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The Ah Dzib P'izté' Art Project exemplifies
how trans-culturation is a basic mechanism of cultural invention and
self-constitution. The wood and stone art of Pisté
was invented in the 1970s by an employee of the federal anthropology
institution; it occurred to this custodian of the archeological site
of Chichén Itzá that on his free time he might carve a
tree trunk into an image of one the famous Maya stone carvings and sell
this to tourists. The art has only and always existed in the context
of tourism as “artisanry” and within the anthropological
visions of the Maya that are produced and circulated within the tourist
market. This work of art and artisanry then are themselves ethnographies
of tourism and anthropology in that they report in the media of wood
and stone the consumer tastes, aesthetics, marketing, and circulation
of knowledge that tourists and anthropologists bring to Chichén
Itzá. By researching and installing the first exhibit of
Pisté artisanry, we sought to transform this “artisanry”
into “art” and the “artisans” into “artists.”
As anthropologists studying arts and artisans of Pisté we are
also thus studying ourselves - that is, “us” anthropologists,
tourists, and non-Maya generally - being “studied” by the
artists/artisans of Pisté who have created an art based on their
assessment of the consumer styles and markets of both tourists and anthropologists.
This is not a circular reflection back and forth between magic mirrors
that make “real” social reality fall out of sight and touch
between mirrors and texts. Instead, this process must be comprehended
historically, as part of history and as having a history: the
mutual and reciprocal borrowing, copying, and cultural differentiation
between Maya, Yucatec, Mexican, US-American, and European cultures can
be traced back to the 19th century, at least, when Anglo-Americans and
non-Spanish Europeans began traveling in the worlds of the Maya as tourists
and archeologists and the knowledge they produced was used by Yucatecos
and Mexicans to forge regional and national societies.
Expo 1997
Ah Dzib P'izté' was an exposition of Maya Art and Artists
from Pisté, México, which is a Yucatec Maya community
located just three kilometers west of the ancient city of Chichén
Itzá. This exposition was organized by The Field School
of Experimental Ethnography as a central component of an ongoing ethnographic
research project. The Field School broadly seeks to explore new
modes of doing anthropology so as to surpass the sterile choices of
modern social science -- scientific objectivity and romantic relativism.
The research culminating in EXPO’97 Ah Dzib P'izté' confounds
the distinction between “applied” and “pure”
research, just as the exhibition itself dispels and recarves such wearisome
distinctions as that between “art” and “artisanry,”
“tourist” and “native,” and between the Culture
of the First World and the Civilizations of the Third and Fourth Worlds.
The art of Pisté was born in the historical whirlpool of anthropological
and touristic involvement in local life that began in the 19th century.
Project Ah Dzib P’izté’
was designed and executed by the anthropology students in the Field
School of Experimental Ethnography. These students received training
in new ethnographic methods based on principles of collaboration, “double
sensation,” evocation, ethnographic triggers, and transculturation.
Carving wood and stone is an art that was created in Pisté in
the mid-1970s when a custodian of the archeological site of Chichén
Itzá, Don Chablé, decided to carve wooden idols in the
image of ancient Maya gods and personages as depicted in the Maya codices
such as the Dresden Codex or in ancient stone and stucco carvings of
Chichén and Palenque. His experimentation with different local
trees, especially the chakáand pich, and with different images
or forms, was expressly for the purpose of selling a product to tourists
who came to visit Chichén, which was at that moment just beginning
an explosive increase of visitors that has continued for the last 20
years. He soon developed a skill and a market, which he
guarded from others. However, curiosity and envy compelled many
young boys and some adults to secretly observe and copy his techniques
and artwork as a way to explore economic alternatives to the unstable
subsistence farming of corn. Thus, a whole generation of artisans
came into existence who were known as “chac mooleros” because
of the idol that they most typically carved, that is the chac mool which
is the famous reclining human figure that sits with knees bent holding
with both hands a plate over the abdomen, supposedly to receive the
fresh heart and blood of sacrifice.
From these first “chac mooleros” a richly complex, delicate,
and original art form emerged in direct relation to tourism, the international
mystique of the Maya, the history of anthropological involvement in
the community, and the tourist obsession with souvenirs. Constrained
by the tourist refusal to pay the cost of high quality indigenous art,
skilled artists have been compelled to quickly make generic figures
and to not explore their creative inspirations. For the Expo ‘97
project we asked artists to contribute two or three of their most refined
and detailed pieces -- the collection mostly consists of entirely unique
works of art whose distinctive value is inestimable in the contemporary
art market.
Fieldwork is focused on the work of trans-culturation that saturates
all facets of the project, from the collaborative study with the artists,
the history of anthropology in Pisté, to the art itself, the
market in which it is sold, and the exposition of the artists’
work. The goals of this ethnographic project, which has culminated in
the Ah Dzib P'izté' Art Expo’97, are:
1 to facilitate
the cross and transcultural exchanges between different communities
through the specific pedagogical context of providing USA-based undergraduates
training in anthropology through a total immersion program in México
whose particular goals are:
2 to explore
new experimental methods of ethnographic fieldwork and writing that
are rooted in the quotidian processes of cultural invention, exchange,
interaction, and evocation in which research occurs;
3 to install
in Pisté the first exhibit of local art, to make it an annual
event, and to direct it primarily towards a community audience versus
solely a tourist attraction;
4 to reinstall
the exhibit at international sites in the USA, as well as to explore
possibilities in Spain and Argentina, and to create a catalog study
of Pisté art based on the exhibit in addition to other ethnographic
writings;
5 to stimulate
and acknowledge the creative genius of the Maya artists by showing the
exhibit internationally and through the publication of both a marketing
catalog and scholarly book-length studies;
6 to promote the
Maya artists of Pisté and facilitate their access to and recognition
within the international market of art;
7 to use ethnographic
fieldwork and research processes in new ways to forge new links and
relationships between cultural communities situated in different geopolitical
and economic locations in the world so that anthropology can become
more pertinent to these communities in their addressing the social issues
and problems that they experience.
Publications derived from the Ah Dzib P'izté'
Armstrong Fumero, Fernando
2000 Making Art in Pisté: Art and Experimental Ethnography
in a Yucatec Maya Community. Master’s Thesis, Department
of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
Castañeda, Quetzil E., Fernando Armstrong
Fumero and Lisa C. Breglia
1999 Ah Dzib P'izté': Modern Maya Art in Ancient Tradition. Exhibition Catalog. Lake Forest, IL: Lake Forest College.
Castañeda, Quetzil E.
2009 Aesthetics and Ambivalence of Maya Modernity: The Ethnography of Maya Art. In J. Kowalski and Mary Katherine Scott, eds., Crafting Maya Identity. DeKalb, Il.: NIU Press.
2005 Between Pure and Applied Research: Ethnography in a Transcultural Tourist Art World. Special Issue, Anthropological Contributions
to the Tourism Industry. Tim Wallace, editor. NAPA
Bulletin, #23: 87-118.
2005 Community Collaboration and Ethnographic Intervention: Dialogues in the Pisté Maya Art World. Practicing Anthropology, vol. 27 (4): 31-34.
2004 Art-Writing in the Maya Art World of Chichén Itzá: Transcultural Ethnography and Experimental Fieldwork.American
Ethnologist, vol. 31 (1): 21-42.
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