Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds examines the overlapping worlds of contemporary indigenous Mesoamerica through a particular Highland Maya community, with a primary focus on religious identities. This study is based on extensive fieldwork in Guatemala and San Diego, California, original survey data from the K’iche’ town of San Andrés Xecul, interviews with clergy and national Maya religious leaders, and extensive secondary literature. MacKenzie defends community-based anthropology but with Vered Amit’s definition of community as “tensions.” In so doing, he aims to treat religion among the K’iche’an Maya, while attentive to other domains like politics and economics but never reduced to them, as a portrayal of indigenous religious formation and change.
Each of the chapters makes a notable contribution to the growing scholarship on understandings of Maya traditionalism, Maya Christianities, and the Maya diaspora. However, like the panorama of family resemblances among competing siblings, the matrix that MacKenzie provides enables him to...
