The Mayas

The last couple of weeks have been a challenge for Helena Iara (and, of course, for her parents): we just flew from Florianópolis to Santa Fe, and though the trip was much better than anyone might have expected with a little baby, it hasn't left much time for blogging -- or even talking about philosophy!  I guess I leave the excuses for the lack of recent posts at that.

One of the wonderful things about parenting is the sense of solidarity with other parents, who know what you are going through, and who often have clothes, toys, and lots of other baby things that their own kids have just grown out of.  So when we got to Santa Fe, we got wonderful presents from friends, including several cloth books.

Most of the books are bound like the books that most of us read, but one of them was bound as a codex, where the sheet folds over on itself to make pages, so one is opened on the left, the next on the right.  Until the end of the middle ages, many European books were bound as a codex (other were in scrolls), but I took advantage of the form of the book to tell Helena about Maya literature.  We have some of the most famous tales from the Maya post-classical period (the Popul Vuh, the Chilam Balam) in codices with beautiful glyphs and illustrations.  I would have liked to tell her the stories, but it has been too long since I have read them, and I didn't want to get them wrong.  So instead, I told her a little about contemporary Mayan philosophy, especially that of the Zapatistas.

It's the nature of American news to cover a story only when there is novelty or tragedy or violence, so when the Zapatistas took San Cristóbal in 1994, it got headlines around the world.  Now, when I tell friends about the Zapatistas, many of them say, "They're still around?"  The truth is, though, that the 1994 revolution gave the Mayas control over a huge territory in the south of Mexico, and though no other country recognizes them as independent, that have basically created their own nation-state.

Helena and I haven't talked political philosophy much, so it takes time to explain how different Zapatista ideas about democracy are from Euro-American ones.  Leaders, for instance, are not elected, but chosen in a lottery (exactly as was done in Athens, lest we think this is a strange idea), and they are obliged to listen to the ideas of all of the people in their village and then implement those idea, whether they like them or not.  All decisions are discussed in detail and at length (a Zapatista joke: "How many Zapatistas does it take to screw in a light bulb?"  Answer: "Come back in a week and I'll tell you after we talk it over."), but not in the way of the English parliament or US congress.  I was struck, for instance, when working with a Zapatista NGO in Chiapas, that the indigenous members of the group would caucus together, then present one coherent idea to the whole group.  Within their caucus, they could debate each other, but when faced with the other (from another village, another social group), they would always stand together.

The fundamental idea of the Zapatistas, something they get from Maya thought and from Liberation Theology, is autonomy, sometimes translated into Tsotsil as Stalel Stuk, or "doing and thinking for oneself."  In the United States, the tradition of protest movements is to demand rights or benefits from the government: the civil rights movement or the women's suffrage movements were all about the fact that women and blacks had been excluded from the state, and needed to be included as a way to be recognized as human beings (a very Hegelian idea) and to gain more prosperity.  The Zapatistas, in contrast, decided to cut themselves off from the Mexican government.  They did not want to gain recognition, rights, or benefits from the state.  They wanted to be left alone, so that they could do it themselves.

And in fact, they have done a better job than the Mexican state: whether we're talking about education (obligatory for Maya kids, available for all of them, and good), agricultural innovation (the Zapatistas set up their own agricultural university), or security (the Zapatista area is one of the few parts of Mexico not demolished by the violence of the drug war), the Zapatistas' autonomy has made life much better for them.  And perhaps more significantly, when you see an indigenous peasant in Chiapas, in Zpatista controlled territory, she'll have a straight back and she'll look you in the eye with pride.  Not many other places in Mexico (or the world) that you could say that.