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''Pirates of Our Spirituality'' : The 2012 Apocalypse and the Value of Heritage in Guatemala
Elizabeth R. Bell Latin American Perspectives 2012 39: 96 originally published online 6 September 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X12458421 The online version of this article can be found at: http://lap.sagepub.com/content/39/6/96

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Pirates of Our Spirituality The 2012 Apocalypse and the Value of Heritage in Guatemala
by Elizabeth R. Bell

Maya spirituality serves as a locus of enunciation for the ongoing negotiation between local expressive culture and a changing globalized society. In recent years the Mayas of Guatemala have subversively used the global market provided by tourism to survive economically, recover their cultural property, and reclaim their heritage. Lacking voice and representation in an environment that has historically threatened their way of life, they assert their heritage in order to valorize their culture. They employ public knowledge and experience of natural disasters to demonstrate not just the accuracy of the 2012 prophecies of change at the end of the Maya calendars long count, but also the value of the knowledge systems that produced them. La espiritualidad maya sirve como un lugar de enunciacin de la negociacin en curso entre la cultura local expresiva y la sociedad cambiante y globalizada. En los ltimos aos los mayas de Guatemala han utilizado subversivamente el mercado global provisto por el turismo para sobrevivir econmicamente, recuperar su patrimonio cultural, y recuperar su patrimonio. Careciendo de voz y representacin en un ambiente que histricamente ha amenazado su modo de vida, han afirmado su patrimonio con el fin de valorar su cultura. Ellos emplean el conocimiento pblico y la experiencia de los desastres naturales para demostrar no slo la exactitud de las profecas del 2012 del cambio al final de la cuenta larga del calendario maya, sino tambin el valor de los sistemas de conocimiento que los produjo. Keywords: Tourism, 2012 apocalypse, Mayas, Mayan spirituality, Intangible cultural heritage

Casual conversation among residents of the United States would reveal that most are familiar with the ominous date of December 21, 2012. Circulating for years among the New Age community, references to the perceived implications of the year 2012 have recently filtered into popular culture with the largebudget special-effects Hollywood film 2012 (2009) and even the official Britney Spears video for her 2011 Billboard top hit Till the World Ends (urging listeners to, unsurprisingly, dance until the world ends, which the video implies occurs on December 21, 2012). Both of these examples imply that the end of
Elizabeth R. Bell is a senior lecturer at the Ohio State University, where she received her Ph.D. from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with a minor in folklore studies in 2012. She has spent extensive time in Guatemala since 2007, most recently under a Fulbright grant. Her research focuses on Kaqchikel-Maya spirituality and investigates those practices as a means of resisting domination.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 187, Vol. 39 No. 6, November 2012 96-108 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X12458421 2012 Latin American Perspectives

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2012 will bring about an apocalypse, notably through a series of cataclysmic natural disasters. The idea behind this is that a long cyclical count in the sacred Maya calendar will end on December 21, 2012. A cycle of 144,000 days is called a Baqtun, and 2012 will mark the end of 13 Baqtun, a count that began on August 11, 3114 BCE. Because the Maya sacred count goes from 1 to 13, reaching the top number 13 prompts a return to the beginning count of the calendar. A common misconception is that this is the same as the calendars resetting to zero, which seems an ominous prospect. In reality, because the calendar is cyclical, the count may reset but will continue counting again through another Baqtun and beyond. Foreigners seem to have a wide array of opinions on this topic, as evidenced at least by the approximately 4,800 fiction and nonfiction books on the 2012 prophecies available for purchase on Amazon.com, as well as numerous virtual discussions and business ventures (see, e.g., Messages from the Heart of the Mayan Lands, 2012). I will discuss the response of the Kaqchikel Mayas of Guatemala to the popularization of the 2012 prophecies and characterize the differences between their discourse and the non-Maya discourse manifested in tourism. Given their proximity to the capital and thus to the flow of foreigners and foreign goods, they have produced a good deal of interesting dialogue surrounding tourism and have been discussed by other researchers (see Little, 2003; 2004; 2008; 2009b). If we understand the foreign attraction to the 2012 prophecies as a facet of cultural tourism, an interesting dynamic surrounding the concept of heritage emerges. While the tourism industry seeks to appropriate the symbols of Maya culture to generate revenue, the pan-Maya cultural movement seeks to rearticulate and reclaim these same symbols. As a consequence, we encounter two different types of value that ultimately claim the same heritage. On the one hand, as Little (2008) has pointed out, the tourism industry appropriates