Listening in the Pakal controversy: A matter of care in Ancient Maya studies

Abstract

This article explores the fraught historical politics of a 20th-century controversy over a Classic Maya king. The controversy ostensibly concerned the age at death of a ruler discovered in 1952 in an elaborate sarcophagus at the Mexican site of Palenque. Combining osteological and epigraphic techniques, Mexican scholars estimated that the ruler died at about 40 or 50 years of age. Two decades later, an emerging collective of US hieroglyph experts claimed to have determined the grammatical structure of Maya glyphs for the first time and reevaluated the sarcophagus inscriptions. They concluded that the king, given the name ‘Pakal’, lived a remarkably long life of 80 years (603–683 ce). This reading sparked a controversy that would persist until 1999. At stake was not just how to tell the story of an ancient Maya lord, but who could tell it, with what evidence, and with what degree of certainty. The inclination of some Mexican archaeologists to adopt nationalist and Marxist orientations came into palpable tension with foreign scholars’ liberal, universalist knowledge practices. To address this problem, I rethink Pakal’s material mediation through bones and inscriptions as a ‘matter of concern’ (Bruno Latour) and ‘matter of care’ (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa). I show how these concepts facilitate the reconsideration of contradictory historical propositions as potential sites of coexistence among actors temporarily ill equipped to listen to each other’s claims. Ultimately, I present ‘listening’ as a technique of cosmopolitical care that complements the extensive emphasis on speech and spokespersonship in Latourian cosmopolitics.