"Allen J. Christenson offers us in this wonderful book a testimony
to contemporary Maya artistic creativity in the shadow of civil
war, natural disaster, and rampant modernization. Trained in art
history and thoroughly acquainted with the historical and modern
ethnography of the Maya area, Christenson chronicles in this
beautifully illustrated work the reconstruction of the central
altarpiece of the Maya Church of Tz'utujil-speaking Santiago Atitla
n, Guatemala. The much-loved colonial-era shrine collapsed after a
series of destructive earthquakes in the twentieth century.
Christenson's close friendship with the Cha vez brothers, the
native Maya artists who reconstructed the shrine in close
consultation with village elders, enables him to provide detailed
exegesis of how this complex work of art translates into material
form the theology and cosmology of the traditional Tz'utujil Maya.
"With the author's guidance, we are taught to see this
remarkable work of art as the Maya Christian cosmogram that it is.
Although it has the triptych form of a conventional Catholic
altarpiece, its iconography reveals a profoundly Maya narrative,
replete with sacred mountains and life-giving caves, with the whole
articulated by a central axis mundi motif in the form of a sacred
tree or maize plant (ambiguity intended) that is reminiscent of
well-known ancient Maya ideas. Through Christenson's focused
analysis of the iconography of this shrine, we are able to see and
understand almost firsthand how the modern Maya people of Santiago
Atitla n have remembered the imagined universe of their ancestors
and placed upon this sacred framework their received truths in time
present." -- Gary H. Gossen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of
Anthropology and Latin American Studies, University at Albany,
SUNY
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