cultural traditions and assigns them a commodified exchange value so that they can be consumed. On the other, the Kaqchikels give value to their spiritual practices as inherited knowledge on which they are the authorities. In their conceptualization, the cultural tradition is valuable because it is both accurate in its information (i.e., the ancient Maya knowledge system is true) and accurate as a marker of a Maya identity that is transmitted from the ancient Mayas to the contemporary Kaqchikels. By means of this declaration of authoritative knowledge, tourism becomes a stage on which the Kaqchikels can claim valorization of their culture, and they seize this opportunity in order to contradict the foreign influence of that tourism. Judith Maxwell (2012: 1011) has recently arrived at a similar conclusion, asserting that the Mayas are contesting ownership of their myth-history with INGUAT [the state tourism agency], with the Guatemalan State, and with non-Maya academics. As they reappropriate the symbolism of Maya history and substantiate the accuracy of its prophecies, the Kaqchikels are attempting to valorize a culture that has been threatened since colonization and in recent decades has undergone a veritable cultural genocide. The current resurgence of Maya spirituality in Guatemala has occurred in a religiously plural society, with the stage for it being set by the growth of both Catholicism and Protestantism. Since the conquest, which was a political but also a religious undertaking, pre-Columbian Maya spirituality has been under siege. Colonial Catholic efforts to eradicate Maya spiritual beliefs and disrupt the local society became especially vehement in the decades following 1935,
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when Catholic Action mounted an attack on traditional Maya spiritual customs. Since the 1960s the new Protestant missionaries of the charismatic variety have made a concentrated effort to extirpate traditional beliefs. The autochthonous religion must coexist and, indeed, enter into dialogue with, these originally foreign religious institutions. A Protestant statistician, speaking of Guatemala (quoted in Garrard-Burnett, 1998: 162), said, The simple fact is that some people will always remain Catholic no matter what. Catholicism has a way of continuously informing the spirituality of Guatemalans. While this is evidence of an effective colonization that is not just geopolitical but also religious, it also reflects an ability to coexist with indigenous beliefs in a relatively nonconflictive manner. Because conversion never happens evenly, not all Mayas have adopted the same religious orientations. This has created a fractured social structure in most highland towns, and the resurgence of traditional Maya spirituality in recent decades has placed even more strain on the fissures already present. As we examine the practices of traditional spirituality among the Kaqchikels, we can perhaps understand the pull toward this traditionalism as an inflection point in the dynamic that orients the daily and, indeed, the transcendent lives of Maya people. Guatemala is divided between Mayas and ladinos, and both groups are more heterogeneous than they are portrayed. The Maya population is made up of more than 20 ethnolinguistic groupings, of which the Kaqchikels are usually considered the third-most-numerous and one of the most politically active. Ladino is often incorrectly glossed as a synonym for mestizo, assuming mixed Spanish and Maya ancestry, but the grouping also includes the whites of Guatemala, many of whom are descendents of Germans who came to the country around the turn of the twentieth century looking to establish coffee plantations. While it is difficult to obtain census data because of the informal economy, the geographic isolation of many Maya groups, and the political implications of such information, Warren (2002: 151) estimates that the Mayas make up 4287 percent of the population, and 60 percent is the figure generally accepted among researchers. Control of the government is maintained by an oligarchy of prominent ladino families (Fischer and Brown, 1996: 1112). This dynamic creates an inharmonious social and political environment in which the two groups generally do not share interests and lifestyles. Although the Mayas do not have high social status or economic power, it is their culture that is appropriated for tourism purposes (see, e.g., Little, 2008). Both the Kaqchikels themselves and the tourism industry characterize Maya spirituality as a type of knowledge produced and passed down by the Maya people. Understanding this knowledge as cultural property helps clarify the way in which it has been appropriated for touristic ends. Bendix and Hafstein (2009: 67) explain that the concept of cultural property has historically been a function of nationalism, which moved artifacts between states that claimed them as restitution for damages. In our contemporary context, however, cultural property has been a means for the groups whose property was adapted to nationalist projects to reclaim it:
Cultural property is (re)claimed in the aftermath of war or colonial rule as an assertion of sovereign powers and an affirmation of cultural integrity vis--vis foreign invasion and foreign rule, or else in the face of globalized markets and the universalist aspirations of foreign science. In other words, claims to cultural property are a technology of sovereignty.
