Intertwined Histories and Relational Personhood: Maya Co-essences (Spirit or Way Companions) Past and Present

Summary

It is widely recognized that co-essences or spirit companions (wayob) were a part of ancient Maya understandings of personhood. Partly because ethnographic analogies are used to understand ancient practices, it is easy to assume that beliefs and experiences surrounding Maya co-essences were static over many hundreds of years. In examining archaeological, epigraphic, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic data, this paper investigates the history of co-essences and, in turn, the way in which co-essences made history. Such human-spiritual relations were intertwined with shifting social identities of gender, class, and culture. As such, this paper considers relationality from a pluralistic perspective.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Dynamic Worlds, Shifting Paradigms: Relational Ontologies in Archaeology

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