Digitising the sacred: Maya women’s cosmovision online

Digitising the Sacred: Maya Women’s Cosmovision Online
The indigenous population of Latin America has been able to protect their culture, languages and knowledge by maintaining their beliefs. For them, to look to the past is as important as to live in the present. Hirsch (1996) recognises the inherent character of postmemory as ‘the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth... shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor recreated.’ Traumatic events provoked by the Spanish invasion and colonisation, and the imposition of Christianity forced the Maya to create resistance strategies – oral history and specific traditional mnemonic systems – to maintain their ancestral knowledge, cosmovision and identity. The uninterrupted use of the sacred Maya calendar Cholq’ij by the Mayas is part of this continuous act of resistance.

Currently, Maya women are contesting the narrative imposed by the state, social prejudices and media-imposed perceptions, reclaiming their place in society online. How is the Cholq’ij represented in Maya women’s narratives in relation to their knowledge, world-views and philosophies online? The Aj’kijab are the guardians of the Maya tradition and the calendar’s knowledge. By moving online, the Cholq’ij went from being a specialist calendar, interpreted by an Aj’kij inside a community in a defined time and context,to being standardised and available to everybody.

The process of conveying the Cholq’ij’s abstract concepts in a contested media, such as an online/virtual place, certainly implies a process of cultural surrender, yet paradoxically key to represent the Maya people’s identity and culture.