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Once a tool of a homogenizing national formation for appropriating cultural expression, cultural property becomes a technology of sovereignty by which culture can be restored to its original possessors. In postcolonial Guatemala, Kaqchikel spiritual practices are being reclaimed as the Mayas seek a way of asserting their authority over these practices and thereby their validity within the nation-state. Furthermore, the instability provoked by global tourism has stimulated Kaqchikel efforts to reclaim their cultural property. Through a kind of perverse logic, tourism provides an audience that simultaneously validates cultural practices through the acknowledgment of their authenticity while it misrepresents and alters their meaning. In response to tourist interest in the 2012 apocalypse, the Kaqchikels are asserting their authority over their ancestral knowledge systems. Spiritual Tourism in Guatemala Tourism is one of the driving forces of globalization, promoting and facilitating transnational exchange and integration. It is fundamentally an economic activity. In theory, citizens of the First World participate in tourism as their monetary limitations permit, and this allows capital to flow between countries. In Latin America, however, tourism does not always work this way in practice. Because First World companies have invested in Third World countries, the system is a closed loop in which much of the capital remains in the First World (Mowforth and Munt, 2008: 15), denying the Third World countries the full economic benefits of the industry. Moreover, because tourism is generated by culture and defined by it (Reid, 2003: 105), it necessitates the commodification of cultures so that they can enter the free market along with other kinds of capital. This structure has led to uneven development from which the poorest populations, who are most often the producers of the cultural forms that are appropriated by the tourism market, benefit little or not at all. Tourism is a homogenizing force that, although promoted as economic development, is not in fact a positive experience for all parties involved (Reid, 2003: 1). While orthodox economists may explain that free market flow would economically equalize all citizens, Donald Reid argues that, although local communities often provide the raw material for tourism, they are last in line when it comes to benefiting from any development. They are usually unable to make the decisions regarding the introduction of tourism to their area (Little, 2008: 92), and once tourism is present they are often considered both a spectacle and an obstacle. While their culture is put on display, they themselves are viewed as an obstacle to the progress that tourism hopes to bring about. As the tourism industry grew in the 1990s, a critical period of reconstruction after the armed conflict according to Jennifer Burtner (2004), the emphasis was on creating an authentic experience for tourists, and this assumed a certain level of interaction with and/or observation of the Mayas in their perceived traditional way of life (Little, 2004: 7, 4041). The Mayas have been the focus of the national tourism campaign for the past two decades, partly because of a 1992 agreement between the governments of Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and El Salvador to collaborate in a tourism project that promoted the

