Catholics and Protestants accuse each other that their ways are contrary to will of God. This article explores ways these Yucatecans talk about tranquility, which involves its demonstration in bodily practice, and its importance for ethnic and class identities. It concludes with a call for a wider investigation into relationships between bodily practice and ethnicity, particularly behavioral correlates of ethnic identities. After three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, and arguably two centuries of neocolonialism, how Maya-speaking people configure social identity and difference has aroused scholarly interest. Concern in these matters intensified in 1980s and 1990s during civil war that pitted a Guatemalan army against Maya villagers, and again with Zapatista rebellion of 1994 in Mexico and military occupation of Chiapas that continues to this day. Some ethnographers suggest that romanticism about Maya--involving tourists, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and National Geographic magazine illustrations--has placed constraints on how Mayan people assert their ethnic identity (Castaneda 1996; Hervik 1999). Others have stressed creative articulation of ethnicity in context of struggles for indigenous rights under state military power (Alonso Caamal 1993; Fischer 1999, 2001; Fischer and McKenna 1996; Hale 1994; Nash 1995, 1997, 2001; Warren 1992, 1998; Watanabe 1995; Wilson 1995). Still others focus on correspondence between ethnic identities and class realities (Gabbert 2004), or examine how identities emerged in relationship to colonial and state administrative procedures (Castaneda 2004:42; Eiss 2004; Fallaw 2004; Restall 2004; Watanabe 2000). Berkley (1998) points to relationship between language ideology and ethnic identity, as does Castaneda (2004:41), who cautions against eliding realities of cultural and ethnic diversity because the terms 'Indian,' 'ladino,' 'mestizo,' 'indigenous' are not equivalent across Maya world [and] do not have any stable meaning (emphasis in original). Attention in this essay is given to a relatively neglected area: relationship between identity and bodily experience. In Santiago Chimaltenango, Guatemala, Watanabe (1992) found that a sense of community emerged through experience of collective action, and argued for a study of relationship between identity and experience (Watanabe 1995; see also Fischer 1999). How bodily practice (as distinguished from body adornment [cf. Turner 1995]) relates to perception and identity has become an area of anthropological concern (Bourdieu 1984; Csordas 1990; Farnell 1999; Lock 1993; Martin Alcoff 1999; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Van Wolputte 2004). It is useful to understand how perceptions and feelings that emerge with bodily experience relate to how Maya think about themselves and others. …