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September 2017 Vol. 55 No. 1

How have Maya past and present thought of themselves as they looked beyond the limits of family and community out into a wider world where people quite different from themselves lived? Did they conceive of themselves as a race, an ethnic group, a nation of some sort that included all of “them” but not the “others”? This question has occupied students of the contemporary and colonial-era Maya, especially as modern Maya increasingly adopt views drawn from Western scholarship to identify themselves as a people descended from the ancient Maya and distributed now by historical accident across various language and national boundaries. This edited volume of 11 essays is one of the first to explore the issue of Maya identity in the most comprehensive terms from the point of view of Maya archaeology and epigraphy, linguistics, history, and ethnography. It cannot offer definitive answers, but it forcefully highlights the problem by solidly documenting, for example, that Maya people never referred to themselves as Maya until recently. The essays trace avenues for future research and showcase research techniques and data sources that can clarify the complicated, changing nature of Indigenous identities.

--P. R. Sullivan, independent scholar

Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.