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Maya cultural contingents of each country known as the Mundo Maya (Mayan World). In response to this touristic invasion, the Maya populations of Guatemala have been working within the system to take advantage of it. Little (2003: 530) describes how the Maya street vendors sell wares to tourists for a relatively small amount of money just to be able to survive. Necessarily operating within the space of non-Mayas, as Little explains, the Mayas are forced to cope with how they have been described in tourism material and situated within tourism development. They manage this through public performances, joking, and manipulation of the system so that they too can benefit from it economically. This situation reveals that Maya heritage has different values in different situations. It is useful for tourism but disavowed when it comes to issues of land ownership, where acceptance of it would imply Mayas right to the land as its original inhabitants. While it is economically advantageous to the Guatemalan state to bolster its Maya cultural resources, recognizing those resources with regard to land rights would mean loss of control over the income from the countrys agriculture. (Indeed, its proposed redistribution of land was one of the reasons the Arbenz government of 1954 was deemed a potential socialist threat and ousted.) INGUAT has used the worldwide perception of Maya culture as something timeless, eternal, and native to distract potential tourists from the negative reputation that the country has recently received in the media. In the phrase Guatemala: so beautiful, so safe that has recently appeared in the Guatemalan tourism campaign, the adjectives allude not just to the past violence of the war but also to the negative press regarding urban and rural violence, particularly drug-cartel-induced violence now that the Mexican Zeta drug cartel has crossed into Guatemala in response to a concentrated effort against it in Mexico. To counteract this negative image, INGUAT draws attention to other features of Guatemala, emphasizing the beauty of the country and its living Maya culture. Its official slogan is Guatemala: The Heart of the Mayan World. Although the Mayas do not hold political power, they have become the face of the countrys tourism campaign. Globalization has brought more foreigners to Guatemala, many of whom seek to take part in Maya spirituality (see Little, 2009b: 85). Olsen and Timothy (2006) explain that, while religion has been a motivating factor for tourism for centuries, it has been overlooked by governments and tourism agencies until recently. Recognizing the economic potential of religious tourism, they are now commodifying religiously important locations. Travelers are increasingly visiting sacred locations in pursuit of authentic experiences. The New Age movement has also supported individuals interest in alternative spiritualities (Timothy and Conover, 2006: 139), and spiritual practices such as animism are often of central interest to participants in that movement. Maya daykeepers, the guides of Maya spirituality, generally view this foreign interest as superficial. As Cirilo Prez, the daykeeper who advised the former Guatemalan president lvaro Colom, put it, When foreigners, or even some Guatemalans, see us, they think Look at the Maya, how nice, how pretty, but they dont understand us (Mayan 2012 apocalypse theory, 2009).

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U.S. Americans tend to use the term spiritual when religious seems not to fit because of the absence of formalized institutions. Douglas Burton-Christie (2010) provides a general definition:
Spirituality often refers to the felt sense of the transcendent grounded in the deepest part of ones being; still, it is increasingly understood that such spiritual awareness arises in response to concrete social, political, economic, sexual, or ecological dimensions of existence and in turn informs a persons capacity to respond to these realities.

