Foreigners Among Us: Alterity and the Making of Ancient Maya Societies (Chapter 1)

2023 1 INTRODUCTION Foreigners, the foreign, and outsiders – per their definition – are certain peoples, places, and things at a distance. Yet, foreigners, the foreign, and outsiders are also close to home – and even part of who we are. This book explores such outsiders in ancient Maya society and examines them from varied standpoints to challenge who and what might be considered “Other” and how being foreign was not only transmitted, grounded in place, or inherited, but also performed, assigned, experienced, and dissolved through shifting practices. The focus of the book rests, in particular, on diverse peoples in the Maya area during the Classic (ca. 300–900/ 1000 CE), Postclassic (ca. 900/1000–1521 CE), and Colonial (ca. 1521–1821 CE) periods, but also necessarily peers into contacts, engagements and relations throughout Mesoamerica, the Americas more broadly, and with Europeans – all the while insisting that outsider status must be approached as multi-scalar, relational, and intersectional rather than as neutral, intrinsic, or binary. The topic of the Other has long been broached in cultural anthropological discourses, Postcolonial, Black, and Indigenous studies, history, and historic archaeologies of Colonial encounters (Bhabha 1994; Deloria 1988; DuBois 1995; Launay 2018; Said 1979; Taussig 1993). It is less commonly explored in the archaeology of more ancient peoples (Lau 2013; Scherer et al. 2018) or, when it is explored, it is often through the lens of political conquest and neutral economic reach (e.g. World Systems Theory, models of trade and exchange, etc.). There is good reason why foreigners from other communities or marginalized outsiders from within one’s own communities are disregarded or glossed over in archaeology. Without definitive statements of “us” and “them”, the real and imagined worlds of being Other can be difficult to identify in the archaeological record. Likewise, the constitution of the foreign can be fleeting, disappearing within one generation or manifesting only as a transient ritual practice. Thus, archaeological time frames that look at century-long periods have the potential to miss important nuances in the making and unmaking of the foreign. DOI: 10.4324/9781003287698-1 2 Introduction Another reason why foreigners and outsiders are rarely explored is that understandings of ancient societies in the Americas and other places of the world have been largely dominated by cultural evolutionary frameworks that often assume that societies evolved from simple to complex forms of social organization whereby engagement of difference was only encountered later, such as part of the contact between Indigenous peoples and Europeans. From Lewis Henry Morgan (1985 [1877]) to Emile Durkheim (1964), ancient societies were conceived as undifferentiated and simple. They eventually developed into complex networks of hierarchical states, empires, and global entities whereby social hierarchy and social diversity were conflated. Such conceptions are further exacerbated by historical linguistic and cladistic models that represent language, biology, and cultural change as moving from homogenous and universal to diverse in dendric tree-like branches (Figure 1.1a). Nonetheless, even small-scale hunting and gathering groups were in contact, during one moment or another, with other communities, cultures, and language groups (Bird-David 2017; Mauss and Beuchat 2004; Scerri et al. 2018). Perhaps a braided river channel or a knotted meshwork might serve as a better model for the ways communities of belonging and distinction emerged and formed throughout history (Figure 1.1b) (DeLanda 2016; Ingold 2016; Love 2011). FIGURE 1.1 Models of human relations through time: (a) cladistic, dendrogram model (modified from Maya language tree from 2000 BCE to 2000 CE); (b) braided river channel (inspired from Love 2011:Fig.3.9c and Ingold 2016:Fig.4.6) Introduction 3 Lastly, for the Maya area in particular, a zone of approx. 400,000 square kilometers encompassing the contemporary countries of Guatemala, Belize, southeastern Mexico, and western Honduras and El Salvador, it seemingly appears as a single culture zone with a single unifying name, the Maya (Figure 1.2, 1.3). During the point of contact and deeper into history, however, this geographical zone was never united as a single political, cultural, or even linguistic unit and was always composed of diverse communities of varying affiliations and distinctions that shifted over time (Ardren 2015; Beyyette and LeCount 2017; Sachse 2006). Gabbert (2006), for example, argues that those living in the Maya region did not see themselves as part of a single self-conscious ethnic community, but rather as subjects of native kingdoms. In fact, the name “Maya” likely derives from references to peoples associated with the Late Postclassic (ca. 1200–1450 CE) polity of Mayapan in northwestern Yucatán. It was later used in the Colonial period as a way to denote native customs, things, and peoples, including Yucatecan Maya speakers who spoke mayathan, and as a contrast to the Spanish (Gabbert 2004; Restall 2004; Restall and Gabbert 2017). During the 19th and 20th centuries, academics and linguists began to use the term to refer to a larger cultural group based on shared characteristics of approximately 30 different languages, which have been grouped together as part of the larger Maya language family and have