Spiritual embodiment in a highland Maya community
Description
The Middle American soul has long held the interest of Westerners. Ever since Europeans first came into contact with Middle Americans, the former have debated the qualities, and even the existence, of souls in the Americas. Scholarship concerning the soul has continued into the present-century and occupies an important place in the anthropological corpus on the Maya. The present study will explore a contemporary expression of the Maya soul, focusing on that of the Kaqchikel Maya of San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala. An exploration of the domains of soul-therapy, midwifery, and community dance in Comalapa reveals these to convey complex understandings of soul, ones that implicate specific bodily operations and conditions. This being the case, these domains of activity are analyzed with an eye to ascertaining the nature of the relationship between body and soul among local Maya. I propose that human and non-human bodies are closely implicated in the existence and manifestation of soul, and articulate this as an operation of spiritual embodiment. Spiritual embodiment can be considered a corporal model of the soul, one that looks to apprehensible qualities of physical media, such as of the body, to gauge and explain features of a non-physical reality, such as of the soul. This approach to Maya soul speaks to the grounding of experience requisite to being Comalapan Maya while helping to contextualize local soul qualities of animation, mobility, and multiplicity