It can be said that the central topic of this work by Marie-Odile Marion is the Lacandón group, subject to which she devoted most of her professional life. The work is as vast as it is deep and it discusses in a simple way –but with an elegant prose- the history of this ethnic group from its pre-Hispanic dynamic to modern times, touching most of its cultural manifestations: relationships man-woman, sociopolitical organization, everyday universe, rites of passage, rituals and cosmology.

Marion tries to understand the history and the different concepts that interweave the Lacandón reality through the study of the structures that regulate their relationships (man-man, man-nature and man-divinities) in relation to the plot of their social universe; she tries to understand the basis of their kinship relationship system; in the same way, she establishes a terminology for affinity and consanguinity and defines the norms of access to authority and power, all this by means of the logic of their forms of residence and filiation.

She also describes the place reserved for each person at the center of the exchange system, according to the prerogatives and duties inherent to men, women, adults and children throughout the activities they perform during the cycle of their everyday life, and in the complete cycle of their biological and social life. From this analysis emerges Marion’s essential postulate: men and women relate to the great cycles of human activity in order to guarantee the reproduction of their history and, therefore, of their society. This hypothesis allowed the author to prove, most of all, the pertinence of a model of thought that appeared in the various forms of social life and also in the imagined representations of the cosmos, of nature and of the supernatural world by means of the myths of oral tradition, which also offered the possibility of proposing an interpretation –whose rigorousness is acknowledged by the author- of the ritual complex.

Marion based part of her work on the interpretative model proposed by Graulich, and she acknowledges that this author has proved the pertinence of a comparative analysis of Mexican Pre-Hispanic myths and rituals. As Marion points out:

[Graulich] sketched a gigantic scheme of the ancient forms of thought when he underlined the origin of the great Mesoamerican conceptual schemes at the center of a common cultural melting point. His admirable saga of the pre-Hispanic Indian philosophy is, according to us, the most important anthropological contribution of recent years to the study of Mesoamerica’s ancient religions, whose implications, on the other hand, must be applied, for all useful purposes, to the interpretative study of contemporary Indian cultures (p. 13).

According to Graulich, the main model used by the ancient Mexicans to interpret their history is based on a perpetual movement of union and, later on, of disjunction of opposite principles that alternate to assure the consecutive restoration of cosmic balance. Order is established by the union of opposites, to which oppose rupture and confusion, introduced by disjunction: the reestablishment of the cyclic movement of the cosmos and of the idea of human history associated to it is the result of the alternation of those principles. In this way have been explained the great periods of man’s history, the origin of man’s failures and his successive conquests, the loss of immortality, the discovery of fire, the appearance of the Four Suns that mark the cataclysms of which men were witnesses and victims, the introduction of corn and the progressive instauration of a ritual system destined to guarantee the reproduction of a world threatened by the force of the stars and by the power of the gods associated to them.

All this constitutes an interpretative paradigm with which Marion agrees and, consequently, she says that:

This is how the ancient Mexicans explain their own philosophy of history, to which they submit themselves, both ideologically and socially, through the creation of mechanisms capable of satisfying the demands for a restoration of an always threatened, always uncertain balance. From this derives the establishment of a prodigious ritual system that nourishes from a mythological heritage, which is also impressive, and whose purpose is the immortalization of thought and of lived history in order to assure the continuity of those societies that vindicate themselves as heirs of that legacy (p. 14).

Grosso modo, this is the conceptual model used by Graulich and shared by Marion. In other words, the author’s main purpose was to interpret the symbolic system of the Lacandón Mayan. In this sense, Marion examines numerous examples of oral tradition and ritual practices and, as a result, we witness the emergence of certain assertions of various degrees of importance. One of them refers to the relationships that exist -despite the fact that they are both spatially and temporarily separated- between the collective representations of contemporary Lacandón and those of the neighboring Mayan societies (Chol and Yucatecan), or those of the ancient Mayan (the colonial Quiché), or of societies farther away as to geography and history (Toltec and Mexica of the central high plateau) or, even more, of those of the Mayan’s distant ancestors: the Olmec, much more ancient but nevertheless equally determining.

The various parallelisms established by Marion reinforced, according to the author, her initial hypothesis; that is, her analysis emphasized the homogeneity that exists between all these forms of cultural expression throughout the centuries and regions (without any doubt, this idea is coherent with those of Lévi-Strauss’). This explains the continuity of the Mesoamerican forms of thought at the center of the Indian cultures of nowadays Mexico.

This interpretative effort also allowed the author to discover the specificities of Mayan thought, the intellectual originality of the Lacandón and their attachment to certain concepts they have inherited and elegantly incorporated to their view of the present world in order to fulfill the particular conditions of their insertion in a hostile ecological environment. At the same time, these concepts have helped them to explain the modalities of their kinship system. Precisely in this way emerged the powerful image of the Mother-Moon, protector of women and of their efforts during labor, dean of this small matrilocal society in which symbolic power is transmitted through the uterus to counterbalance the power of the Sun, the universal fertilizer, whose journey, rest and nourishment must be guaranteed by men.

According to Marion, the attempts of the Lacandón to organize their cosmos also ordered their social system. They did this based on an ancient –though not obsolete- model and thus proved that the logic of their organization is based on the logic of their thought.

Not only does Marion synchronically analyze the symbolic dimension of the Mayan-Lacandón world, but she also performs a critical arrangement and review of the available data. This task led her to the analysis of several authors. Her historical analysis begins with early XX century works (Desiré Charnay and Alfred Tozzer), with researchers who lived with the Indians during the first decades of the XX century. Although these researchers did not have the chance to meet all the families, due to the large dispersion that existed between their units of residence, they were able to observe said Indians when they were just beginning to establish close and constant relationships with the Western society. This allowed them to transmit a large amount of data of estimable interest to the ethnologists that followed; she specially emphasizes Soustelle’s contributions about the families of San Quintín.

Marion indicates that since the fifties, the studies of the Lacandón were encouraged by Bruce’s works, who undertook, before exploring the mythology, the task of putting together a Lacandón grammar (1958) thanks to the familiarity he managed to establish with his informant Chank´in viejo (Chank´in the old), the narrator of Nahá. Bruce transcribed the myths (1974–1976) and dreams (1979) of the Indians of the northern group and he must be considered a pioneer of the studies regarding the Lacandón symbolic system. His books have an enormous advantage: they present the texts in Mayan and Spanish, which makes the interpretation work easier for the researchers.

Marion also states that Baer performed similar works at the heart of the southern group, but his results did not have the distribution Bruce’s did, and his contributions are limited to the study of interpersonal relationships and the recent history of the families of the Lacanjá location (1972).

These works, together with those developed during the seventies, for instance, J. Nordike (1973) and J. Nations (1979), are appointed by Marion to be the most important ever performed about the Lacandón society, and they were used as a starting point for the work of the author. Although there already were many very varied reports about the forms of social organization, material culture, mythology and rituals, a synthetic analysis was needed in order to deduce the logic of the social system built and structured over a conceptual frame that, despite the opinion of certain authors (such as Thompson), continues to provide order for the categories of Indigenous thought in order to orchestrate the great moments of said groups’ collective activity.

Marion’s contribution to the study of the Mayan of the tropical forest consists in a commendable effort to decipher that “forest of symbols” (the author gladly borrows Turner’s expression), where the trees carry the sap of life, while they are the pillars of social organization where the lakes of peaceful waters shelter powerful mythical representations, as that of the Moon, whose traits and characteristics she analyzed, leaving this beautiful book as an academic legacy to us.

Adrián Médina Liberty. Psychology Department, UNAM.
English translation by Denisse Piñera Palacios.