Bradley E. Ensor provides a new theoretical contribution to Maya ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological research. Rather than operating solely as a symbolic order unobservable to archaeologists, kinship, according to Ensor, forms concrete social relations that structure daily life and can be reflected in the material remains of a society. Ensor argues that the use of cross-culturally identified and confirmed material indicators of postmarital residence and descent group organization enable archaeologists—those with the most direct material evidence on prehispanic Maya social organization—to overturn a traditional reliance on competing and problematic ethnohistorical models.
Using recent data from an arch aeological project within the Chontalpa Maya region of Tabasco, Mexico, Ensor illustrates how archaeologists can interpret and explain the diversity of kinship behavior and its influence on gender within any given Maya social formation.
Bradley E. Ensor provides a new theoretical contribution to Maya ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological research. Rather than operating solely as a symbolic order unobservable to archaeologists, kinship, according to Ensor, forms concrete social relations that structure daily life and can be reflected in the material remains of a society. Ensor argues that the use of cross-culturally identified and confirmed material indicators of postmarital residence and descent group organization enable archaeologists—those with the most direct material evidence on prehispanic Maya social organization—to overturn a traditional reliance on competing and problematic ethnohistorical models.
Using recent data from an arch aeological project within the Chontalpa Maya region of Tabasco, Mexico, Ensor illustrates how archaeologists can interpret and explain the diversity of kinship behavior and its influence on gender within any given Maya social formation.
Hardcover(First Edition)
-
SHIP THIS ITEMIn stock. Ships in 6-10 days.PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Bradley E. Ensor provides a new theoretical contribution to Maya ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological research. Rather than operating solely as a symbolic order unobservable to archaeologists, kinship, according to Ensor, forms concrete social relations that structure daily life and can be reflected in the material remains of a society. Ensor argues that the use of cross-culturally identified and confirmed material indicators of postmarital residence and descent group organization enable archaeologists—those with the most direct material evidence on prehispanic Maya social organization—to overturn a traditional reliance on competing and problematic ethnohistorical models.
Using recent data from an arch aeological project within the Chontalpa Maya region of Tabasco, Mexico, Ensor illustrates how archaeologists can interpret and explain the diversity of kinship behavior and its influence on gender within any given Maya social formation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817317850 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 01/08/2013 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship
By BRADLEY E. ENSOR
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The University of alabama PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1785-0
Chapter One
A Brief History of Ancient Maya Kinship Studies
The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the trends and diversity in interpretation on prehispanic Maya kinship. The following does not attempt to describe the different kinship models—the subject of Chapter 2—but instead is intended to provide a better understanding of the history of thought on this subject. In the following historical outline, different periods are distinguished by the introduction of new perspectives and interpretations and by their relationships with broader trends in anthropological theory. As the reader will observe, during any given "period" of interpretation there were multiple, competing models and debates. The chapter ends with some general observations on "traditions" in the study of ancient Maya kinship, which are important to understanding this area of research and the reoccurring problems described in Chapter 3.
Structural Functionalism
Tozzer (1907) and Beals (1932) provided some of the earliest depictions of Maya kinship. The earliest work that had a lasting influence to the present was a pioneering study by Eggan (1934). Eggan examines Yucatecan kin terms listed in the Motul Dictionary (dated to the late 16th century) and in the Beltrán Dictionary (first printed in 1746) (Eggan 1934:189). In line with Radcliffe-Brown's functionalist approaches at the time, when kin terminologies were being associated with their social functions, Eggan used the Motul and Beltrán terms to interpret Maya social organization and marriage. He also assumed the historic documentary evidence was characteristic of the ancient Maya. He concluded that the nomenclature reflects a system that distinguishes cross cousins. Based on cross-cultural ethnological knowledge of the time, this kin terminology system was associated with cross-cousin marriage, exogamous unilineal descent groups, and "daughter exchange" by households. Supported partially by Beals's (1932) examination of Fray Diego de Landa's Relación de las Cosas deYucatán, Eggan (1934) concluded that Maya kinship involved unspecified patrilineal descent groups (suggesting moieties or clans) with cross-cousin marriage.
Throughout the middle of the last century, structural functionalism maintained its preeminence and kinship studies, particularly classificatory analyses of kin terms and their linkages with social organization and marriage among non-Western societies, were practically synonymous with anthropology. Approaches to ancient Maya kinship therefore continued to favor the use of kin terminologies and names recorded in historic documents, with the same assumption that these characterize the preconquest Maya. In a major work, Roys (1940) examined 16th-century Yucatec names, revealing a pattern whereby individuals maintained patronyms and matronyms. Through ethnological association, that observation led Roys to the hypothesis that the ancient Maya had both patrilineal descent and matrilineal descent (double descent).
