February 13, 2010 Nick Hopkins, PhD: "One Thousand Years of Maya
Literary Tradition: From
Classic Inscriptions to Chol Folktales"
The tremendous advances in the reading of Classic
period Maya
hieroglyphic inscriptions in the late 20th century have made it
possible to treat Classic texts like other literatures and subject them
to critical analysis. Although generally devoted to history, these
texts are not simply lists of historical events; rather, they present
the history in narrative form, and there is a literary style that is
manifested on most monuments. Examining the narrative structures and
rhetorical devices of these texts has led to the revelation that
elements of the Classic literary canon persist in formal storytelling
in modern Maya societies. In this talk a comparison was made
between the two extremes of this literary tradition, taking examples
from well-known hieroglyphic texts and pointing out parallels in
contemporary Chol, and other Mayan, narratives. The evidence shows that
the Classic Maya not only mastered astronomy, mathematics, and the
visual arts, but that they also had a rich literature, a fact that is
seldom appreciated.
In addition to the afternoon talk, Dr. Hopkins
also offerred a morning workshop on the Palace
Tablet at Palenque.
Among the lengthy hieroglyphic inscriptions of
Palenque, the Palace Tablet has long confused epigraphers. In early
interpretations, it was thought that towards the end of the text, a
mysterious new ruler appeared, one who was otherwise unknown. Now we
know better. Applying Kathryn Josserand's principles of text structure
and her own rules for text and image relations, Karen Bassie concluded
that the mystery protagonist was actually the Drum Major Headdress, an
artifact featured on a number of Palenque's monuments. In this workshop
the text of the Palace Tablet was parsed, showing its narrative
structure and the devices that signal text divisions and mark principal
events, and some quantitative methods were applied that aid in the
interpretation of inscriptions. In the process the
history of the headdress was sketched and speculation made on its
meaning for the rulers of
Palenque.
Nick
Hopkins holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago
and has done extensive field work in modern Maya societies in Mexico
and Guatemala. Primarily a linguist, he has published on Mayan
languages, and he has been involved in Maya epigraphy since the 1950s.
With his late wife Kathryn Josserand he has studied the narrative
discourse of Mayan languages, including Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions.
Currently managing Jaguar Tours, specializing in guided visits to Maya
sites, he has taught anthropology and linguistics at the University of
Texas, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Universidad
Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, and Florida State
University. He has published some three dozen articles in a number of
academic journals, and is presently working on a dictionary of Chol
Mayan and organizing research material for an electronic archive:
the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.
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