Lacandons
The Lacandons , also Lacandons ( Lacandon Hach Winik , "true or real people") are an indigenous people in eastern Chiapas , Mexico . They are divided into two sub-ethnicities, the Northern and Southern Lacandons.
Among the descendants of the ancient Maya , they are the last to maintain their centuries-old, traditional way of life and religion. Since the 20th century they have come into increasing contact with civilization. The culture of the approximately 700 Lacandons today is threatened with extinction due to acculturation .
Surname
The Lacandons call themselves Hach Winik - "real or real people". The name "Lakandone", Spanish Lacandón (plural Lacandones ), originally referred to a group of Chortí -Mayas who lived on an island in the Río Lacantún during the time of the Conquista . The name Lakantun means "big rock" in the Chortí language .
history
Up to the 18th century, a group of Chortí -Maya lived in the area of the Selva Lacandona , which was named Lacandones after the Lacantún river . This group, like the neighboring Itzá , resisted the Spanish conquest for a long time, but was subjugated by the Spanish between 1692 and 1712 and forcibly resettled in the Guatemalan highlands, which ended their ethnic independence.
The ancestors of today's Lacandons fled in the 18th and early 19th centuries from parts of the Peten and the Yucatán Peninsula from the Spanish to the jungle areas near the Rio Usumacinta , where they survived in isolation as a kind of forest nomads until modern times. As a result, they remained largely unaffected by Christianity and other European cultural influences during this period .
For a long time they lived very withdrawn and without contact to civilization in the " Selva Lacandona ", a jungle area in Chiapas. The first whites they met were loggers in the 19th century in search of mahogany trees.
In the 20th century the Lacandons had developed into two sub-ethnic groups: the southern group lived by the lake of Lakanha '(Lacanjá) near Bonampak and the northern group around the lakes of Mensäbäk and Naha' (Najá). The southern group adopted Christianity as a result of the activities of North American Protestant missionaries and largely integrated into Mexican society in the decades that followed. The northern Lacandons of Naha 'opposed attempts at the mission.
From the 1950s onwards, landless farmers - mestizos and highland Mayans - increasingly poured into the Lacandon jungle, pushing the Lacandons back. In the 1970s, logging companies, with the support of the Mexican government, brought the large mahogany trees from the Lacandon area. The Mexican government won the Lacandon benevolence in 1972 by granting them land titles over 614,321 hectares of their traditional settlement area as the Zona Lacandona . Sixty families with about two hundred members from the six Lacandon communities were now also legally owners of the land. In return for payment, they allowed the logging companies to fell the mahogany trees. As beneficiaries of the Mexican government, the Lacandons saw no reason to support the 1994 uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) guerrilla army active in Chiapas , rather they were hostile to it.
Since the spiritual leader (t'o'ohil) of the Lacandons of Naha ', Chan K'in Viejo, died in 1996 at the age of 104, there have been reports of a rapid disintegration of traditional culture among the northern Lacandons as well.
Culture
Today there are only about 700 Lacandons left. Their traditional clothing is a straight-cut white linen dress, by which they are easy to recognize. The men usually wear their long, uncut hair, falling down openly.
They maintain the ancient Mayan customs to this day. The " medicine man " is common. The peyote cactus is central to the generation of trance states. Tobacco also plays a major role in many ceremonies and women, men and children smoke long cigars. They also wear pure white robes. The Lacandon pantheon is very complex and consists of gods of all kinds, ages and genders.
For the Lacandons, Yaxchilán is still an important place, where they make sacrifices to their ancestral gods. There are traces of recent, even smaller blood sacrifices on sacrificial stones, such as B. Remains of bird blood and feathers can be seen.
The average number of children per family among the Lacandons is currently given as 1.6 children, while one generation earlier it was 3.8 children and one generation earlier 9.6 children.
In contrast to the ancient Mayas, who passed on knowledge through a script, the knowledge of the Lacandons is only passed on orally. That is why the oral communication of cultural customs has a high priority in the social structure of the Lacandons. The storytelling in this regard is therefore for education and entertainment. The main narrator is typically the father or grandfather of the family.
