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Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis
Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.
Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.
Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.
Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.
Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.
126 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 21, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 19, 2023
read so so similar to how my essays sound. in a bad terrible terrifying way. my scrooge era. anyways, banger regardless. shout-out milton professor for the rec.
July 30, 2025
3.5
Some of these essays do the thing that excellent essays do: touch on everything by focusing on one thing, which is such a lovely example of boundaries and their power, and books, thought itself, focused vision, and its fruit. In this case, the fruit of the calabash tree and One Hunahpu's dry skull that nonetheless speaks...and spits!
Illuminating ruminations on the Popol Vuh; I probably jumped into the wrong kind of book to understand that entirely new and fresh document.
"The Mesoamerican idea that the cosmos is dialectical, but it is a special kind of dialectic, in that it never resolves into synthesis. In their constant self-differencing, Mesoamerican
paired items never settle into a stable identity or essence, but
rather remain conditioned and animated by their disidentification in some other thing. Anthropologist Dennis Tedlock says that this non-synthesizing dialectic gives the phenomenology of the Mayan mythworld a jittery or oscillating quality, as any being is always in relation to some other being, producing intermixed signals in any one being’s utterance, so that meanings are always changing in the inescapable pull of multiplicity, discontinuity, and disidentification."
Some of these essays do the thing that excellent essays do: touch on everything by focusing on one thing, which is such a lovely example of boundaries and their power, and books, thought itself, focused vision, and its fruit. In this case, the fruit of the calabash tree and One Hunahpu's dry skull that nonetheless speaks...and spits!
Illuminating ruminations on the Popol Vuh; I probably jumped into the wrong kind of book to understand that entirely new and fresh document.
"The Mesoamerican idea that the cosmos is dialectical, but it is a special kind of dialectic, in that it never resolves into synthesis. In their constant self-differencing, Mesoamerican
paired items never settle into a stable identity or essence, but
rather remain conditioned and animated by their disidentification in some other thing. Anthropologist Dennis Tedlock says that this non-synthesizing dialectic gives the phenomenology of the Mayan mythworld a jittery or oscillating quality, as any being is always in relation to some other being, producing intermixed signals in any one being’s utterance, so that meanings are always changing in the inescapable pull of multiplicity, discontinuity, and disidentification."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews