The Integration, Cross and Fusion of the Colonial-Christians and Maya Culture in Guatemala.

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María Andrea Cáceres Sandoval                                                                                                                             D 0197 010

World Cultures Individual Study

The Integration, Cross and Fusion of the Colonial-Christians and Maya Culture in Guatemala

Introduction

It has been through cultural contact, that entire civilizations have been destroyed and disappeared while others just have combined, reconciled and coalesced their mutually opposed beliefs and practices into a new conglomerate whole marked by internal inconsistencies.  When these cultures blend, a new generation, with its own idiosyncrasy, emerges, different from where it originated, just as the result of new languages, mixture between races, together with the evolution of religions.  The essence of the Mayan culture (not referred to the classic Mayas, but to the new indigenous populations that descended from them) reshaped with the contribution of the different populations, especially in today’s Guatemala, revitalizing social patterns manifested through their material and spiritual culture, elements that enclose the conception of the world-life and the idiosyncrasy of the Mayan population nowadays. The traditions of the Mayan people are product of their particular historic development, its cultural specificity and the socioeconomic juncture that provided an irreplaceable view of the world.  These ancestral manifestations have three sources of origin: (1) the pre-Hispanic Maya heritage, whose cosmic vision remains; (2) the occidental link, represented by the Hispano-Arabic that burst in America at beginning of 16th-century; and (3) the contribution of the African population that where brought by the Spanish.  

However, in Guatemala it’s considered that the popular practice of the Mayan culture has mostly been influenced after the Spanish Conquest. It consists in a syncretism of the occidental culture with the indigenous folklore, where the "nature of ideas, deities, and practices derive from historically distinct traditions become reinterpreted and transformed in situations of a cultural encounter”. This Mayan syncretism has been debated from two perspectives:  (1) this merging took place between the persistence of the indigenous cult and the acceptance of the Spanish-Catholic costumes, and (2) this syncretism just reflects the exigency of the colonialism, in which the Maya where subjected under the Christian costumes.  Nevertheless, these two phenomena have allowed the syncretism and the ethnic relation to take place.  Simultaneously, it has been clearly reflected in the configuration of some techniques, processes and specific elements that, historically amalgamated, have given result to the popular arts and traditions, a new social culture and a hybridized religion, constructing the symbolic landscape of the people.

Artistic Syncretism

 

the quetzal, alluding to  the ‘feathered serpent’-Quetzalcoatl, and jaguars which implied memorial to the                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

         

        Other of the outstanding arts is the ceramics and pottery that keep the Mayan cultural expressions and inheritance of their designs and elaboration techniques syncretized with the occidental procedures.  These types of ceramics are characterized for being located in production centers where they used to be before the Spanish arrival.  These centers were prorated by their qualities like the ones in Chinautla, ‘’’’’’’’’’b                                                                                                        

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churches and cemeteries: among these we can find crockeries, flower vases, incense-holders, earthenware tubs and tombstones.

Socio-Religious Syncretism

During the Spanish Conquest many Mayan rituals, arts and socio-political powers were abruptly destroyed. Ancient temples ...

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