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By Quetzil E. Castañeda, Project Director
The Chilam Balam Ah P'izté Project in Memory and History is a
research program with a pre-history or, at least, a history of prior
incarnations. It emerges from previous investigations of the role of
anthropology in the life and history of Maya communities, cultures,
societies, and civilization. In his early work, Castañeda studied
the archeological creation of the modern ruins of Chichén Itzá
as a site for tourism and how the community of Pisté, México,
has emerged in relation to the anthropology and tourism of the nearby
ruins. Although both archival study of historical documents and fieldwork
study of oral histories was necessary for this earlier project, most
of the material was not used to the full extent possible. For years
this data has been kept in reserve as basic sources for a proposed future
historical ethnography of social life of Pisté in the decades
before and during the time of the archeological reconstruction of Chichén
(1923-1941). While such a project remains the open horizon of the research
on memory and history, the question of what specifically to do with
this material and how — which includes rich ethnographic data
collected in the 1930s by Morris Steggerda and narratives about this
time period elicited by a number of octegenarians by Castañeda
— has triggered a series of possibilities.
Initially, I had conceived of a project in oral history that would contrapuntally
speak to the history of the community as collected/written by Steggerda
and other anthropologists that have provided descriptions of Pisté
in the course of their late 19th and early 20th century travels in Yucatán.
The two main points of interest in this projected study is, first, the
active ethnographic elicitation of a “native” point of view
of the lived experience and history of the reconstruction of Chichén
Itzá — in other words: a history of anthropology from the
subject position of the “object” of anthropological studies.
In other words, the oral histories would work to “resuscitate”
or “flesh out” through contradiction, opposition, and differentiation
the written ethnographic and historical record itself with the histories/memories
of the persons about whom that history is written. Since such a history
would articulate in interesting ways to the writings of both participating
anthropologists — e.g., Le Plongeon, E.H. Thompson, Sylvanus G.
Morley, Anne Axtell, Eric Thompson, Morris Steggerda, and many others
— and the historians of these anthropologists — e.g., Von
Hagan, Brunhouse, Adamson, and others — the second point of interest
is the way in which the historiographical operation that would tack
back and forth between the written/literal histories and the spoken/oral
histories to problematize history itself. In this regard, the project
was conceived as working within the problematization of history that
Michel de Certeau delineated in his historiographical study, The Writing
of History, and implied a radically different conception of the phrase
“Maya anthropology” as not only an anthropology of the Maya
but a Maya vision of and constitutively active participation in Maya
anthropology.
Work on this project was conducted alongside other primary research
and thus did not realize its potential when it faced the pragmatic questions
of what next. For on the one hand, the need for a full blown historical
study always loomed over the shoulder given the vast amount not only
of “official histories” of second hand sources as already
mentioned, but of archival records for the Carnegie Institution of Washington
(the philanthropic sponsor of 18 years interdisciplinary research at
Chichén Itzá) as well as for each of the prominent anthropologists
whose biography intersects with Chichén and Pisté. A solidly
responsible social and cultural history of this topic requires a thorough
study of the politics and economy of the anthropological and archeological
investment in Yucatán. This need then had always been somewhat
“threatening” not merely for the magnitude of the task posed,
but for an ethnographer not properly trained in the historical methods
of archival research. Thus, although the goal of doing a history of
the transformation of Yucatán into an archeological and ethnographic
wonderland of Maya Culture for tourism (as well as for the nation) has
been displaced from the present moment as an indeterminate future possibility
within the long range Field School agenda, the project itself is of
critical importance and of such immense scope that it demands the dedication
of one or more persons of the highest capacities. Further, I have continued
to collect, from archives and special collections, historical materials
of different types — documents, photographs, film footage, and
object artifacts — that would be useful resources for the investigation
of this broad topic.
On the other hand, the fieldwork based study of the collective and individual
memories and histories of Pisté in relation to anthropology and
tourism entered into an inevitable and regrettable moment of impossibility
which necessitated an entire conceptual shifting. The project so long
as it is conceived as primarily based on the memories of those who had
worked with the archeologists in the 1920s and 1930s has only a certain
window of opportunity, which has unfortunately closed. Too often surviving
octogenarians were men that had in fact lived a life with minimal connection
to the archeological world of the Maya or were spouses of men who had
been the masons and field hands that reconstructed Chichén Itzá.