The term spirituality has recently become a popular way of indicating opposition to religion; in other words, one may refer to oneself as spiritual but not religious. Burton-Christie (2010) suggests that the spirituality that has emerged in the United States since 1950 is the result of individualism and an increased political awareness that prompted an interest in civic duties such as nonviolent resistance. At the same time, the socially conscious 1960s witnessed an intense awareness of Native American spirituality, and in the past few decades interest in ancient indigenous spiritual practices has only increased. Moreover, the very nature of spiritualism in the United States almost assumes the incorporation of indigenous practices, since, as MacDonald (2005: 8718) clarifies, [a] predilection to speak of having spirituality rather than having religion indicated a change in worldview and a transition from exclusive religious traditions to inclusive, overlapping expressions of commitment to world and community. Contemporary spirituality implies the confluence of various religions and worldviews, as people not necessarily connected to the origin of the views create a conglomeration of different ideas that they use to confront questions of their daily existence. Although the ideas expressed in traditional Maya spirituality are ancestral, foreigners are using them in new ways as they integrate them into a global worldview. Spiritual tourism, then, is tourism based on foreign interest in local spiritual practices. As December 21, 2012, approaches, Maya spirituality has become a subject of increased interest to foreigners. The Value of the 2012 Prophecies: Tourism and Intangible Cultural Heritage A symposium organized in 2010 by the Guatemalan journalist Kara Andrade and me entitled El da y el destino: Desde los derechos hasta el 2012 brought together three daykeepers (one Kaqchikel, one Kiche, one ladino), a Kaqchikel Catholic priest, a Kaqchikel director of a Catholic community organization, and a ladino Evangelical pastor to discuss spirituality and religion in Guatemala. Questions were submitted online beforehand as well as taken from the audience. There were three important tendencies in the responses from these spiritual leaders: that foreign interpretations of the prophecies for 2012 were incorrect, that the appropriation of Maya spirituality for tourism was unwanted, and that climate change and natural disasters were evidence of the approaching change. With regard to the first, the daykeeper Carlos Alvarado stated simply, The catastrophe of 2012 is a lie. He went on to explain that the idea of an apocalypse was based on ignorance; study of the Maya sacred calendar makes it
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evident that it is cyclical and continues ad infinitum. The 440-year-long Baqtun is not the longest count in the calendar, and therefore the end of a cycle of 13 of them should not have any particular significance. As the Kaqchikel daykeeper Baldomero Cuma Chvez put it, Its the end of a calendar cycle, not the end of the world. Further discussion revealed that the central prognostication of 2012 is not necessarily apocalyptic end times but some sort of change. Daykeepers say that the beginning of one Baqtun ending in 2012 more or less coincides with the arrival of the Spaniards in Guatemala in 1519. The implication is that, since the concluding Baqtun (just under 395 years) has seen domination by the Spaniards and their descendents, the ladinos, after 2012 there will be some sort of spiritual or energetic change that enables the Mayas to break free from discrimination and violence. It is, as one Kaqchikel daykeeper told me, the hope for transformation. Contemporary claims to the meaning of 2012 are inseparable from colonialism and its continued impact in Guatemala. Inhabiting a postcolonial nation that maintains its hierarchical social structure and denies Maya groups representation, the Kaqchikels are finding subtle ways to respond to this continued domination. Central to the idea that others simply have it wrong is a claim to a role for the Mayas as the authorities on the subject. Moreover, it is generally accepted that this knowledge has been transmitted to the present-day Mayas directly or through inheritance. Walter Mignolo (2000: 93), rethinking the ways in which knowledge has been produced as the process of decolonization unfolds, argues that, traditionally, colonized nations have been considered to be producers of culture but not producers of knowledge. Postmodernity and postcolonialism have allowed subalterns to transmit their knowledge systems. He coins the term border gnosis to refer to the subaltern reason striving to bring to the foreground the force and creativity of knowledges demoted during a long process of colonization of the Western hemisphere, which was at the same time the process in which modernity and the modern Reason were constructed (13). Gnosis, he explains, is a type