been linked to the archaeological ruins of the region. A “Maya” identity – as opposed to Tzoztil, Chol, Chorti, Mopan, Itza or Itzaj, K’iche’, etc. ethnolinguistic identities, however, continues to be reworked as Indigenous peoples reclaim a sense of Mayaness and reconfigure it within the context of the historical moment (Castañeda 2004; Castillo Cocom et al. 2017; Menchú and Wright 2000; Montejo 2008; Warren 1998). Thus, local and foreign identities were and continue to be forged on multiple, shifting scales of interaction. Despite the difficulties in identifying foreign interactions in the past, however, it would be a mistake to ignore the ways in which different worlds and identities collided, drew from, and were remade in ancient times since doing so risks the portrayal of ancient societies as homogenous, self-contained cultural units (Wolf 1982:3–23). For the ancient Mayas, scholarship on foreigners has most extensively been explored through the narrative of the Early Classic Teotihuacan “entrada” of military leaders and their entourages from Central Mexico (Ball 1993; Braswell 2003; Demarest and Foias 1993; Hirth et al. 2020; Houston et al. 2021; Stanton 2005; Stuart 2000) and through the debates on the arrival, conquest, and occupation of Itza, Toltec, and other peoples that may have lived and ruled at Chichén Itzá during the Terminal Classic and Early Postclassic periods (Boot 2005; Rice and Rice 2018; Ringle 2017; Thompson 1938; Tozzer 1957). These narratives often highlight the perspective of warriors, stranger-kings, and dominant lineages whose marks on the archaeological, epigraphic, and ethnohistoric records are highly visible, albeit often difficult to interpret. This book examines some of these narratives, but also explores those that were less visible or more marginalized. It takes, in particular, a feminist intersectional perspective inspired by standpoint theory as a means to provide a more nuanced and varied understanding of how the foreign might have been experienced in antiquity and by whom (Wylie 2007). 4 Introduction FIGURE 1.2 Map of Mesoamerica with selected sites mentioned in the text and inset of zone attributed as the Maya area in solid black (drafted by C. Halperin) Introduction 5 FIGURE 1.3 Map of the Maya area with selected sites mentioned in the text (drafted by C. Halperin) Standpoints and Intersectional Identities Standpoint theory asserts that knowledge production is always socially and historically situated. As such, the production of knowledge from marginal standpoints has the potential to provide more varied inquiries, widen explanatory power, and provide new insights. Although such standpoints have often focused on feminist ones, standpoint theorists were always keen on underscoring the different power structures that produced different lived experiences, whether racialized, economic, sexualized or otherwise, and thus the different ways these lived experiences could 6 Introduction not only condition how knowledge about the world was produced, but also serve as ways to change those conditions (Allen 2017; Harding 1991, 2004, 2009). As bell hooks (1984:preface) notes from a Black feminist perspective, To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body… Living as we did – on the edge – we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as the margin. We understood both. Some critiques of standpoint theory, however, have pointed out that there is no such thing as automatic epistemic privilege (Hekman 1997), and some proponents seek to avoid “a social constructivism that ultimately gives rise to corrosive relativism” (Wylie 2004:344). Yet despite these challenges, standpoints matter since the people whose standpoints are considered matter. Rather than an automatic epistemic privilege, standpoints must be part of a critical consciousness of the understanding of the world. What can be quite useful in standpoint theory for this study is a critical consciousness of the types of standpoints that may frame the analyses of social groups and identities in the past. Since being foreign is arguably itself a relative form of positionality, one’s analysis of foreigners, the foreign, and outsiders must necessarily draw from a particular standpoint. For example, in the analysis of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, a cloth painting created by Quauhaquechollan elites in the 16th century, Spanish, Quauhaquechollan, and other Indigenous allies were clearly depicted to distinguish themselves relative to a foreign Other: most notably Kaqchikel, K’iche’, and Pipil peoples who were painted with darker skin, different clothing, and distinct weapons than the Spanish and Indigenous Mexicans (Asselbergs 2008, 2012; Matthew 2012). In contrast, the excavation of Ciudad Vieja, the colonial city where many of these Quauhaquechollan warriors eventually took up residence, might take up the positionality of the Kaqchikel with the Quauhaquecholltecos as foreigners. Such designations are not neutral since they imply some sort of legitimacy of belonging. Thus, in addition to the positionality we take to be the focus of study (Central Mexicans vs. Kaqchikels), our positionality also depends on the types of evidence (e.g. texts, monuments, artifacts, landscapes) one draws on, which are not neutral either since they were produced by and for particular peoples in the past and are understood and valued in different ways by those in the present. Furthermore, the experience of being foreign