The Mysterious Maya of National Geographic

• Localización: Journal of Latin American Anthropology, ISSN 1085-7052, Vol. 4, Nº. 1, 1998, págs. 166-197
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • National Geographic magazine uses mystery as a narrative device to enhance the exotic character, hence the desirability of cultural "others" to its customers. Such popular constructions of "The Maya" shared a great deal with scholarship on Yucatan that emphasized cultural continuity as part of a project of building authority and authenticity through the attempt to determine historical origins. Such scholarship reified daily practices and remained blind to the lived experience of contemporary Maya people. This paper agues that only through a critical approach to popular and academic representations of "Maya culture" can we accornrnodate intra�cultural diversity, agency, and selfidentification in ethnographic analysis and writing