Rethinking the Maya : Understanding an Ancient Language in Modern Linguistic Terms

Since the 1500s, Mayan language and glyphic systems have been romanticized by Eurocentric interpretations. In recent years, many anthropological works have perpetuated these myths by presenting inaccurate analyses of Maya linguistics. Rather than showing the Maya as an advance and civilized people, these texts promoted a weak, barbarous Maya who could be easily manipulated by European culture, language, and written form. Utilizing French poet Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) idea of the Palimpsest, traditional anthropologists have perpetuated the Mayan Palimpsest, or the masking over of the original Mayan culture with the new. Rather than revealing the underlying cultural characteristics of the Mayan languages, as Baudelaire’s theory would have presumably encouraged, Westerners have reinvented the Mayan past and masked over Mayan spoken and written languages with new vague and biased interpretations of their peoples and languages. The underlying goal of this paper is to deconstruct the Mayan Palimpsest; that is, the Eurocentric views within traditional Mayan language studies, in order to promote a more accurate interpretation of the Mayan linguistic past.