was and is not solely binary (insider vs. outsider), but was also intersected by different identities of gender, sex, age, race, and social position. Alison Wylie (2007:211) argues that a feminist archaeology should be grounded in the situated experiences of women and those who are oppressed by gendered systems of inequality and in order to do so, one can take women’s everyday lives as a starting point. In expanding on Wylie’s proscriptions, Kathleen Sterling (2015:104) suggests that intersectional approaches “ground Introduction 7 research in the situated experiences of all people of all ages, races, genders, etc. taking their everyday lives as a starting point. Identity is constantly experienced and performed and may be part of a “double consciousness.” In a “double consciousness”, she refers to W.E.B. DuBois’ (1995:8–9) understanding of himself as being both American and Black; “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” This tension was brought to his self-reflective question, “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”. In this sense, foreign identities might be experienced differently by different social positions, and in turn, different identities might be considered more foreign than others. Multiple Communities, Multiple Others Although the idea of being a foreigner is grounded in the binary of insiders vs. outsiders, we live as part of multiple communities that operate on different scales of belonging, all of which shift over time. As such, outsider status could be experienced and produced on multiple levels. Such layering of foreign identities, for example, can be seen in Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s (1967:637–654) attempt, in his Apologética Historia Sumaria, to make sense of what he and other Europeans referred to as barbarie, ways of being barbarian, during the 16th century.1 He noted that the term could be used in the most general way, to refer to nations or people who were foreign, ferocious, disorderly, or lacking in reason. Positioned largely from the perspective of his understanding of Greek writings on barbarians, these were people the Greek viewed as cruel as they were their enemies in battle. The second meaning, he clarified, was a linguistic one whereby it refers to people who did not speak Latin or Greek or that “no pronuniciaban bien, sino rudamente y con defecto” (ibid:638), that don’t pronounce or speak the language correctly, suggesting that these individuals were immigrants or acquired the language later in life. These people may have cities or rulers, in contrast to the third way of being barbarian, those who lived so-called simpler lives in the forest and without authoritarian rule. The fourth form were those who did not practice the Christian faith. They included, for those writing in Latin and Greek, “turcos” and “moros” as well as those who practiced sacrifices. These peoples were different from the fifth type, those who were familiar with Christianity, but actively resisted it. It was not until the 19th century, that the word barbarian shifted to connote peoples at a particular socioevolutionary stage who engaged in horticulture and had ceramic technology, but did not live in cities (Morgan 1985 [1988]). At the point of Spanish Contact, although Indigenous peoples living in Yucatán often referred to the Spanish as dzul or tz’ul, foreigner, many Indigenous Maya political, ethnic, or regional groups, could be considered to have been dzul, even if they spoke the same language. In the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, Yucatec Mayans referred to a Maya political province in north-central Belize as Dzuluinicob (or Dzulwinikob), meaning “foreign people”, with Tipu as one of its principal towns (Jones 1989:8–9, 98–99). In turn, in the Book of Chilam Balam of 8 Introduction Tizimin, the Itza Maya from northern Yucatán referred to the Xiu Maya who overthrew Mayapan as the t u men uitzil tz’ul or “hummingbird foreigners” (Edmonson 1982:162), and the Itza were often called ah nunob “those who do not know the language of the land, stammerers or stutterers” (Thompson 1970:16). Similarly, in the Late Postclassic Maya Dresden Codex, foreigners were often those to the west, tz’ul chik’in, who were mentioned in reference to gods and peoples (Beliaev 2013:168). Auguries, for example, were made in reference to saktam and ts’ul chik’in “the foreigners of the west”. Dmitri Beliaev (2013:170–171) suggests that saktam may refer to an ethnic group associated with Xicalango who spoke Chontal Maya. These foreign groups were not distant, isolated, and exotic foreigners, but those close to and intermingled with their own communities, yet whose historical tensions conditioned practices and designations of distinction and difference. In this sense, this book seeks to recognize and identify both proximate and distant experiences with the foreign. According to Colonial period papers and documents of Chontal Maya elites from Southwestern Campeche and Tabasco, the Chontal (or Putun) Maya were most concerned with the foreigners from Ciuatecpan and Balancan whom they warred with and they referred to as Dzulob (Thompson 1970:5). The Chontal Acalan ruler, Paxua (ca. 1420–1450), for example, was said to have seized the Dzulob settlement of Ciuatecpan (Scholes and Roys 1948:82), even though the Dzulob later recaptured it back. The next Acalan ruler, Pachimalahix (ca. 1450– 1480), waged war with the Dzulob from Balancan, and apparently the Acalan rulers were