Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds: Religion and Modernity in a Transnational K'iche' Community (IMS Culture and Society)

Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds examines tension and conflict over ethnic and religious identity in the Kiche Maya community of San Andrs Xecul in the Guatemalan Highlands and considers how religious and ethnic attachments are sustained and transformed through the transnational experiences of locals who have migrated to the United States. Author C. James MacKenzie explores the relationship among four coexisting religious communities within Highland Maya villages in contemporary Guatemalacostumbre, traditionalist religion with a shamanic substrate Enthusiastic Christianity, versions of Charismaticism and Pentecostalism an inculturated and Mayanized version of Catholicism and a purified and antisyncretic Maya Spiritualitywith attention to the modern and nonmodern worldviews that sustain them. He introduces a sophisticated set of theories to interpret both traditional religion and its relationship to other contemporary religious options, analyzing the relation among these various worldviews in terms of the indigenization of modernity and the various ways modernity can be apprehended as an intellectual project or an embodied experience. Read more