Water, Identity, and Baptism in K'iche'an Maya Narratives from Colonial Highland Guatemala

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3974438
AutoresMallory E Matsumoto (0000-0003-3213-8760, The University of Texas at Austin, autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Volume63
Fascículo2
Páginas135-165
Data de publicação2023-11-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHistory of Religions (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0018-2710 • E-ISSN: 1545-6935
EditoraUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/726712
OpenAlexW4388817011
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas25

For the colonial-era K’iche’an Maya, water was a constant, ambiguous feature of their highland Guatemalan world with the power to destroy, create, or transform. The element featured prominently in Indigenous narratives of the past as a key interactant in development of their communities’ ancestral identities and as an instrument that could be manipulated by the gods and ancestors. Upon their arrival in Guatemala in the sixteenth century, Spanish missionaries brought with them another conception of water as a vehicle for divine grace in the first Catholic rite, baptism. Water’s role in Indigenous cosmology presented, in theory, a point of articulation for explaining to K’iche’an peoples the spiritual transformation that baptism represented in Catholic doctrine. Close examination of colonial Indigenous accounts of the baptismal encounter, however, indicate that K’iche’an authors integrated their own understanding of water into reception of baptism as an index of sociopolitical identity. By reinforcing the key roles of local leaders in shaping community identity and interpreting the Catholic initiation rite as a sociopolitical statement, the K’iche’an encounter with baptismal water ultimately reflected the reality of early colonial Guatemala in which spiritual and political conquest were deeply intertwined

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Baptism · Colonialism · Ethnology · Identity (music) · Literature · Maya · Narrative · Sociology · Theology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy · Politics and Society in Latin America