continuously at war or on hostile terms with them (ibid:85–86). Because most of the place names in the region were Chontal Maya in origin and the name Ciuatecpan is Nahuatl, Scholes and Roys (ibid:86) suggested that the Dzulob were part of Nahuatl-speaking peoples living along the Usumacinta River. In turning the tables, it is important to also mention that the name Chontal derives from the Nahuatl word chontalli, meaning “foreigner”, and thus was not likely a name the Chontal-speaking peoples of this region called themselves at the time (Thompson 1970:5). In fact, Nahuatl-speaking groups from Central Mexico including the Mexica called different peoples from what is now Oaxaca and Nicaragua as chontalli (Scholes and Roys 1948:15). One of the possible names the Chontal Maya may have used to refer to themselves was Putun, which may mean “peaceful” or Potom/Patom, which means potter or ceramist (ollero, alfarero en general, official de cosas de barro) (Kremer 1994:295). Such a name seems particularly fitting given that this region had a rich tradition of making ceramics including large quantities of ceramic bricks at the site of Comalcalco in the Late Classic period, a practice not found elsewhere in the Maya area. The word tz’ul, however, is rarely mentioned in Classic period Maya texts (Beliaev 2013:170; Helmke et al. 2018:123). When it is mentioned, it is often related to warfare and to the verb hul or ul, meaning “to arrive”, a point explored in Chapter 2 in relation to warfare and Chapter 5 in relation to pilgrimage. For example, a captive is referred to as “foreign” on a text inscribed on a stingray spine from Comalcalco (Tokovinine 2020:255, Fig. 7.3a). In turn, an unprovenienced Introduction 9 monument from the Museo Popol Vuh records the arrival of a foreign king or overlord, hu-li-…? tz’u?-lu KALOM-TE’, in 758 CE followed by an attack (Luin and Matteo 2010:1218). Thus, as noted throughout the book, emic understanding of social and spiritual boundaries can be identified through glyphic texts that refer to the arrival of people. Today, the word dzul cannot be divorced from class and status since those with authoritative roles, government officials, and those of higher social-economic status may be referred to as dzul (Castañeda 2004:42, 53; Gabbert 2004:31–35), highlighting the intersectional nature of the foreign. Interestingly, contemporary Yucatec Maya speakers have also reclaimed the word dzul to invert its derogatory meaning. A husband and wife, for example, may refer to each other as “foreigners” as a term of endearment or respect. A wife may call her husband dzul or nojoch dzul while the husband may call his wife xunáan or nojoch xunáan, which translates as foreign lady (Crystal Sheedy April 28, 2022, personal communication). In addition to references to foreigners, contemporary Maya language speakers also signal group belonging and exclusion through their use of the term “true people”, such as hach winik among the Lacandon (Balsanelli 2021:68; Boremanse 1998), batz’I viniketik among the Tzotzil (Gossen 1999:6), tojol winik among the Tojolabal, and qas winaq among the Tzu’utujil (Christenson 2006). “True people” differ from others by their practices, values, dress, origins, and language affiliations, and those excluded from local belonging may include other Maya language groups or communities, non-Indigenous groups, and those of other nationalities, although these are overlapping designations. For example, Mopan Maya folk stories try to make sense of Chol Maya peoples, with some noting that there are Chol who are like the Mopan as they are both “Indians”, but there are also bad Chols whose “ears are very long”, “are not Indians”, “are Xacampach” and “will kill and eat you” (Thompson 1930:152–155). Likewise, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Tzoltzil Maya would often imitate foreign “Others” in their public theatrical performances of the fiesta of San Sebastián. They would dress up as Spanish/Ladinos, as Aztecs/Montezumas (Señior White Heads), and Lacandon Maya, all of whom were also made fun of by the Blackman (a mythical trickster figure), monkey impersonators, and other ritual clowns (Bricker 1973:46–67). As Simon Critchley (2002:65) asserts, foreigners are often the butt of jokes because humour is essentially about demythologizing the exotic, defamiliarizing the familiar, and inverting common sense. As suggested by Houston and colleagues (2016), performing the Other as part of mimetic dances and public theatrics likely had ancient antecedents. They argue, for example, that an Ik’ style Late Classic vase likely from Motul de San José and environs portrayed an Ik’ royal court scene in which dancers were dressed up as Teotihuacanos. These dancers were marked with black body paint, spikey hair, and k’an crosses on their belts (Figure 1.4). Thus, rather than rely solely on labels and textual designations of foreigners, it is clear that many of the ways of expressing belonging and exclusion are emergent from practices and places, which have material traces in the archaeological record. 10 Introduction FIGURE 1.4 Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Ik’ style vase showing a royal court scene with a seated Ik’ lord (right) and two dancing figures (left) (K6315, Justin Kerr Maya Archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.) Relational Identities: People, Things, and Places Personhood and identities of belonging are not intrinsic to the self or group, but are part of a relational field of people, things, and places that emerge through dwelling or being in the world (Crellin et al. 2020; Hutson 2009; Ingold 1993). The practices of identities are not always undertaken with rigorous intentionality and forethought. Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 1977) calls this unconscious way of being habitus, embodied dispositions, values, and customs that emerge through our everyday practices. Nonetheless, there are moments in which such identities are foregrounded, defined more sharply, and objectified in more explicit terms (Belcourt 2008; Conkey and Hastorf 1993; Díaz-Andreu and Lucy 2005). In both cases, identities of belonging and of alterity emerge within and through recursive relations with other people, places, and things. In other words, identities are not reducible to particular types of bodies (e.g. sexed, aged, phenotypic traits, etc.), objects (e.g. dress, ornaments, tools, belongings), or places (houses, settlements, river valleys, mountains, etc.), but emerge with and through them (Ashmore 2004a; Beck 2007; Butler 1993; Csordas 1994; Hendon 2010; Joyce 1998). In some societies, such as among many Amerindian communities including the Maya, these buildings, mountains, and ornaments are not inert matter upon which humans imprint meaning or modify. Rather, they are affective and have their own vitalities that impinge on human and non-human beings alike (Balsanelli 2021; Gillespie 2021; Hendon 2018; Houston 2014). Rather than conceive of selfhood through the concept of habitus, Juan Castillo Cocom (2017:64–65) indicates that for the people of Maya T’aan, selfhood manifests as iknal, “the embodied and disembodied quality of ‘being present’ as the context and product of relationships”, whereby identity is conceived as relational and dynamic. Although one’s habitus is resident in the body, iknal can also reside in places without the person’s physical presence (ibid). Furthermore, relationships Introduction 11 with one’s soul(s), deities, and ancestors, form a fundamental mode of relationality for the understanding and constitution of self and others (Carlsen and Prechtel 1991; Gillespie 2021; Pitarch 2012). Likewise, the making of people and things was a part of shared customs, dispositions, and learning communities, and in making – these social relations were reconstituted and remade anew (Hendon 2015; Lave and Wender 1991; Roddick and Stahl 2016; Wenger 1999). In Mesoamerica, it is commonly recognized that identities were not born, but were made with the shaping of the body, care, and rituals, such as the giving of gendered gifts to make babies into girls or boys (Duncan and Hofling 2011:202; Eberl 2013; Joyce 2000). The making of one’s baah, what might be understood as one’s physical and soul-animated body but also one’s self in Classic Maya texts (Houston et al. 2006:61–101), for example, begins soon after birth with the modification of a baby’s head, a way of ensouling the baby and shaping it into a proper human being. The particular techniques of wrapping, framing, and shaping of the baby’s cranium were specific to certain communities in space and time, relationally forming the larger community they were born into (Duncan and Hofling 2011; Tiesler 2014). These practices were followed by other “shaping” practices – the painting, marking, and piercing of the body, and the wearing of particular clothes whose meanings and customs were inherited – but also reworked and manipulated in the context of social practices. Archaeologists have long discussed the making of ceramics and other material culture as part of shared interaction spheres or communities of practice whereby ideas, practices, and values are transmitted and shared as part of networked learning communities, and which can result in similar material products. Multiple, linked communities of practice may form a constellation of practice in which intensive direct engagement is not possible, but dispositions and common practices are linked through similar use of tools, shared historical roots, shared working conditions or resources, interlinked interactions of some participants, among other factors (Wenger 1999:126–133). When communities of practices are sufficiently isolated from one another, however, certain objects or stylistic expressions can be viewed as foreign (Schortman et al. 2001). Lisa LeCount (2010a, 2010b, 2017), for example, argues that two different but overlapping communities of practice were forged in the upper Belize River Valley during the Classic period, one centered at the sites of Xunantunich, Actuncan, and Buenvista del Cayo and based on the making and using of black-slipped Mount Maloney bowls, and the other among settlements to the east and south of Xunantunich and based on the making and using of red-slipped Garbutt Creek Red bowls, which were identical to Mount Maloney bowls with the exception of its red slip color. She argues that Mount Maloney bowls were not just reflections of interaction networks, but explicitly embodied a larger community identity through their use in public ceremonial events, ritual caching, feasting, and burial practices. Such identities, however, emerged from and were reinforced through their use in everyday cooking and food serving in the home. These different communities, encompassing both the Garbutt Creek Red and Mount Maloney producing 12 Introduction regions, however, articulated through shared burial practices, based on the long tradition of burying