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| Barbara Tedlock with Maya Woman in Guatemala |
BARBARA TEDLOCK
Cultural anthropologist Barbara Tedlock has spent a lifetime exploring the spaces between the lines in numerous ethnic cultures. Equipped with a masters degree in Ethnomusicology along with a masters and PhD in Anthropology, she and her husband Dennis Tedlock, best known for his translation of The Popul Vuh: Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, traveled the world to engage in a new kind of cross-cultural understanding to learn how cultures think, dream, heal, honor their ancestors, and live.
Though publication is an important aspect for anthropologists, diving into the field may well be their life blood. Tedlock is also a key figure in anthropological dream research. Though she has authored many books, this post will center on Time and the Highland Maya, exploring how the Maya view time.
TIME AND THE HIGHLAND MAYA
The Tedlocks' fieldwork began in June 1975 for three months, then ten months in 1976, and lastly another three months in 1979. They conducted formal, structured ethnographic surveys as well as informal, unstructured interviews. They read from ethno-historical documents with consultants and viewed previously reported "facts" through observation and eventually through their own apprenticeships. Studies were conducted in five K'iche' communities, with the majority of time being spent in Momostenango, Guatemala. They interviewed weavers, merchants, farmers, town officials and various religious specialists ranging from members of a Catholic Action group to dozens of priest-shamans.
Barbara discussed a 1722 historical document with a Momostecan elder, a Maya calendar that was written in the K'iche' language. Tapes were made during both formal and informal interviews. In the middle stages of Barbara's work in Momostenango, she and Dennis undertook formal training as calendar diviners and were initiated in August, 1976. This allowed them to perform calendrical divinations for K'iche' Maya who solicited their services.
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| San Andres de Xecul in Momostenango (Photo TraveloGuatemala) |
MAYA CALENDAR
Quoting Barbara Tedlock, "The ancient Maya were great horologists, or students of time. They measured the lunar cycle and solar year; lunar and solar eclipses; and the risings of Venus and Mars with accuracy. In many cases their measurements were more accurate than those of the Europeans who conquered them.
"But unlike the Europeans," she continued, "the Maya were interested not only in the quantities of time but also in its qualities, especially its meaning for human affairs."
Though the Tedlocks were quick to understand Maya astronomy practices, efforts to inhabit their symbolic world became more nuanced and demanding.
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| Chichen Itza By Night (By Astrojem.net) |
As explained by Barbara, the very foundation of their calendar—composed of myriad overlays of cycles of differing lengths and portents—rested on a cycle of 260 named and numbered days. The names of this cycle had no obvious correlation with astronomical events and the names of its days and their divinatory interpretations were largely lacking in astronomical references.
HIGHLAND VS. LOWLAND INTERPRETATIONS
According to Barbara Tedlock, among the Lowland Maya of the Yucatán, the ancient ways of interpreting time are known from inscriptions on thousands of stone monuments (stela) and from the few ancient books that survived the fires of Spanish missionaries and a handful of early colonial documents. But the contemporary indigenous people of the Yucatán region have long since forgotten how to keep time in the manner of their ancestors, she observed.
However with the Highland Maya, she wrote, and especially those from the western highlands where the Tedlocks chose to land, the situation is reversed. The monuments there are bare of inscriptions, according to Tedlock, and not one of the ancient books escaped the flames. But it is among the Highland Maya rather than their Lowland cousins that time continues to this day to be calculated and given meaning according to ancient methods. Scores of indigenous Guatemalan communities speaking Mayan languages keep the 260-day cycle and, in many cases, the ancient solar cycle as well.
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| Guatemalan Western Highlands |
TOLZK'IN CALENDAR
For this reason, Barbara Tedlock chose this particular region in western Guatemala's high
lands to study and do her work. And it is here where she was confirmed as a day keeper. "The Tzolk'in calendar," said Tedlock, "was primarily used for making predictions and communicating with the gods or ancestors.
"The Maya believe a god rules each day and depending on that god's traits, it could be good or bad for certain activities. The calendar is easy to remember and that's why it has been passed down and used to this day. It fits into the culture of the people.
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| The 260-Day Calendar Arranged by Number From Time and the Highland Maya, by Tedlock |
"It fits into their agriculture, their spinning, their weaving. It's something people use and it doesn't conflict with our calendar," she explained. "People look at the characteristics, the god, of every day, If it's a day that relates to money, then it's time to pay bills."
RECRUITMENT
Being indoctrinated as a day keeper for a non-indigenous person is almost unthinkable. But the Tedlocks came to it through a great backstory which I'll share. They were indoctrinated under the formal apprenticeship of a diviner in Momostenango in the 70s. This is no small undertaking and day keepers are recruited in shamanistic fashion, with "divine election" through birth, dreams, and/or illness.
For Barbara Tedlock, "divine election" came about through illness. The unusual opportunity to learn divination was provided to them by a gifted, socially prominent priest-shaman who had noticed their intense interest in the topic and observed Barbara's cooperation in answering questions he asked during the calendrical divinations he performed for her during the illness. His high status and reputation allowed him to risk potential public and private criticism for accepting foreigners as students. Both Barbara and Dennis were trained and initiated together because it was divined that their joint indiscretions had caused her illness, also and because their teacher had a series of dreams that recommended "united" service" for them.
Barbara's role in learning of divinatory service involved a role not formally discussed in the sociological or anthropological literature on the topic of fieldwork, namely, participant-as-observed. Shortly after beginning formal training, Barbara realized that her teacher's personal commitment to their training was extremely serious. If they failed as students, he failed, and their social disgrace would become his.
VILLAGE LIFE
With that being said, they settled into village life in Guatemala, became initiated as day keepers, learned the rituals, and made fewer treks north. As time went on, their contemporaries in the US said they had "gone native," not unlike the consensus among Margaret Mead and her husband's fellow anthropologists during their work in Papua New Guinea and the South Seas.
As for their roles as anthropologists, the Tedlocks returned to them in full as soon as the liminal period was over, on the day of their initiation. Barbara Tedlock's account of the ritual life of an Indigenous community in Guatemala offered a rare glimpse at the importance of ancient religious symbols in the daily world of a twentieth-century Indigenous people. Her participation in the calendric rituals that permeated every aspect of life in Momostenango gave her a unique perspective on the fascination with time that has long characterized the Maya culture.
Tedlock is the author of a number of books including The Woman in a Shaman's Body; Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations; The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Encounters with the Zuni Indians. Her books explore cross-cultural understanding and communication of dreams, ethno-medicines, and aesthetics.
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| Guatemala |
If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon/ And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.
