VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
This paper recognizes Indigenous place names as a critical element of Belizean heritage, as they encode knowledge of the landscape that aided in survival across centuries of European colonization. Based on interviews with descendants of fugitives from debt servitude and war refugees, this paper draws upon Tim Ingold’s “wayfinding” and Keith Basso’s “sense of place.” The Belizean tourism industry focuses on ancient Maya grandeur, yet during the colonial period, tangible Maya heritage was greatly reduced, due to epidemic disease and because they survived by living lightly on the land. As Spanish conquistadors forced relocation, labor, and taxation, Maya people scattered into smaller forest settlements, and material possessions and large buildings were liabilities. These patterns intensified in the 18th-19th centuries, as British woodcutters and slavers moved further upriver, and capitalist plantations and timber companies exploited Indigenous labor, secured through land monopolization and mechanisms of debt. The peninsular Social War (Caste War) compelled the flight of thousands more. Maya place names refer to natural resources: bodies of water, fruit trees, and hunting grounds. As Maya debt fugitives and refugees recounted their stories of flight to their descendants, they listed the places that they passed through. In these naming practices, they passed along knowledge of natural resources—a gift for the next generation of wayfarers. Almost none of these place names appear on modern maps. While the destruction of Maya settlements was a product of British colonialism, the ongoing erasure of those place names further buries ancestral knowledge, including of human rights violations.
Christine Kray is Professor of Anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. A political anthropologist, she has conducted research abroad and at home to understand the dynamics of power and culture. Abroad, her research has focused on the (Yucatec) Maya of Belize and Mexico, and she uses ethnographic, oral historical, and archival methods to critically examine subjective experiences and agency vis-à-vis colonialism, war, and religious evangelization. At home, she has used feminist theory to analyze ritual and performance in U.S. presidential politics.