of knowledge that is acquired through spiritual or mystical meansthat is simply known without having to be studied. Thus the Mayas, as a previously marginalized and violently oppressed group, assert their possession of an inherited knowledge that is necessarily non-Cartesian and non-Western. More important, the contemporary Mayas are considered possessors of this knowledge because of their direct connection with the ancient Mayas, and this means that it cannot be reproduced by anyone but themselves. Ironically, this places them in precisely the position to be attractive as an object of tourism. The second main theme to emerge from the symposium discussion was an explicit critique of tourism. This preoccupation on the part of the Maya daykeepers was evident early on in the discussion, first articulated by Cuma Chvez, who referred to the ways in which Hollywood has speculated about and taken advantage of the 2012 concept. The Kiche daykeeper Vilma Poz lamented the careless use of Maya spiritual concepts by foreigners who do not understand what they mean. She argued that the multicultural nation of Guatemala has taken advantage of Maya spirituality and turned it into a business, making those involved in it little more than pirates of our spirituality. These Mayas were generally critical of the way a concept that they consider inherent in their culture has been used by outsiders. Pozs reference to a
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business is a clear allusion to tourism, and her pirate metaphor is revealing. Piracy has always been part of colonialist ventures of economic expansion. Pirates were employed by the British Empire in the early 1600s and were very useful in the development of English maritime and colonial power (Jowitt, 2010: 2). Furthermore, something that is pirated is not considered authentic. Guatemalans are more than familiar with pirated media and technology; the markets are full of kiosks selling pirated movies, music, and computer software. This analogy therefore also alludes to what the panelists suggested throughout the symposium and other daykeepers have implied in my other interviews and interactions: that the adaptation of Maya spirituality for the purpose of tourism inevitably robs it of its perceived authenticity. Spiritual tourism turns Maya spirituality from a devotional practice to a spectacle. As Little (2004: 39) suggests, this is in fact the way tourism operates. Commercialization replaces the original practice with a simulacrum that can be consumed by anyone. A participant need not be Maya to consume Maya spirituality, and it is unnecessary for the tourist to understand how that spirituality functions within Maya culture. Paradoxically, the tourists pursuit of authenticity leads to the loss of authenticity. Cuma Chvez elaborated on the involvement of international actors in the appropriation of the 2012 prophecies as follows:
Maya spirituality has often, in this era of the twenty-first century, become a tourist attraction. People from the outside have a certain motivation to discover how Maya spirituality is dealt with in our environment. I think that its not bad at all that people want to get to know or be a part of this movement. The most important thing is that they respect and value the essence of this spirituality.

He went on to clarify that when tourists arrive to observe a public ceremony, they may take pictures without first asking the permission of the daykeeper leading the ceremony. Because all the participants contribute their own energy to the overall energy of the gathering, the mere presence of a foreigner whose intentions may not be entirely in accord with those of the Maya participants may cause a degree of imbalance to the ceremony that the daykeeper must mediate and resolve. Interestingly, the Kaqchikels do not reject any and all participation by foreigners; in fact, the presence of foreign energy that the daykeeper must resolve serves to validate the daykeepers skills. Moreover, acceptance of foreign participation reinforces the idea that Maya spirituality functions through a simulacrum that can be applied to many individuals situations. How can the Mayas both reject and accept tourism? According to Cuma Chvez, tourists should ask, What do the Maya say? Similarly, Poz said, We live it, we feel it. The Mayas view themselves as the authorities on Maya spirituality and as possessing it as a type of intellectual property. Although they consider their spirituality ancestral, they do not claim that their traditions are or should be unmediated by outside forces. Rather, their concern is maintaining their status as experts on what they view as their sacred ancestral knowledge. While the modern world has tended to rely increasingly on authority based on reason and formal education, the Kaqchikels assert an authority based on the inheritance of non-Western knowledge systems and use this claim to counter attempts by foreigners to possess those knowledge systems.