The problem with the latter category of informant is that due first
to human and especially Maya reluctance to talk about what another person
experienced with third parties and second the strong Maya cultural conventions
of those days by which domains of activity defined according to age
and gender hierarchies were strongly sealed off from each other. Thus,
a woman who had spent four or five decades with a man who had spent
his life working with archeologists would have little to say about her
husband’s non-domestic experiences; likewise, children of such
persons, who in the 1980s and 1990s are grown adults, may have very
little to offer in terms of reflections on the life of their parents
outside of their own immediate biographic experiences with them. These
factors led to a shift in perspective and in conceptualization of the
object of study away from “the Maya history of Maya archeology,”
to a more general and open problematizing of history and histories as
constituted through multiple forms of memory and experience forged in
transnational and transcultural processes of sustained and pervasive
duration.
These difficulties however raise another issue that is too often pushed
under the rug of being a practical and methodological problem, which
is that of how does one ask about experiences conceptualized in cultural
and subjective modes incommensurate with the asker’s conceptualization
and valorization of those experiences? Either, as fieldworkers learn,
one asks a seemingly infinite number of questions that draw an insurmountable
blank or “blanket of snow” much like when a TV station goes
off the air or one’s questions begin to be tautologically answered
back within closer and closer approximations of the language and values
presupposed by the question, which in turn are reiterated in terms of
those approximations. This is dialogue. Dialogue is the secret nature
of the interview situation modeled on an “observer” interviewing
an “informant” as the neutral elicitation of statements
uncorrupted by hypothetical externalities such as the interviewing observer.
It is this dialogical interaction — an intercultural communication
— that dialogism holds is the creative moment of the reinvention
of meanings, worlds, and cultures. If so, intercultural dialogue is
also transcultural and a moment and event of transculturation through
which worlds of meaning and identities are forged through a differentiation
based in repetition and appropriation of alterity. This is not mimesis,
however, which copies an identity to make an image of likeness as the
Same (but different), but a “copying” that appropriates
and repeats likeness as difference or rather as différance whose
reiteration differentiates — i.e., calls forth (meanings, identities,
differences) to constitute them as differentiated (worlds and cultures)
in their identity. [With regard to these theoretical issues, see G.
Deleuze, Repetition and Difference, and
J. Derrida, Of Grammatology.]
Dialogical encounters, intercultural communication, transculturation,
whether in the everyday life of groups or the fieldwork practices of
ethnography, are elements constitutive of the situation under investigation.
Thus, to pose some human collectivity or cultural artifice of that collectivity
as an object of study is to already implicate the subject who does the
studying, and their practices of studying, of the postulated object
within the constitution of the phenomenon as part of the object of study.
This necessity of including the subject of study within the object of
study is redoubled in the context of this projected research on Maya-anthropology
where the subject matter at stake is already the history of anthropological
intervention in a Maya community through the community’s collective
remembering of that history. The relations of complicity, refraction,
speculation, differentiation, transculturation multiply and enfold upon
themselves as they saturate the possibilities of subjects and objects
of study and rendering them, as well as the research that envisions
them, impossible.
From this problematization of Maya and anthropology as Maya anthropology
a radically distinct mode of fieldwork and ethnography would be called
into practice in which there is no object of study other than the study
of its own process as the articulation and remediation of “Maya”
and “anthropology” in the radically revalorized mode of
Maya Anthropology. In this vision of ethnography difference is forced
into nomadism since alterity is displaced from its reified guise of
the Other as the enabling ground of fieldwork. The Chilam Balam Ah P'izté
Project in Memory and History is precisely an experiment about (or “of”
and “in”) Maya Anthropology theorized in this manner. Such
an experiment is an experiment of itself: It is in this sense that experimental
ethnography is experimental, that is, it is an experiment without the
pretension of a teleology outside of itself, without a telos that seeks
transcendence from its own means and process.