The 1960s was a pivotal decade for the topic of prehispanic Maya kinship and marks the beginning of a major split between two major schools of thought. One of these schools maintained an emphasis on double descent models, such as the Australian Kariera section system. The other maintained an emphasis on patrilineal descent and descent groups.
In what must be one of the most influential nonpublications in the history of anthropology, Lounsbury's unpublished paper (that this author has never seen) is reportedly credited with linking Roys's (1940) interpretation of the coexistence of double descent with Eggan's (1934) interpretation of cross-cousin marriage, resulting in the Kariera hypothesis (Coe 1965; Hage 2003; Thompson 1982). At the time, there was some confusion over the Australian Kariera section system, but it was commonly viewed as consisting of a patrilineal descent group with two subgroups, a matrilineal descent group with two subgroups, and cross-cousin marriage. The two descent groups were thought to be moieties and the four subgroups reflected a quadripartite division of society (the actual system is described in Chapter 3). We now know that the Kariera system is purely patrilineal, that the "moieties" are a conceptual tool for the anthropologists trying to make sense of it, and that the Kariera did not practice cross-cousin marriage. But at the time, Lounsbury's interpretation led Coe (1965) to reexamine Roy's data, resulting in the interpretation of double descent, and, by extension, the interpretation of both patrilineal and matrilineal descent groups. Furthermore, Coe brought forth the observation that some 16th-century Yucatec towns and precolumbian Maya centers have a quadripartite spatial division. The result was Coe's interpretation that the ancient Maya elite had Kariera kinship: in terms of kin terminology, cross-cousin marriage across the two unilineal descent groups, and a quadripartite division of society. Meanwhile, he interpreted the commoners' marriage system as endogamous within the quadrants.
More ethnographies and historical documents on Maya regions were published in the 1950s and 1960s. In an influential article on patrilineal clan organization in a Nahuat community in Tlaxcala, Mexico, Nutini (1961:63–66) also compiled the growing evidence for patrilineal descent groups in the 16th-century Yucatán and Alta Verapaz regions, and in the 20th-century Tzeltal-Tzotzil area and Lacandonia. Nutini pulls together evidence from Tozzer (1907), Beals (1932), Eggan (1934), Villa Rojas (1947), Guiteras (1951), Fray Diego de Landa's Relación de las Cosas deYucatán, and Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas' Apologetica Historia, all of which indicated varying forms of patrilineal descent, patrilineal inheritance, and patrilineal descent groups spanning much of the Maya macroregion from the 16th to 20th centuries. In an interesting departure from the typical hist orical data, Holland (1964) observed that Tzotzil religion identifies sacred mountains as origins of patrilineal descent groups (and suggests a similar role for prehispanic pyramids). Increasing evidence seemed to be favoring the patrilineal kinship hypothesis.
Within anthropology, what came to be known as cognatic descent (non-unilineal descent) was previously considered an aberration and often ignored to focus instead on unilineal systems. However, by the 1950s, anthropologists were beginning to pay much more attention to these systems and how to classify them (e.g., Goodenough 1955; Murdock 1960). Using historical documents on the late 16th-century Chontal Maya, discovered and presented by Scholes and Roys (1968), Haviland (1970b) described in a brief article the substantial amount of variation in postmarital residence memberships, leading him to conclude that the Chontal Maya had cognatic kinship. Whereas the prior debate was over whether the Maya had unilineal or double descent, this was the first influential work to suggest the Maya had neither.
Ethnohistorical Structural Functionalism and the Archaeology of Social Organization
The 1970s to the close of the millennium can be considered a period of transition from structural-functionalist approaches dominated by ethnohistory and Tikal succession data to a "takeover" by archaeologists working first with settlement pattern studies, followed by processual models to explain Maya cultural developments. At the heart of these studies was a long-lasting effort to better identify ancient Maya social organization, which arguably continues today. Despite the emergence of new paradigms, Mayanist archaeologists still relied heavily on the ethnohistorical models of the former paradigm.