individuals with their heads to the south that dated back to the Preclassic period. In contrast to these black and red-slipped bowls, however, Terminal Classic Fine Orange molded-carved ceramic bowls may have been considered foreign or exotic in the Upper Belize River Valley as they were not produced locally and were relatively rare (LeCount 1999). As these contemporary and archaeological examples illustrate, ceramics, clothing, head modifications, folk stories, mimetic performances, and other materials and practices have – and had – the potential to be integral parts of the making of social imaginaries – of both self and others. As Benedict Anderson emphasizes for the creation of nations in the modern world, it is not possible to know all its members nor all its territorial extents. As such, nations were “imagined political communities”, since they were experienced and understood as sovereign through particular materials and concepts, such as print media, which burgeoned as a form of communication in the 16th and 17th centuries, or the census, the museum, and the map, which were instrumental in forging a common sense of national identity from the mid 19th century onward through the conceptual crystallization of its people, its heritage, and its bounded sense of place. Anderson does not see “imagined political communities” of nations as invented, fabricated, or inauthentic. Rather, to him, they are a continuous process of becoming because they are understood with and through tangible practices, peoples, materials, and places. Although sovereign nations in its modern sense were not part of ancient Maya lifeways, local and foreign peoples and places may have been experienced as imagined communities made possible by both “filtered” direct engagements (Chapters 2, 3, 5) with particular peoples, places and through particular things, such as weapons (Chapter 2), signature foods and drinks (Chapter 4), and small portable objects, among other materialities (Chapters 2 and 6). Substantial ethnohistoric and epigraphic evidence suggests that ancient identities of group belonging may have heavily focused on both the political/settlement community and descent or patronym group, although they were both highly dynamic in time and space, as these entities fused together, were annexed, separated, and migrated (Carmack 1981:156–165; Hill II 1989; Martin and Grube 2000; Sachse 2006; Stuart and Houston 1994; Tokovinine 2013; Watanabe 2004). Classic Maya polities were moral communities forged through reciprocal and entangled relations of obligation, tribute, labor services, and a sense of common heritage and destiny. Kalomte’ (ruler, military ruler), kuhul ajaw (divine lords), ajaw (lords), and sajal (noblemen and noblewomen) from different polities were, in turn, enmeshed in relations of domination, subordination, and affiliations with other rulers in shifting dynamics of power. Although Classic period polities were not likely produced through high degrees of territorial boundary maintenance (Halperin et al. 2020; Hammond 1991:275–281; Iannone 2010) as is the case today (McAtackney and McGuire 2020), people and places were often intimately intertwined. Senses of belonging were rooted in but also extended beyond houses, agricultural fields, settlements, mountains, caves, and other features in the landscape that were important repositories for knowledge about a community’s history Introduction 13 (Ashmore 2004; Tokovinine 2013; see also Basso 1996). They were also places where ancestors and patron deities resided and whose relations were maintained through offerings, rituals, quotidian activities, and circulation through the landscape (Baron 2016; Bassie-Sweet et al. 2015). Yet heritage and identities can and could be maintained despite separation from particular places of origin. Diasporic communities maintain ties to their homelands through continued practices and traditions, the recounting of origin stories and founding myths, return visits to homelands, and portable objects from afar. Chapter 2, for example, discusses diasporic objects, material touchstones for approaching homelands through particular memories and emotions (Pechurina 2020; Skiles and Clark 2010). Another identity that regularly implicates both senses of belonging and senses of foreignness is that of ethnicity. While most scholars recognize that the Maya area likely comprised many different regional identities and affiliations in antiquity, the pinpointing of ethnicities is enormously difficult to identity with archaeological evidence alone, and as such are often discussed with much caution (Beyyette and LeCount 2017; Sachse 2006; see also Jones 1997; Berdan et al. 2008). In some cases, regional distinctions may have been downplayed as most Classic period hieroglyphic texts were written in Classic Ch’olti’an with only subtle regional distinctions identified through grammatical and orthological variations (Boot 2019; Houston et al. 2000; Lacadena and Wichmann 2002). The elite textual language of hieroglyphic writing, however, likely masked local vernaculars, similar to the way Latin was the preferred language for written texts during the Middle Ages while medieval German, French, English, and Spanish were part of everyday exchanges by both elites and non-elites. Ed Schortman and colleagues (2001) have argued that ancient Mesoamerican elites participated in and had to balance between two cultures: a restricted elite culture shared across polities and different ethnic-linguistic