WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Mayan Astronomy

Note 4: Rigoberta Menchu-Tum: The Way Time Stands Today. 2/26/99

Rigoberta Menchu Tum said in an interview before she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize that

"The Mayas, our grandparents, always said; every human being occupies a small piece of time. Time itself is much longer, and because of this they always said that we must care for this earth while we are on it because it will be part of our children and the children of our grandchildren. They know that life is short, that it can end so soon, and that if one gets lost on the way, others will come to take their place."

Occupying "a small piece of time" is an idea that marks the profound difference between Eurocentric and native American perceptions of reality. Understanding what it means to occupy time, knowing why a life committed to taking care of the earth is the only logical and necessary activity associated with the reality of occupying time, knowing why that is a necessary condition of being in time, and comprehending what it means that one can get "lost on the way," and that "others will come to take [your] place" if you do get lost, is not a linear series of unconnected ideas, each one compartmentalized inside its own box or cell of potential doing, but is instead the only way that native Americans have ever defined the way that human beings are perceived as being(s) related to the world. To assume that Europeans do not recognize, at least at some remedial level of knowing, the difference between their own practical relationship to the world and the one that native Americans have had and maintained for thousands of years is the same as missing the point of the last five hundred years of history in the Western hemisphere.

David Stoll, in his recent book, I, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Westview Press, 1999), has claimed that Menchu's autobiography (I, Rigoberta Menchu) is flawed because its factual content is inaccurate. She claims, for instance, according to Stoll, that she witnessed the murder of her brother in the plaza of Chajul by the Guatemalan army. Stoll claims that interviews with the people of the village revealed that the murder never occurred as she describes it, even if he does not dispute the fact that the Guatemalan army was responsible for her brother's death. Stoll's impulse to cast doubt on Menchu's recollections of past events is firmly grounded in an academic insistence on accuracy in reporting facts that are perceived as being relevant to the issues in hand and at stake in the controversial history of human and civil rights violations that have occurred in Guatemala during the past thirty years. Documentation of the abuses committed by the Guatemalan government during the civil war there is both extensive and overwhelming in its condemnation of official policy and behavior. No one can dispute the fact that most of the victims of the army's campaigns were Mayas living in remote, rural areas of the country. If Stoll's objective is to turn those truths into lies by casting doubt on the veracity of Menchu's personal experiences, his effort cannot possibly be successful because evidence to the contrary cannot be made to disappear. Simply because Stoll has found a citizen of Chajul who remembers a different set of circumstances for events that have receded as much as fifteen or twenty years into the past does not mean that the Guatemalan army never killed a native American in or near that village. In short, unless David Stoll is stupid or a fool or both, his purpose cannot be to turn factual evidence of European genocide against native Americans into distortion and falsehood.

So, if that is not his purpose, what does he seek to accomplish by discrediting Menchu's account of her own life? Take the issue from the point of view of authority as it is played out in academic circles, in general, and in the academic discipline of Anthro(a)pology in particular. Stoll, like Levi-Strauss, is an anthro(a)pologist who has spent years studying the issue of whether or not Menchu's account can be read as authentic and truthful. James Clifford, in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1988), a book dealing in large part with the problem of authority in ethnographic texts, notes that many problems arise in a field-worker's attempt to deal with the native informants he encounters who supply him with the information he/she later translates into a book about the native population he has been studying. The relationship between Stoll and the old man in the plaza at Chajul falls generally into this category. Clifford notes that

"Informant's intentions are overdetermined, their words politically and metaphorically complex. If accorded an autonomous textual space, transcribed at sufficient length, indigenous statements make sense in terms different from those of the arranging ethnographer." (51)

What I find curious about Stoll's claim is that he never seems to have encountered a native informant who offered information that contradicted his own preconceived (?) expectation that Menchu was guilty of fabricating her personal experiences. That seems odd since anthro(a)pologists have always complained that native accounts cannot be trusted to produce data consistent with the researcher's point of view, data that always already supports whatever conclusion the ethnographer intends to reach and later publish. Stoll, unlike every other field-researcher in the history of ethnographic study, found only collaboration for his conclusion in years and years of field-work and study.

What we seem to have here is a kind of inversion of standard expectations, a reversal of the primary expectation, so to speak, which every field-researcher trained in ethnography in any and every university in the western world carries with him/her into the field of study; namely, that the informant can be expected to misrepresent the truth the ethnographer is seeking to verify. In this single case, apparently, Stoll failed to encounter the realization of that universal truth since all his informants confirmed the fact the Rigoberta Menchu lied about her own life experiences. There can be any number of possible explanations for the existence of this apparent paradox in David Stoll's research. Perhaps Menchu's neighbors and friends were jealous of her notoriety and success and took advantage of an opportunity to discredit her veracity. Maybe Stoll was perceived by his informants as an agent of the Guatemalan army who had been sent among them to find the people who were willing to tell the truth to an anglo stranger so they could be singled out for execution later in order to preserve the myth that Eurocentric genocide against native Americans has never occurred in the Western hemisphere. That would be motive enough in Guatemala to say to him whatever the informant thought the government wanted them to say. "No such event ever occurred here," seems like the right kind of answer to return to army headquarters.