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Although heritage is the basis of their authority, what the Kaqchikels value is not heritage as an artifact but authority over that heritage. In contrast, the tourism industry constructs value based on heritage as an artifact with universal appeal. UNESCO, seeking to identify and safeguard cultural knowledge worldwide, has been a driving force in international efforts to preserve world heritage. Kaqchikel spiritual practices are not on the official list of intangible cultural heritage, but UNESCO has produced reports about Guatemala, and the city of Antigua, an important tourist hub in the Kaqchikel region, is considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site (see e.g., Little, 2009a). The touristic approach to these practices is similar to the UNESCO process, which identifies practices that are valuable and of interest to the global human community. UNESCO defines intangible cultural heritage as living expressions and the traditions that countless groups and communities worldwide have inherited from their ancestors and transmit to their descendants, in most cases orally (Intangible heritage, 2007). At the root of this paradigm is the assignment of value. Practices are considered valuable because they have authenticity that is in danger of being lost. Assigning value in this way leads to conflicting uses of the image portrayed by tourism and the one communicated by the Maya communities themselves. The practices and public image of the Mayas serve tourism through their economic exchange value, drawing foreigners to the country to purchase an authentic experience. The value of these practices to the tourism industry resides in their classification as an endangered artifact. At the same time, the Mayas, bolstered by the pan-Maya movement, seek to assign these practices a contemporary cultural value. Intangible cultural heritage is inextricably tied to a paradigm of cultural property. Much as cultural property was appropriated for homogenizing nation-building efforts throughout Latin America in the nineteenth century, world heritage incorporates cultural property into a world schema that fetishizes it and separates it from its local context. The heightened interest in the process of creating heritage is a byproduct of contemporary economic development. As Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (2004: 61) elaborates:
While persistence in old life ways may not be economically viable and may well be inconsistent with economic development and with national ideologies, the valorization of those life ways as heritage (and integration of heritage into economies of cultural tourism) is economically viable, consistent with economic development theory, and can be brought into line with national ideologies of cultural uniqueness and modernity. Fundamental to this process is the heritage economy as a modern economy.

Kirschenblatt-Gimblett goes on to explain that heritage as history has become central to minority groups identities. While violence and discrimination have threatened the Kaqchikels livelihood, they seek to bind their group together through a common past. They now find themselves under continued threat not necessarily of military violence (although there is still plenty of violence in Guatemala) but of an ideologically violent process that appropriates the symbolism of their spiritual practices and their culture for tourists consumption. As Dorothy Noyes (2010: 12) has said,

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Groups that have suffered discrimination and indignity naturally seek to revalorize their own experience. . . . Furthermore, subaltern actors tend to invoke their cultural identities when seeking recognition or political opportunities because other idioms of valorization, such as citizenship or professional qualifications, may not be available. Marked by culture, they must make culture the lever to pull themselves upward.

Denied entry as beneficiaries of the money-making machine of tourism, groups such as the Kaqchikels seek other means of valorization. While the tourism industry appropriates the object of cultural production, the Kaqchikels respond by staking a claim to their principal distinguishing feature, their culture. Maya spiritual practitioners are not just adapting to but also utilizing the new opportunities provided them by the global tourism market. In light of the general unavailability of social mobility to the lower classes, the Mayas of Guatemala have entered the informal economy in an effort to make a living. Little (2003; 2004) shows how traditional handicrafts and the people themselves have become commodities constructed as authentic Maya cultural production. As Maxwell (2012: 7) has noted, many Maya daykeepers are using informal or free means of communication in an effort to generate income from the sale of their services. Among these that I have seen are e-mail list serves that advertise the production of Maya glyphs, web sites that sell podcasts of Maya daykeepers wisdom, and blogs and social media accounts in which they create memes that express the truth of Maya knowledge. Kaqchikels understand that, as long as the Mayas themselves are able to construct the message presented, having more participants in Maya spirituality is both economically and ideologically advantageous, helping to validate Maya practices in a nationstate that does not recognize their intrinsic value. The third major topic discussed in the symposium was the role of climate change and natural disasters as evidence for the approaching doomsday. It is very common for this connection to be made, and it is often implied that we are bringing all this on ourselves. The Kaqchikels explain that natural disasters are a direct result of the way humanity has taken advantage of the Earths natural resources. They