communities, and a local community culture that was not only a part of their upbringing but was necessary for their legitimacy and reciprocal relations with their tribute paying communities (see also Marken et al. 2017). Yet it would be myopic to think that commoners were not highly mobile, and thus it is likely that they also had to grapple with balancing multiple cultures, customs, and identities. As explored in Chapter 2, advances in stable isotope studies of human teeth and more widespread baseline sampling over the last two decades have revealed that Pre-Columbian peoples of all statuses were much more mobile than previously considered, and have allowed us to identify the presence of those born outside a given geological and climatic-specific region from which an individual was buried (Price et al. 2010, 2019; Suzuki et al. 2020; Wright 2012). Isotopic identifications of foreignness are, in essence, statistically significant differences in isotope values (usually strontium and oxygen, but also sulphur and lead) from a baseline signature and create what appear to be unambiguous binary signatures of local and non-local individuals. Such data, however, cannot always be taken at face value, since practices of affiliation and belonging may have cross-cut geologic and geographic zones and, likewise, practices of difference may have been marked within the same geologic and geographic zones. Thus, it is useful for isotopic data 14 Introduction to be contextualized, when possible, with burial treatments, archaeological contexts, associated artifacts, skeletal health, and body modifications, among other lines of evidence. Despite the challenges in identifying ethnicities and other types of communities in archaeology, the different ways of approaching ethnicity are useful for thinking about the tensions of agency and structure in identity in general. For example, some scholars have focused on “primordialist” approaches whereby ethnicity is considered to be a permanent and essential identity passed down through the generations. This perspective is descent-focused with particular practices, attributes, biology (genetics, phenotypes, biodistance studies), and values inherited from one generation to the next. In contrast, “instrumentalist” and “situational” approaches underscore the practice-based and socially constructed aspects of group belonging whereby ethnicity has the potential to shift based on social context and social positioning, and are maintained through both everyday and diacritical practices of affiliation with others (Chan 2005; Hu 2013; Voss 2008, 2005). This latter perspective recognizes the agency of its members and the ways in which people downplay, highlight, or rework their affiliations as conditioned by their needs and the constraints of the historical moment. For example, Elizabeth Brumfiel (1994:100–101) argued that the Otomis of Xaltocan displayed their ethnic affiliation more frequently when it was to their advantage as a symbol of cooperation between commoners and elites during the Middle Postclassic (1100–1300 CE). At this point, the Otomis were the majority ethnic group of Xaltocan in Central Mexico. They later suppressed symbols of their ethnic identity during the Late Postclassic (1300–1519 CE) after the Tepanecs and other Nahua groups conquered them as it became more advantageous for Xaltocan elites to align themselves with the Nahua ruling class. As Renato Rosaldo (1988) has argued, however, these are false dichotomies in that ethnic identities are often formulated through both primordialist and instrumental/situationalist modes. That is, identities derive from references to both timeless traditions and biological or geographic origins and situated performances and practices of affiliation and display that depend on social contexts and perceived advantages of belonging or not (Barth 1969). Voss (2008:26) suggests that it is at the tension of primordialist and instrumentalist tendencies where the exercise of power in negotiating social identity occurs, and it is here that we begin to see ethnogenesis, the creation of new ethnicities through cultural contact and engagement. Some ways of defining group belonging, however, matter more than others during certain moments in history and for certain institutions and types of people. For example, stemming from a long history of abusive and marginalizing Colonial policies in North America, US and Canadian governments now only recognize Indigenous tribal status as a matter of proven descent (primordialist) and, up until 1985, Indigenous women in Canada lost their official tribal status if they married a non-status Indian (primordialist and patriarchal). Despite the importance of primordialist claims to heritage and sovereign rights, many also consider the everyday practices, craft traditions, myths, ruins, community gatherings, sacred objects, Introduction 15 mountains, not to mention self-determination, as just as essential to Indigenous communities in their constitution of self (Atalay 2020; Basso 1996; Belcourt 2008; Clifford 2004; Supernant 2018). In turn, some contemporary Yucatec speakers may make no claims to a Maya identity, preferring to identify as campesino (peasant), but may engage relationally with their heritage by working their milpa (agricultural fields), bringing them in daily engagements with archaeological ruins, traditional forestry dynamics, and local foodways (Hutson 2009:153–181). Depending on the nature of their work and the