Stephen Houston, David Stuart & Karl Taube. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and experience among the Classic Maya.

Hammond, Norman

STEPHEN HOUSTON, DAVID STUART & KARL TAUBE. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and experience among the Classic Maya. viii+324 pages, 265 illustrations. Austin (TX): University of Texas Press; 0-292-71294-4 hardback 35 [pounds sterling].

The body is fashionable these days: in Vienna the Kunsthistorisches Museum's summer 2006 Giambologna exhibit was titled Triumph of the Body, while the new Musee du Quai Branly in Paris opened at the same time with Stephane Bretons Qu'est ce qu'un corps? The latter, exploring cross-cultural attitudes to the human body, alive or dead, was the less aesthetic, more didactic exemplar of what is now termed Body Theory or BT. BT has actually been around for some time: Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter (1993), seen by some anthropologists as an ur-text, followed considerable earlier discussion of the sociopolitical importance of the body, actual and metaphorical, that began with Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies (1957), which stimulated in turn Marie Axton's The Queen's Two Bodies (1977), and Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn's Renaissance Bodies (1990). BT has been a concern in studies of Renaissance culture for a generation: its arrival in archaeology is relatively recent, although Alfredo Lopez Austin's Cuerpo humano e ideologia (1980) was, as Houston and his colleagues note, a pioneering work in Mesoamerican ethnohistory.

One of the first studies to bring BT into Maya archaeology was Estella Weiss-Krejci's 'Restless corpses' (2001), which together with her 'Mortuary representations of the noble house' (2004) used documented funerary practices of medieval European nobility to illuminate those of the Classic Maya. The Memory of Bones now takes up what the authors define as 'the content, network, and texture of body concepts among the Classic Maya' (p. 3), based heavily on the evidence of epigraphy, sculpture, and vase painting although 'the Maya body had many features, of which only a few were noted by the scribes and sculptors of the Maya world (p. 56). Stuart and Taube are equal intellectual contributors in the enterprise, but the authorial voice is distinctively (and admittedly: p. 8) Houston's: the result is an intellectually coherent, stylistically unified, and highly illuminating book.

After an extensive introduction to the Maya body and its terminology in prehispanic, contact and modern vocabularies, there are chapters on 'bodies and portraits', 'ingestion', 'senses', 'emotions', dishonor', 'words on wings' and 'dance, music, masking', described as the 'vertebrae' of the book's spine (in which case the cerebral introduction is presumably the head, and the epilogue on 'body, being, and experience among the Classic Maya' literally the tailpiece). This skeleton gives no sense, however, of the richness of nuance and abundant apercus that the authors provide to flesh out their conceptual schema. Some observations are extant commonplaces or from uncited works, others have the authors disagreeing with their own earlier selves. Living and historic Mayan languages, notably Ch'olan, Ch'olti' and Yukatek, provide a wealth of terminology for body parts and functions, which the book examines from the skin inwards, relating them always where possible to Classic period glyphs and sculptures.

Those bodies were animate, with a soul (ch'ulel), the divinity that hedged royal rank (k'u) or a spirit co-essence (way), and sexualised: nudity is notable in some recently discovered Maya art, including the San Bartolo murals, and sexual action is, though rare, not unknown (for instance at Naj Tunich). Gustatory acts are similarly rarely portrayed, but the authors make good use of Charles Wisdom's unpublished Ch'orti' materials from the 1930s (as in other chapters) to explain Maya ingestion at both ends of the alimentary tract. It's a pity that most portrayals of enema administration, as with many of food and drink consumption, are on looted vessels (the authors caution that the faker's hand may be responsible for some unique features), the more so since the recent interest in Maya feasting, detectable from archaeological evidence, contrasts with the small numbers that could have been served by the victuals shown in courtly scenes on painted pots. Tombs, however, often had numbers of vessels sufficient to hold food and drink--notably cacao--for many more persons than the single deceased.

The authors seek to understand not just the ancient Maya body but the Maya mind also, and suggest a synaesthetic blending of sensory perception where, for example, sound can be expressed as colour. Aroma was shown by a curl, speech (as elsewhere in Mesoamerica) by a scroll, which was also used for music: the pax drum on the Santa Rita murals has not only a sound-scroll rising from its membrane, but another from a singing skull on the side which seems to epitomise the 'hoarse noise' noted by Spanish chroniclers (Hammond 1972: 126-7). Maya notions of taste and touch are better evidenced linguistically than iconographically, but breath could be expressed in many ways: as maize leaves on Piedras Negras Stela 40, metonymically for 'life' (Hammond 1981: 79) or as the Ik sign used for wind.

Whether we can understand past emotion from Maya visual expression is doubtful, and doubted: the authors note that the naturalism which we see in Maya sculpture and vase painting is 'deceptively transparent', leading us on--as we have done with the art of Classical Greece--to believe that because we understand what is shown, we therefore understand also what mental processes lay behind it. The Memory of Bones is packed with such thoughtful and thought-provoking ideas, some of them straining at the edge of credibility but few dismissable as fantasy: Houston in particular has mined the literature of other disciplines too well for that, and the insights which Stuart and Taube add from their unmatched knowledge of Maya script and imagery make this a rare and illuminating insight into the non-material aspects of material culture.

References

AXTON, M. 1977. The Queen's Two Bodies. London: Royal Historical Society.

BUTLER, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'. New York: Routledge.

GENT, L. & N. LLEWELLVN. 1990. Renaissance Bodies: the Human Figure in English Culture. London: Reaktion.

HAMMOND, N. 1972. Classic Maya Music. Part 1: Drums. Archaeology 25: 124-31.

--1981. Pom for the ancestors: a reexamination of Piedras Negras Stela 40. Mexicon 3: 77-9.

KANTOROWICZ, Ernst, 1957. The King's Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

WEISS-KREJCI, E. 2001. Restless Corpses: 'Secondary Burial' in the Babenberg and Habsburg Dynasties. Antiquity 75: 769-80.

--2004. Mortuary representations of the noble house: A cross-cultural comparison between collective tombs of the ancient Maya and dynastic Europe. Journal of Social Archaeology 4: 368-404.

NORMAN HAMMOND

Department of Archaeology, Boston University, USA