The plurality of temporal reckoning among the Maya

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of time reckoning in several domains of Maya language and culture, as observed in the Sierra region of Yucatan in the last decades of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that multiple systems of temporal reckoning and orientation co-operate in the traditional domains of daily practice, and it attempts to formulate principles by which different systems are combined in actional frameworks It is argued that most cyclicity in contemporary Yucatec Maya is derivative of natural or social processes and that in rituals it results from the translation of spatial arrays into temporal sequences. The paper tracks the varieties of cyclic and spiral time measurement in several domains, where different units and levels of temporal measurement and different rhythms are observed: 1) the field of co-presence in which utterances are performed, including deictic time; 2) the diurnal cycle and its actional correlates; 3) the agricultural cycles, the forest life cycle and the labor they imply; 4) domestic space whose time involves in addition the age and generational relations among co-residents; 5) ritual time in Yucatec shamanic practice, which is given special attention. Ritual practices display the most dramatic cyclicity, compounded by sedimentation, deictic time, historical time and cosmological space. Their chronometric dimensions are so elaborate that rituals can be considered a time machine. Viewed from practice, there is no single modality of Maya time, but a diachronic synchronization of multiple temporal streams which produces time as the variable product of tzol reproduction and meyah ‘work.’