Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts'íib as Recorded Knowledge by M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts'íib as Recorded Knowledge by M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios Paula L. Karger Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts'íib as Recorded Knowledge. By Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019, p. 232, $29.95. The infamous example of Fray Diego de Landa's burning of Maya cultural products is, in many ways, an example of reading in terms of an external culture's norms: looking at Maya texts and objects through a Franciscan and Eurocentric lens, de Landa deemed them purveyors of superstition and falsities and ordered them destroyed. Given his sixteenth-century religious and social context, reading differently may have entailed an enormous leap for de Landa. In the twenty-first century, however, that leap is a step made traversable by greater awareness of cultural relativity combined with research that is slowly making Indigenous ways of understanding, recording, and transmitting knowledge more accessible to non-Indigenous audiences. Paul Worley and Rita Palacios's Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts'íib as Recorded Knowledge propels this push to approach Indigenous cultural production according to its own terms, that is, not by traditionally Western standards and methodologies of reading and interpretation, but rather by those of the groups that produce the cultural products. To that end, they introduce ts'íib, a Maya concept that helps them decolonize readings of Maya works, opening interpretation and understanding up to the radical moves that are actively and intentionally happening in Maya cultural spheres but often going unrecognized in their Western counterparts. Worley and Palacios carefully read their chosen examples as parts of a longer narrative and cosmology that exist in their own right, demonstrating the cultural items' participation in an intimately connected network which situates the Maya authors of these works, and from which said authors oppose historical and ongoing colonization. The book thus not only introduces readers to ts'íib and related concepts, but also models the decolonizing of works produced by Maya people. In chapter 1, Worley and Palacios corral the many descriptions of ts'íib stemming from both Maya and non-Maya sources to elaborate on its varied conceptualizations and implications, among them the shift away from the limiting term "literature." Ts'íib, they explain, is not writing in the sense of rendering meaning via alphabetic or glyphic script, although it includes such production, but rather a variety of ways of recording knowledge. Ts'íib includes alphabetic, Western-style writing, but also much more; as Worley and Palacios state, it is "a fluid 'both/and'" (6). In explaining the much broader scope of ts'íib, Worley and Palacios emphasize the importance of performance in ts'íib, ultimately showing that Maya cultural production is active, social, relational, and reiterative: whether it be in the form of the planting of milpa, the weaving of a huipil, or the alphabetic writing of story, ts'íib works to build relationships [End Page 371] between the self, the other, and the cosmos; records knowledge in a manner that reflects upon the past, present, and future; and creates spaces of learning, community, and interaction. Worley and Palacios mobilize the indigenous concepts cholel, k'anel, and cha'anil to explain that "the heavy performatic character (cha'anil) of Maya writing (ts'íib) helps (re) create and sustain the social networks and interactions (k'anel) of its public in spaces real and imagined (cholel)" (27). These concepts, along with ts'íib, are the framework by which the cultural products featured in the subsequent chapters are read. The three following chapters deal with weaving and embroidery, moving from an analysis of textiles themselves to their broader relationships and significations in other contexts. Chapter 2 focuses on textiles to examine the significations woven or embroidered into the designs. Worley and Palacios show that these materials embody their creators as well as their current contexts, recent and generational histories, and social relations in a performance (cha'anil) that creates relationships (k'anel) in relation to space (cholel). The meanings worked into the fabric speak to the individual author of the piece and express the contemporary realities in which this author lives, making statements that counter popular narratives and express Maya cosmologies. This...