This essay builds on a critique of anthropological knowledge production of
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links these two parts of the article is a questioning of the politics and
possibilities of respect of and for indigenous/subaltern peoples such as the Maya
who continue to live under (neo-)colonialist conditions that create a wholesale lack
of respect for colonized and subaltern peoples. The article is written in a
schizophrenic voice of a doubly Maya-Non-Maya, anthropologist-postcolonialist who
narrates a divinatory story of ethnographic realities as a post-Maya Chilam Balam
(roughly, ‘priest’). Exploring the trendiness of and fashion for
‘being Maya’, this ethnographic foray might seem to be an
‘experimental ethnography’ or even an
‘autoethnography’, but is instead just as much a critique of
this new academic pretension as it is of the Mexican political system that
manipulates ‘Maya’ identity.
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