usually refer to the most recent news stories of hurricanes and earthquakes as evidence that the planet is complaining about the wrongdoings that man has created . . . in the environment. Climate change is generally considered both a fact and a byproduct of our ever-more industrialized existence. Because natural disasters resulting from weather and seismic events are easy to observe, it is not difficult to find evidence that points to the conflict between man and nature that has arisen as industrialization has accelerated and required the use of more resources. A public ceremony that I observed at Iximche, the archaeological site of the Post-Classic period Kaqchikel capital and now a national park, was led by the spiritual leaders of Tecpn, a community adjacent to Iximche that is considered an important center of Kaqchikel spiritual activity. The ceremony was a seed blessing on the occasion of the 2010 vernal equinox. In addition to some seven daykeepers there were perhaps 100 or more participants (mostly Maya but including ladino government officials). As the daykeepers performed rituals based on the burning of natural elements, they gave long speeches. Because the central theme of the day was agriculture, the topic of climate was important. One daykeeper discussed at length the role of humans in the maintenance of
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the land, saying, Because of capitalism, we are exhausting Mother Earth. Criticism of the exploitation of natural resources is frequent among the Kaqchikels with whom I have spoken, especially in Tecpn, which has experienced recent debate surrounding the extraction of resources by foreign companies. While spiritual beliefs cannot be proven scientifically, the Kaqchikels can point to natural disasters, which are scientifically observable not just in Guatemala but worldwide and are extensively covered by the international news media, as evidence of the truth of their prophecies. This allows them to assume authority as possessors of knowledge not accessible to Western actors. Underlying the assertion that natural disasters predict the forthcoming 2012 doomsday is the assumption that Mother Nature is opposed to industrialization and the capitalist economic system that drives societies toward development. As expressed in the July 17 symposium and many other interactions with members of the Kaqchikel community, the message is that foreign capitalist ventures in Guatemala are fundamentally damaging it both ecologically and culturally. Coupled with the appropriation of natural resources is the implied appropriation of cultural resources. The Kaqchikels authority on the subject of the 2012 prophecies is a way of opposing the capitalist system that foments tourism, and they offer natural disasters as proof of their wisdom. Conclusions The way many Kaqchikel daykeepers interpret recent historys connection to the 2012 prophecies was well summarized by Cuma Chvez:
[2012] is a time of transformation. Its a time that brings, for us the Maya, a light for the future. We have been stepped on for more than 500 years, but we are still alive. We are the grandchildren of our ancestors. We still practice our spirituality. Supposedly [the spiritual movement] started in 1996 [after the war], but that is not the case. Our ancestors or our grandparents, our predecessors, [practiced their spirituality] secretly because of the repression that existed due to such a difficult, unjust war that our country lived through.

The Mayas of Guatemala have undergone two periods of horrifying violence and subjugation, the conquest and the civil war. Not coincidentally, these two critical periods witnessed some of the greatest efforts to extirpate their way of life. Since the civil war, however, they have begun to develop ways to rebuild their legitimacy: collaborating with linguists to formalize the Maya languages, entering into academic and professional circles, giving testimony, and performing their lifeways in the form of traditional dress, language, and spiritual practices. As postcolonial countries like Guatemala become increasingly globalized, subaltern populations find themselves in a dialogue between tradition and modernity. Nestor Garca Canclini (1995: 9) describes this dynamic: Today we conceive of Latin America as a more complex articulation of traditions and modernities (diverse and unequal), a heterogeneous continent consisting of countries in each of which coexist multiple logics of development. These multiple logics are in continuous articulation and response. Maya spirituality serves as a locus of enunciation between local expressive culture and a changing
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Bell / THE 2012 APOCALYPSE IN GUATEMALA 107

globalized society. If we understand the conquest as fundamentally the beginning of globalization in the Americas, traditionally globalization has tended to eradicate the Maya culture and its ways of knowing. In recent years the Mayas have subversively utilized the global market provided by tourism to survive economically, recover their cultural property, and reclaim their heritage. Lacking other ways to valorize their culture in an environment that has historically threatened it, the Kaqchikels stake a claim to their heritage and denounce the tourism industrys appropriation of it. They employ public knowledge and experience of natural disasters as evidence for the accuracy of the 2012 prophecies and proof of the value of their knowledge systems. Rather than merely claiming their rights to an inert cultural heritage, they assert their authority as bearers of knowledge that actively constructs their present. In response to Slavoj ieks (2010) question Are we living in end times? many Kaqchikels would say no: we are returning to the beginning. References
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