Immediate reactions to this formulation might be that this presents
an extreme version of reflexive anthropology in a most autistic, narcissistic,
tautological, and self-legitimating form that blasphemously goes about
waving banners of objectivist science while scandalously detouring from
the “big” or significant questions of science in any of
its three modalities. From the perspective of “hard” science,
this vision of experimental ethnography is, clearly illegitimate since
it does not aim to “reveal” (or even produce) facts, much
less Truth, to be added to the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge while
erroneously using the language of methods and experimentation to signal
the misguided fieldwork being conceptualized. From the perspective of
“soft” humanist sciences, this construction of fieldwork
is inhumanely and inhumanly objectifying — signalled by the scientific
rhetoric of experimentation — since the Other is not deployed
as the anchor and target of an aestheticizing subjectification of persons
as the mirror of alterity and, thus, the proper object of study. From
the perspective of politico-instrumental science there are no lessons
or laws to be re-applied elsewhere since there is nothing to learn —
no lessons, no rules, no recipes or methods to generalize into prescriptive
statements of universal or specific applicability for the resolution
of issues elsewhere; here there is only the continued “un-resolvement”
of questions posed experimentally for exploration in particular historically
constituted scenes of engagement that is presented as its own agenda.
Each, in their specific formulations and treatment of their subject
matter, of the three projects that comprise The Field School in Experimental
Ethnography work within this theoretical framing that is neither that
of physical nor humanist-social sciences and that also does not belong
to the instrumental-political rationality of policy or practical-applied
sciences. Experimental ethnography abides by a logic and vision of science
that hypothesizes a different configuration of power, knowledge, and
practices, by which to operate. To propose such a reworking of the agenda
and the criteria by which to evaluate its process is itself an experiment.
A hypothesis to explore.
Subsequent to the 1997 field season, a long term research agenda of
the Chilam Balam Ah P'izté' Project in Memory and History emerged.
In relation to the expectable pains of an initial trial year, the undergraduate
level of the student participants, the particular mix of interests and
available student participants, and, perhaps most significantly, the
time needed to develop a more profound knowledge of both the ethnographic
situation and the archival materials, work in the memory/history project
remained more preliminary than the other two areas of The Field School.
The students who worked in this area focused on the creation of valuable
fieldwork experiences of cultural immersion, language learning, and
participant-centered participant observation — see following selection
from student portfolio. However, significant analytical ordering and
substantive data processing of the diverse resources for the memory/history
project was achieved. This was a fundamental step that involved processing
of data found in the various published and unpublished Steggerda documents,
re-tabulation of the financial records of the Carnegie’s economic
support of archeological projects from 1914-1956, sorting and cataloguing
Carnegie and E.H. Thompson photographs secured from the Peabody Museum
of Harvard, and the work on genealogical information for families that
appear on 1930s censuses and that presently reside in Pisté.
While these activities continued throughout the year and into part of
the 1998 season and, as other resources are brought into play, will
continue, the 1997 season succeeded in establishing the groundwork for
a program of research activities and fieldwork that will extend into
the next millenium.
The goals of open collaborative research — which parallel ideas
in critical pedagogy — continue to set a framing limit on the
definition of specific activities. Nonetheless, the specific mix of
research participants are determining factors in our ability to conceptualize
the research process for a given year and affect the type of community
participation and collaboration that can be sustained. To address this
issue, the 1998 season has programmed two installations, one early in
the 6 week season and one at the close which would be installed in conjunction
with the annual Ah Dzib P'izté' Art Expo. The first is conceived
as a “show-casing” of the project or announcement and call
to the community of the project and its possibilities. The second installation
remains an open question, as well as the fieldwork relations that led
to it. Strategic thinking is necessary in orchestrating the material
that can be deployed as triggers in both the mis-en-scenes of interviewing
and installed field sites so as develop over the years a working ethos
of collaboration and expectation with the community.
Despite the principle of open-endedness, collaboration does not mean
that there is no leadership or guiding ideas and decisions. Thus, specifically
on the horizon of this project are the following: the compilation of
the heterogeneous texts of the Steggerda dossier and the bilingual production
of an historical ethnography of the community in 1930s based on these
materials; fieldworking study with the descendents of Martin Dzib, Steggerda’s
interpreter and informant, that can lead to book studies and installations;
successive ethnographic installations over a period of several years
based in the extensive genealogical and census materials that Steggerda
has provided with increasing collaborative participation and revisioning
of the project en route; and a fieldworking study of the life and lives
of the community in relation to the 1920s-1930s reconstruction of Chichén
Itzá through the extensive use of both the photographic and textual
archive as installed triggers for the performative enactment of history
and memory. The indeterminacy of this experimental work has not frightened
funding agencies, for not only has the 1998 field season been funded
with a small seed grant, but the 1999 season has been awarded, with
a commitment for the 2000, a major grant from the Rockefeller Foundation
in conjunction with the Mexican Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las
Artes (FONCA) and the Bancomer Cultural Foundation.
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