Books : The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture)
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 972.01
EAN num: 9780292712942
ISBN number: 0292712944
Label: University of Texas Press
Manufacturer: University of Texas Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 334
Printing Date: June 01, 2006
Publishing house: University of Texas Press
Sale Popularity Level: 974649
Studio: University of Texas Press
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All of human experience flows from bodies that feel, express emotion, and think about what such experiences mean. But is it possible for us, embodied as we are in a particular time and place, to know how people of long ago thought about the body and its experiences? In this groundbreaking book, three leading experts on the Classic Maya (ca. AD 250 to 850) marshal a vast array of evidence from Maya iconography and hieroglyphic writing, as well as archaeological findings, to argue that the Classic Maya developed a coherent approach to the human body that we can recover and understand today.
The authors open with a cartography of the Maya body, its parts and their meanings, as depicted in imagery and texts. They go on to explore such issues as how the body was replicated in portraiture; how it experienced the world through ingestion, the senses, and the emotions; how the body experienced war and sacrifice and the pain and sexuality that were intimately bound up in these domains; how words, often heaven-sent, could be embodied; and how bodies could be blurred through spirit possession.
From these investigations, the authors convincingly demonstrate that the Maya conceptualized the body in varying roles, as a metaphor of time, as a gendered, sexualized being, in distinct stages of life, as an instrument of honor and dishonor, as a vehicle for communication and consumption, as an exemplification of beauty and ugliness, and as a dancer and song-maker. Their findings open a new avenue for empathetically understanding the ancient Maya as living human beings who experienced the world as we do, through the body.
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When three of the most renowned mayanists join to write a book it must turn out great. Well, it did, despite the rather cheap paper it was printed upon. Lavishly illustrated which helps to get their point and written in a very readable style, the topic is one of the most fascinating in maya studies. Basically, the book resumes what was elaborated by the authors over several years in a series of articles on mind, body and senses of the ancient -mostly classic- maya. Their conclusions sometimes seem to be a little far-fetched, though, but that's part of the show.
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