types of communities they settle in, among other factors, diasporic Indigenous communities living in the US, Canada, and elsewhere may prefer to identify by their nationality of origin (e.g., Mexican, Guatemalan) or may find ways to reconnect or reconfigure their Indigenous identities in their new homelands (Delugan 2010; Sittig and González 2016; Stoll 2015). In this sense, we need to recognize how descentbased approaches to identity articulate with everyday practices and the emergent potential of relational identities that are in a constant state of motion. Outline of the Book But what foreign identities mattered in the past? How was the foreign a generative component of identity? And how was the foreign dissolved or reworked as part of ancient practices and imaginaries? These questions are explored through feminist and other standpoints that seek to consider the living experiences of those in the past and also to confront our own academic and contemporary standpoints and biases as scholars, such as myself, who examines the Mayas from afar. Chapter 2 presents four foreign tropes evoked for ancient Maya societies. The most well-known of foreigners are those of stranger-kings, warriors, and elite lineages who come from afar but come to rule over new peoples in new lands. This chapter reviews the debates over the Teotihuacan entrada in 378 CE and presents new data related to the old Putun “invasion” hypothesis during the 9th century CE. The findings related to these foreigners are complemented and enriched by those less celebrated in stone monuments, written texts, and building programs: that of the stranger-queen or outsider wife, that of the cosmopolitan settlement, and that of the humble migrant. Chapter 3, “Captive Performances: Spectacles and the Everyday”, focuses more specifically on the emotive and transformational ways in which ancient Mayas and other Mesoamerican peoples were rendered outsiders through conflict, physical violence, and humiliation. Such processes have been understood in Maya scholarship primarily through the depiction and texts of high status male captives who were an enduring part of the performances in public plaza spaces and elite residential contexts, even long after these individuals escaped, were let go, or died through sacrifice. I find, however, that in taking a feminist standpoint, we might also consider the female captives, subordinate male captives, and children that were also part of the making of outsiders through physical submission but were not celebrated in stone monuments and were relatively invisible in the archaeological record. Drawing on a suite of ethnohistoric data, colonial dictionaries, and Classic 16 Introduction period imagery, I argue that some of these relatively invisible captives may have been enslaved and lived in elite households, serving as cultural brokers despite clear asymmetric power dynamics. In contrast, other ways in which the foreign was experienced were much more palatable. Chapter 4, “Cuisines and the Relational Making of People”, examines how foreign worlds and peoples were understood and internalized through cuisines and the relationality between people and their food and drink. In highlighting five different consumables, I explore the ways in which some Maya regional identities may have emerged through their culinary repertoires, such as balché and other honey products in Northern Yucatán during the Late Postclassic period, and tutu’ soups and stews among peoples in the Eastern Maya Lowlands during the Preclassic and Classic periods. Such foods may have served as flash points for group belonging and distinction when visiting or migrating between regions. Other culinary traditions, such as pulque drinking and the making of tortillas and other foods on flat griddles appear to have been brought in not as a single colonialization but multiple layered, non-linear knotted engagements and influences over time. And perhaps most importantly, I point to the way that alterity could be dissolved with the hospitality of offering a good drink… and preferably one made of cacao! In the ancient Americas, one of the most common ways in which peoples experienced the foreign was through pilgrimage. Perhaps the most well-known of pilgrimages are those of princes and nobles who traveled to distant lands to receive their emblems of rule and undergo the necessary rituals in order to take political office. Chapter 5, “Pilgrimages to Foreign Places and the Acts of Becoming”, however, seeks to move beyond this celebrated rite of passage to also examine the homosocial male experiences that bisected political divisions in visiting caves from afar and spiritual-medical pilgrimages from a feminist perspective in traveling to distant shrine centers throughout the Maya area and beyond. The final chapter, Chapter 6, “Looking in from Afar: Representations of Mayas”, turns the tables to reverse the standpoint of analysis. It examines how other Mesoamerican peoples living in Central Mexico and parts of Honduras may have viewed and conceived of Maya peoples as foreigners. It explores how the Maya themselves may have been Others objectified in allegory, understood through specific types of personages, such as merchants or elite officials, and conflated with other Lowland groups. Thus, in the end, we are reminded that we ourselves are also foreign. Note 1 As Michel de Montaigne pointed out, the original meaning of the word “barbarian” in Greek is, in fact, “foreigner” (Launay 2018: 43).