Where does traditional knowledge hide from prying eyes and a hostile world? Maruch Méndez Pérez and Diane Rus give us an answer: in women’s speech.
Tsotsil-speaking Maya people in highland Chiapas, Mexico, are probably the best-documented Indigenous groups in Latin America. From 1957 into the 1990s, anthropologists from the Harvard Chiapas Project (HCP) produced a flood of studies about their beliefs, rituals, and way of life. Directed by Professor Evon Z. Vogt Jr., HCP researchers focused on two Tsotsil-speaking townships, Zinacantán and Chamula, with dozens of settlements.
Vogt focused on discovering the elements of precolonial Mayan culture that had persisted into the twentieth century. But he and his students never explained how this culture might survive for ten centuries, through the Spanish conquest and subsequent catastrophes. Instead, they simply worked backward, attributing much of what they saw in modern Chiapas to pre-Columbian origins. They found “idols behind the altars” everywhere....
