‘Putting heart’ into history and memory: Dialogues with Maya-Tseltal philosopher, Xuno López Intzin

Abstract

In this article, the author shares her dialogues with the Maya-Tseltal scholar Xuno López Intzin, to open an analytical window to Non-Western conceptions of memory and time. It focuses on the cyclical conceptualization of time, and the embodied experience of history and memory of Maya peoples in the Chiapas Highlands. This Mayan perspective is explained by Xuno López Intzin, in an analytical dialogue with the author, who questions her own linear ethnohistorial perspectives. It aims to contribute to the decolonization of memory studies by giving an academic platform to this subaltern, nonlinear conception of time and history.

Memory worlds: Reframing time and the past – An introduction

“…As another example of important literature, books like Tortillas for the Gods , a symbolist study of the ritual life of the Maya Tzotzil in Zinacantán (Chiapas, México), neatly showed how the highly patterned ritual sequences of feeding ancestral Gods not only connected the living with the deceased through commensality, but structurally replicated cyclic conceptions of time and the past in contemporary Maya societies (Vogt, 1976: 163–69; Hernández Castillo, 2020). Studies on rituals involving spirit possession and altered states of consciousness, a large subtheme in anthropology, are another clear example of the way deeply embodied rituals may also operate as sensuous time capsules where snippets of the past are reincarnated in mediums and allow direct engagement with selected memories, ancestors and broader social and historical processes – such as colonisation or marginalisation and everyday violence (Stoller, 1995; Ferrándiz, 2004, 2009).…”