The plurality of temporal reckoning among the Maya
Journal de la Société des Américanistes February 5, 2025 William F. Hanks
In Yucatec Maya communities of the Sierra region of Yucatán during the late twentieth century, multiple systems of temporal reckoning and orientation operate together in daily practice. Most cyclicity in contemporary Yucatec Maya arises from natural or social processes; in rituals, cyclicity results from translating spatial arrangements into temporal sequences. The paper tracks varieties of cyclic and spiral time measurement across domains: the field of co-presence in utterance, the diurnal cycle, agricultural and forest cycles, domestic space with age and generational relations, and ritual time in shamanic practice.