Kinship research in anthropology reached a turning point in the 1970s. Structural functionalism waned, debates over a social versus biological basis for the building blocks of kinship were well over, the period of cognitive approaches to kinship had declined significantly, and kinship appeared to have disappeared as a field of study in its own right. However, kinship did not disappear but was merely reinvented as a historically grounded and redirected political economic approach diluted into social anthropology, political anthropology, and feminist anthropology (Peletz 1995; Sousa 2003). Although feminist perspectives informing gender analyses still awaited at least another decade to penetrate Maya historical and archaeological studies, and political economic perspectives rarely made their way into Maya studies by North American archaeologists, evolutionary and historical perspectives on change can be seen in several influential works in Maya ethnohistory. Apart from a focus on change, however, much of the ethnohistorical literature throughout the 1970s and 1980s maintained a structural-functionalist approach for creating totalizing models.
Haviland (1970b) identified more evidence for bilocality/ambilocality among the 16th-century Maya of Cozumel Island. However, in this case, he argued that the cognatic postmarital residential behavior demonstrated in the documentary evidence represented a historical shift from patrilocality caused by multiple factors impacting daily lives: dramatic and sudden population losses, Spanish reorganization of households, and evangelizing. He also hypothesized a subsequent shift away from patrilineal descent and a lagging shift to an Iroquois kin terminology. He thus concluded that the Maya of Cozumel originally had patrilineal descent and patrilocality, and in the same article, he suggested that the cognatic behavior among the 16th-century Chontal Maya (Haviland 1970b) represented a similar shift away from patrilocality caused by devastating population losses from the Spanish conquest. In a critique of many of the assumptions behind the double descent hypothesis and cross-cousin marriage, includi ng the then-recent observation that kin terminologies and naming systems cannot reliably predict social organization and marriage systems, Haviland (1973) also argued for historic change from patrilineal descent with patrilocality to ambilineal descent with ambilocality in the 16th-century Yucatán. The same argument appears in his discussion of ancient Maya population estimates (Haviland 1972:137–138).
With the exception of Coe (1965), archaeologists had for the most part been silent in the developing research on precolumbian Maya kinship. However, New Archaeologists working in other regions attempted to identify postmarital residence (and by extension, descent) through distributional analyses of pottery decoration attributes (e.g., Deetz 1960, 1965; Hill 1966; Longacre 1964, 1966, 1968; McPherron 1967; Whallon 1968). Such "ceramic-sociological" studies held the promise that archaeology could contribute information on anthropological topics such as kinship, but those efforts unfortunately suffered from problematic assumptions and methods. Perhaps more influential to Maya research, innovative settlement pattern studies were beginning to produce new perspectives on ancient social organization (e.g., Ashmore 1981; Brainerd 1956; Bullard 1960; Voorhies 1972; Willey and Bullard 1956). Whereas most of these studies applied ethnohistorical and ethnographical models to interpret the archaeol ogical settlement patterns, others used settlement pattern data to interpret the ancient social organization. For example, Haviland's (1963) work on residential features at Tikal supported an enduring interpretation of extended households commonly viewed as patrilocal units (1968:i06, 1972:i36-i38). Haviland (1968) also argued that Maya kinship and social organization changed significantly over time.
From the later 1970s and through the 1980s, structural-functionalist debates continued between ethnohistorians supporting the patrilineal model and those supporting non-unilineal models for the ancient Maya. Unlike previous decades, however, information was no longer limited to early Spanish documents as prehispanic writing, particularly epigraphy at Tikal, was becoming more available for analysis. Using the Classic period Tikal texts, Haviland (1977) indicated that rulership followed a pattern of patrilineal succession. Meanwhile, Thompson (1978) used property inheritance documents from the 16th, 18th, and 19th centuries to argue for a long tradition of bilateral kinship. Favoring a non-unilineal model, Thompson (1982) reevaluated Haviland's conclusions on the Tikal succession data, arguing that transfers in rulership occasionally occurred among patrilateral and matrilateral kin, which he interpreted as double descent. Combined with a review of 16th-, 18th-, and 19th-century kin terminology and property inheritance data, Thompson argued this time in support of a Kariera-like system: assuming that the succession data indicated double descent and that the cross-cousin terminological distinctions indicated cross-cousin marriage.
