Performative Pilgrims and the Shifting Grounds of Anthropological Documentary

Abstract

On the day of the spring equinox every March, one of the pyramids at the renowned Maya archaeological site of Chichén Itzá in Pisté, Yucatán, Mexico, experiences a phenomenon in which the sun casts a serpentlike shadow on one of its balustrades. In any given year, this phenomenon attracts thousands of Mexican, North American, and European tourists, professional and amateur archaeologists and archaeo-astronomers, practitioners of New Age religions, ambulant vendors, and state authorities. Most of these people come, at least ostensively, to acknowledge and celebrate the genius of the ancient Maya, although, importantly, many also come to maintain control over the tourist masses or to make money selling souvenirs and food. In 1995, the equinox event drew more attention than usual, attracting record numbers of visitors, among them conspicuously large numbers of New Age religious practitioners, who came because of the apparent calendrical significance of that particular year. For New Agers, this equinox was to usher in the “Age of Aquarius,” and they had converged on Chichén Itzá because of their belief in the propitious coincidence of this event with a cyclical renewal on the Maya calendar, itself apparently marking the arrival of the “Age of Itzá.”

An underdeveloped version of this essay was presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting in Mérida, Yucatán, March 2001, on a panel exploring the various Yucatecan responses to Incidents of Travel in Chichén Itzá. My friends Quetzil Castañeda and Jeff Himpele have encouraged my participation in dialogues around this video since our shared time at the Princeton University Department of Anthropology. It was Quetzil’s invitation and camraderie that brought me to the Yucatán and inspires our continuing collaborations. I am especially grateful to Jeff Himpele, both for cultivating my latecomer interests in film and visual anthropology and for taking time recently to reflect on why and how they made this video. I should note that my trip to participate in the Yucatán meeting was made possible by the financial assistance of the University of Vermont College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Fund and the Area and International Studies Program. Developing this essay further would not have been possible without the friendship, support, and collegiality of Brent Plate and Edna Melisa Rodriguez-Mangual, whose transdisciplinary promiscuity and acuity have inspired my own increasingly eclectic intellectual travels.