Each year in the Highland Guatemala town of Santiago Momostenango, Maya religious societies, dance teams, and cofradias perform the annual cycle of rituals and festivals prescribed by Costumbre (syncretized Maya Christian religion), which serves to renew the cosmic order. In this richly detailed ethnography, Garrett Cook explores how these festivals of Jesucristo and the saints derive from and reenact three major ancient Maya creation myths, thus revealing patterns of continuity between contemporary expressive culture and the myths, rituals, and iconography of the Classic and...
Each year in the Highland Guatemala town of Santiago Momostenango, Maya religious societies, dance teams, and cofradias perform the annual cycle of...
Based on more than thirty years of ethnographic fieldwork in Highland Guatemala, this study of Maya diviners, shamans, ritual dancers, and religious brotherhoods describes the radical changes in traditional Maya religious practice wrought by economic globalization and political turmoil. Focusing on the primary participants in the annual festival in the K'iche' Maya village of Santiago Momostenango, the authors show how older religious traditionalists and the new generation of "cultural activist" religious practitioners interact within a single local community, and how their competing agendas...
Based on more than thirty years of ethnographic fieldwork in Highland Guatemala, this study of Maya diviners, shamans, ritual dancers, and religious b...