Wherever the truth might lie, the point I want to make is that Stoll's book successfully accomplishes what the Guatemalan army and government could not do: it achieves a first step in the process of disappearing Rigoberta Menchu-Tum. Anathema to all Eurocentric anthro(a)pologists is the notion that any native American ever be allowed to speak for him/herself. Anyone who is surprised by the fact that the first challenge to Menchu's autobiography came from an ethnographer has no knowledge of what anthro(a)pology has always already been about. At issue in the discipline is who speaks for the native American. That Rigoberta Menchu spoke for herself makes an attack against her veracity inevitable because she did not allow a European ethnographer to speak for her, to speak in place of her, to take her place and speak the truth about Guatemala. Stoll has demonstrated that Menchu has gotten "lost on her way," by fabricating the events of her own life, and therefore, he has come "to take her place," to take over the task of speaking the truth about her, about Guatemala, about the CIA's involvement in the death-squads that disappeared her brother and the other members of her family, and so on and so forth.

The concept of occupying "a small piece of time," whenever a Maya person says that, points to the complex of social relationships that I have tried to outline in the discussion of multiples of 13 in Maya astronomy in the previous note. To the Maya person time is not a linear sequence of days that are always already lost to the past before they begin to happen in the present moment. Time has that characteristic only in a circumstance where its progression is predicated on nothing whatsoever except a meaningless revolution of one dead and lifeless celestial body around the fixed position of another dead and lifeless celestial body. Time is dead before it begins only in European conceptions of reality. In native American perceptions of the world time is a living entity that has always already existed as a place where living people interact with the living spirits that animate all celestial bodies. The Maya calendar records, day by day, the relationships that exist between and among the people living in their "small piece of time" and the spirits who occupy it with them. The calendar makes a record of which spirits animate any given day in the sequence that defines a person's actual, living and deathless, "small piece of time" as it transpires from day to day. The point of counting time in multiples of 13, as the 260-day almanac does, as the Mayas have done, concerns the fact that the almanac has the capacity to integrate the periods of the sun, moon, and visible planets against the stellar background, has the capacity to integrate the periods of every object of time that anyone can name, in a nearly perfect repetitious harmony that replicates the past, day-name by day-name and spirit-force by spirit-force and planetary position by planetary position, that preserves the living integrity of the past rather than allowing it to die before it begins as Europeans have always already done.

The past cannot live in Eurocentric thought processes because European calendars have virtually no connection to anything natural that determines what time is. Making a calendar out of preserving the occurrence of the equinoxes and solstices on the same calendrical day four times a year is so minimal a concession to the majesty of time as to be ludicrous and absurd in the face of what more "primitive" and "savage" cultures have managed to accomplish. The idea that the past still exists, of course, is a positive horror to any European because everyone of them hopes against hope that the genocide they have already managed to commit and forget will not and cannot come back to haunt them. It does and it will.

The fact that Rigoberta Menchu connects, without apparent effort, the ideas of time, preservation of the earth, and the threat of being replaced by another in ones "small piece of time," demonstrates the authenticity of her voice. No European could ever mimic the simplicity of that statement. No European understands the concept of preserving the earth and its natural resources because Europeans believe they were put here and sanctioned by God to destroy the earth, to plunder its natural resources for the sake of their own material gain. If the entire world and every living creature on it must die to satisfy their greed, the living Word of their omnipotent God tells them in every sentence of the Myth of Eden that their behavior is not only justified but is demanded from them as their duty since they are always already fatally flawed by their irreversible commitment to original sin. On a brighter note, of course, any one of them can escape that onus of damnation by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their human Savior. Strange as it may seem, cannibalism really is the lesser evil of all the available kinds of behavior that Eurocentric discourse justifies and demands.

David Stoll's crime against Rigoberta Menchu is concealed in his effort to diminish her place in the "small piece of time" that is her life. Whatever his motivation, he can only be condemned for the attempt to take her place in time.

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To reach [Note 1]; [Note 2]; [Note 3]; [Note 5]; [Note 6]; [Note 7]; [Note 8]; [Note 9]; [Note 10]; [Note 11]; [Note 12]; [Note 13]; [Note 14]; [Note 15]; [Note 16]; [Note 17] in this series of thoughts.