Archaeologists increasingly joined the discussion in this period. There was remarkable growth in archaeological settlement pattern and household studies leading to many advances in knowledge on ancient Maya social organization. Michels (1979:22–39) used the settlement pattern data at Kaminaljuyu to interpret unilineal clan organization. Sanders (1989) used settlement pattern data for the Copan area, interpreting different class-based systems. Much more attention was being given to the commonly occurring Maya patio groups (or plazuelas) (e.g., Ashmore 1981:47–54; Kurjack and Garza T. 1981; Rice and Puleston 1981:137–141), which are well known to reflect ethnographically described Maya patio groups. Rice and Puleston (1981:140–141) and Sanders (1981:358) specifically associated the plazuelas with patrilocality, following Haviland's (1968:106, 1972:136–138) earlier interpretations. Rice and Puleston (1981:141) also indicated that these unilocal households appear to have had different craft specializations.
The structural-functionalist debates over patrilineal kinship, double descent, and cognatic models appeared to have faded away in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some studies continued to build support for the patrilineal model for the ancient Maya. For example, Witschey (1991) used 16th- to 19th-century property inheritance records on the Yucatec Maya to demonstrate a historical shift from prehispanic patrilineal inheritance to historical bilateral inheritance of individual property-holdings, which supported Haviland's (1970a, 1973) earlier arguments on historic change. However, by this time, the patrilineal model was widely accepted and both archaeologists and ethnohistorians were prepared to explore more thoroughly its characteristics.
The 1980s to the early 1990s was marked by the emergence of competing versions of patrilineal models. One hypothesis was inspired by one of the most famous kinship systems in anthropology: the Nuer segmentary lineage syst em described by Evans-Pritchard (1940, 1990) and used by Sahlins (1961) to explain Nuer militaristic expansion. In a largely ethnohistorical study, Carmack (1981:148–163) elaborated on his earlier work (1973) to argue that patrilineal segmentary social organization was the basis for the Highland Maya Quiche state. Following Carmack's and Sahlins's leads, Fox (1987) and coworkers (Fox et al. 1992) suggested that predatory expansion by segmentary lineages explains an Epiclassic to Postclassic period Chontal expansion into the west and northern Maya regions. Shortly thereafter, in one of the most thorough studies to date, Hopkins (1988) combined the Classic period epigraphic data from Tikal with multiple lines of both ethnohistorical and ethnographical data on the Yucatec, Chol, and Tzotzil. These varied sources independently demonstrated not just patrilineal kinship, but rather the specific Omaha type of patrilineal descent, descent groups, marriage, and kin terminology. Humberto Ruz (1997) also argued that 16th-century kin terminology from the Chiapas Highlands indicates an Omaha system.
For more than a century, Maya archaeology was, and continues to be, overwhelmingly focused on elite contexts, yet Maya elites were poorly understood from a sociological perspective. This ironic situation prompted a session on Mesoamerican elites at the 86th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1987, resulting in the publication of an edited volume on the topic (A. Chase and D. Chase 1992). Several of the contributed chapters entertained the role of kinship among the precolumbian Maya. Webster (1992:153-155) assumed a lineage structure existed at Copan with both interlineage ranking and internal ranking. Fox et al. (1992) used the Quiche ethnohistoric descriptions of ranked lineages forming a "segmentary state" from Carmack's (1981) ethnohistorical work, along with an archaeological sequence claimed to exhibit the absorption of semi-independent and self-sufficient lineages at Utatlán. Meanwhile, D. Chase and A. Chase (1992:307-310) criticized the entire segmentary state model, on the basis of alternative interpretations of the Quiche and what they see as archaeological evidence for "unitary states." In her criticism of Maya archaeologists' efforts to identify multiple social classes, J. Marcus (1992) used historical Spanish descriptions to claim there were only two classes—elites and commoners—with class endogamy as one of the defining characteristics of Maya and Zapotec prehispanic states. Sanders (1992:279–280) argued, based on Fried (1967), that ranked chiefdoms are founded upon kinship, that states are not, but also that kin-based social organization remains important during the transition from chiefdoms to states. He argues that Copan in the eighth century reflects such a transition, whereby ranked patrilin eages were integral to the elite class under incipient social stratification (Sanders 1992:280–282). Despite basing analyses on similar sets of data, the volume illustrates a general lack of consensus on how to view both class and kinship.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship by BRADLEY E. ENSOR Copyright © 2013 by The University of alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Terminology xi
Introduction: Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship 1
1 A Brief History of Ancient Maya Kinship Studies 15
2 Implications of the Kinship Models 29
3 Problems with Models on Ancient Maya Kinship 57
4 Archaeological Approaches to Class, Kinship, and Gender 69
5 Islas de Los Cerros 85
6 Class, Kinship, and Gender at Islas de Los Cerros 95
7 Crafting Archaeological Models on Class-Based Kinship 114
References Cited 121
Index 141