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Remembering the Future, Anticipating the Past: History, Time, and Cosmology among the Maya of Yucatan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Nancy M. Farriss
Nancy M. Farriss
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

This essay is about concepts of time and the past among the Maya Indians of Yucatan in southeastern Mexico. It explores how these concepts fit into the Maya's general view of the way the world works and how they relate to certain dynamics of Maya history—as we define history—during their pre-Hispanic and colonial past. One inspiration has been the often baffling written records the Maya have left, from which we try to quarry historical facts without always enquiring what the records meant to the people who produced them. The other is the reminder, provided by recent historical work from anthropologists, that people do not record their past so much as construct it, with an eye to the present, and at the same time use that past in molding the present.

Type
Thinking about History
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , July 1987 , pp. 566 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1987

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