Most of the Lacandon children now go to public schools, where they learn the content of the state curriculum in Spanish alone. Almost every household now also has television. This has led to more and more young people striving for Western ways of life.
A common word is kayum , which among the Maya referred to a single-headed tubular drum of any shape made of clay or wood. According to the Danish explorer Frans Blom (1893–1963), the word roughly means "God" and is composed of kay ("to sing") and you ("man", "God"). The Lacandons have adopted drum shapes from the Maya and also use kayum to designate a singer or a singing dancer.
Their everyday objects - or simulations of them created for the tourist market - are now sold as ethnological handicrafts by Lacandon traders in places visited by tourists such as Palenque and others. This changes their attitude towards the specific objects of their culture massively.
language
The Lacandon language ( SIL code lac) is most closely related to Mayathan , the Maya language of Yucatán, as it evolved from the language of Yucatec Maya refugees. It is therefore referred to by some as a variant of Mayathan. The preferred sentence order is as with this subject-verb-object (SVO), but in contrast to this the language is not tonal .
The 2010 census found 20 Lacandon speakers, including no speakers under the age of 20. This information is definitely wrong, as the recordings of a documentation project already show more people who speak this language. While SIL International gives 1,000 speakers for the year 2000, other estimates assume 700 Lacandons who still speak their language. Except for the older ones, almost all of them also speak fluent Spanish. Lacandon is not taught in schools.
Project to document the language and culture
The northern Lacandons were never Christianized and until a few years ago they always lived shielded from Spaniards and Mexicans, which is why there is a strong scientific interest in their culture and language. Since they have opened up to the western majority society in recent years , their culture is expected to disappear in a few decades. Since 2002, a project financed by the Volkswagen Foundation at the Canadian University of Victoria has been trying to document traditional culture and language for posterity in the form of video recordings.
See also
literature
- Christian Rätsch , K'ayum Ma'ax: A cosmos in the rainforest. Myths and Visions of the Lacandon Indians (= Diederichs Yellow Series ), Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Munich 1984; 2nd, revised edition 1994, ISBN 3-424-00748-X .
- Herbert Rittlinger : Into the land of the Lacandons - To the last Mayans. FA Brockhaus, Wiesbaden 1959.
- Wilfried Westphal: Exogenous socio-cultural change among the Lacandons (Mexico): a study on the problem of national integration in developing countries, Hamburger Museum für Völkerkunde , Hamburg / Renner, Munich 1973, DNB 730346919 (Dissertation University of Hamburg, Department of Cultural History and Cultural Studies, 1971, 379 pages).
- Wilfried Westphal: Lacandonia: A people dies in the jungle. Flamberg, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-7179-2095-2
Web links
- Lacandon Cultural Heritage Project (University of Victoria, Canada)
- Documentation of endangered languages: Lacandon
- Angelfire: Lacandon Mayans
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Lacandones - Hach Winik (Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, CDI)
- ↑ Götz von Houwald : Mapa y Descripción de la Montaña del Peten e Ytzá. Interpretación de un documento de los años poco después de la conquista de Tayasal. (PDF; 2.1 MB) Indiana 9, Ibero-American Institute Berlin.
- ^ A b c Lacandon Cultural Heritage Project: The Lacandones.
- ↑ http://www.chiapas.at/sonderseiten/latein America/ montes_azules.doc
- ↑ Åke Hultkrantz , Michael Rípinsky-Naxon, Christer Lindberg: The book of the shamans. North and South America . Munich 2002, ISBN 3-550-07558-8 . P. 90.
- ^ Samuel Martí: Music history in pictures . Volume II: Ancient Music . Delivery 7: Old America. Music of the Indians in pre-Columbian times . Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1970, p. 134
- ^ INEGI 2010: Censo de Población y Vievienda 2010 , accessed April 7, 2011
- ^ Ethnologue.com: Lacandon