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Impending Maya apocalypse? |
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Written by C. James MacKenzie
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Friday, November 20 2009, 9:48 PM |
The 2012 Maya Doomsday Industry is heating up. Here in Guatemala, the jury is out on what might await us as dawn breaks on the 21st (some say 24th) of December 2012. In the sacred calendar of 260 days, which many Maya still observe, that particular day is listed as 4 Ajpu’. Not that this matters: it’s the moribund ‘Long Count’ (which is believed to be completing its 5,125-year cycle) that’s sexy these days.
Maya today don’t require a Long Count to recognize the signs. “K’ax le k’aslemal chanim ri’, Santia’y (Life is hard these days, James)” is a constant refrain in the K’iche’ Maya community where I study. While the current drought and famine have not dramatically affected the highlands (where most of the country’s 7.5 million indigenous people live), people are worried that late rains might damage the harvested maize, which needs time to dry. Many blame the increasingly unpredictable weather on a loss of “respect,” in terms of basic sociability, but also for their staple crop, and for their forests, which Maya understand to be essential — along with appropriate ceremonies — in courting the rains. So sure, a number of friends here have suggested that we could use a change.
A Maya Catholic priest, now in his 70s, recently shared with me his hopes and worries about 2012. Present problems, he stressed, are of a different order than the murderous counterinsurgency of decades past. Generalized violence, loosely chalked up to delinquency, narco-traffickers and juridical impunity, are truly terrifying for this priest, a veteran of exile and death threats from a genocidal military in the 1980s. “What scares me now,” he explained, “is that the faces I see in the newspapers, of captured gang members and kidnappers, are those of my Maya brothers and sisters.” Something very deep, he fears, has been broken. Maybe 2012, he suggested, will bring renewal.
In the last few years violence and crime have spread to rural indigenous towns. In many communities, neighbours now patrol their streets each night. In the town where I study, gates guard the two access roads and patrollers communicate by radio to report anything suspicious. While ominously similar to the infamous “Civil Self-Defense Patrols” mandated during the counterinsurgency of the early 1980s (and responsible for much of the ensuing violence), the members of this community are proud of their ability to take charge, finally, of their town. Unfortunately, in many other towns, “taking charge” in this way has also resulted in the lynching of suspected criminals.
Of course, the film “2012” and much of the attendant apocalyptic fever we’ll be confronting for the next few years, won’t bother with what Maya these days think and worry about; nor should we expect this. After all, it’s a story about our future and our fears, and it’s telling that the emphasis is on destruction and endings, prophesied this time by a people who occupy an empty space in Western popular imagination: a vanished race.
The un-vanished Maya I know are tired (like us) of the disasters they continue to confront, but are suspicious of the whole notion of “endings” in any absolute sense. Change — for good or ill — is understood here to take work, and they have been involved in this work for a very long time and in different ways. So, too, of course, have many among us.
In case you’re wondering, Maya I know say that the day Ajpu’, among other things, is a good time to think about your grandparents and to remember what they might have taught you. You should also watch your temper.
C. James MacKenzie is an assistant professor in the Anthropology Department, University of Lethbridge
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