SUNY series, Trans-Indigenous Decolonial Critiques

An Interactionist Theory of Indigenous Cultures

Victor Montejo

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438485775
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Mayalogue, Native Mayan scholar Victor Montejo provides an alternative reading and interpretation of cultures, challenging Western ethnocentric approaches that have marginalized Native knowledge and worldviews in the past. He proposes instead a methodology for studying culture as a unified whole, a radical departure from the compartmentalized sections of knowledge recognized by Western scientific tradition. Offering a strong critique of traditional anthropological studies, with its terms and categories that have denigrated Indigenous cultures throughout the centuries, Montejo's postcolonial work aims to dismantle the colonialist construction of Indigenous cultures, giving way to a Native approach that balances insider and outsider descriptions of a particular culture. Developed from an Indigenous Maya perspective, Mayalogue is a contribution to the dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, students, and general audiences in the social sciences and humanities, and will be an essential text in decolonizing the minds of those who engage in the study of cultures anywhere in the world in the twenty-first century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: An Indigenous Point of View
• 2 Anthropological Theories and Indigenous People
• 3 Decolonizing Maya History and Cultures
• 4 Mayalogue: The Treaty of Maya Ideas: Q’inal: Time, Life, and Existence
• 5 Mayalogue: From Oral Histories and Traditions to Written Ethnographies
• 6 Native Methods for Documenting History: Oxlan B’en: The Cyclical View of Time and History
• 7 Mayalogue: Ohtajb’al: Maya Knowledge and Epistemology
• 8 Mayalogue, the Interactionist Model: Humans, Nature, and the Supernatural World
• 9 The Tonal or Spirit Bearer: Human Nature/Animal Nature or the Theory of the Self
• 10 The “Cargo System” and World Maintenance
• 11 Mayalogue as a Cosmocentric Paradigm
• 12 World Building, World Maintenance, and World Dismantling
• 13 Prophetic Cycles and World Renewal
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover