Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures By Paul M. Worley

Abstract

There is much in this study to interest folklorists, and much, as well, to arouse our indignation, or more usefully, to prod us into constructive self-reflection. For here is a book in which culture brokers are presented as imperialists whose intention is to silence indigenous voices, “folklore” is conceptualized as a parroting of dying traditions, and folklorists in the academy are said to miss the point that traditions are interpretive modes that empower the people who live them. The critique goes further: even the scholar who presents the narratives of indigenous peoples in their own voices is still controlling the agenda and hence depriving subjects of discursive agency. From such a stringent vantage point, we might question whether it is possible to do responsible ethnographic work on narrative traditions, but Paul Worley suggests that we can, and he models in this book his method of treating Yucatec Mayan storytelling as “a way of knowing” (96) and as a form of “ethnogenesis” (104).