Torture in the Archives: Mayans Meet Europeans

Abstract

DURING THE SCORE OF YEARS NAMED 2 AHAW, or what the Christian world calls the early 16th century, Europeans began appearing over the horizon of the Mayan world. It was not a meeting of history with prehistory, or of literacy with preliteracy, but of one history and literacy with another. Europeans wrote Mayans into their history and, as we shall see, Mayans wrote Europeans into theirs. Mayan writings have been difficult to read for those of us whose sense of literacy and history are of the European kind. In the case of the texts Mayans wrote before Europeans invaded their world, decipherment was long delayed by our reluctance to entertain either a phonetic reading of the signs of the Mayan script or a historical reading of the inscriptions on Mayan monuments (see Lounsbury 1989:216-220). Soon after the European invasion Mayan writers produced a good many texts in the medium of the Roman alphabet, but in cases where such a text seems to contradict a European one on some point of history, we have tended to favor the European account. And when our only source has been Mayan statements reported by Europeans, we have accepted these with little concern for the circumstances of the dialogues that produced them, even in the case of the proceedings of the Holy Inquisition. So it is that we have conceded a triple hegemony to European over Mayan discourse, in the first instance preserving the opacity of both the alien script and discourse, in the second instance favoring a familiar discourse over an alien one when both are written in the familiar script, and in the third instance giving more weight to the familiarity of a report written by Europeans than to the situation of the Mayans whose spoken words it represents. What will concern us here is the past interpretation and possible reinterpretation of 16th-century alphabetic texts, some written by Mayans and others by Europeans, but all of them bespeaking confrontations between two worlds. The writings of this period are of particular anthropological interest because the distance between the two sides-the coefficient of mutual otherness, so to speak-is at its peak. Mayan writers point directly to the conditions Europeans imposed on certain key dialogues, conditions that did not have the subtlety of hegemony, which does its work implicitly and by sheer inertia, but were rather a matter of the direct application of force. On the European side, where the writings in question are reports of investigations conducted among Mayans, there is an epistemological assumption that truth can be separated from the methods used to obtain it. This assumption, as we shall see, has been shared until very recently by interpreters of these reports, whether they be historians or anthropologists. The earliest Mayan writers to use the Roman alphabet worked primarily in two regions: highland Guatemala, where the best-known works are the Popol Vuh or Council Book and the Annals of the Cakchiquels, both written in Quichean languages; and