The Classic Maya

The Past and the Present in the Present," made two important points concerning social structure that are pertinent to understanding Classic Maya political structure. One is that political-cum-social; structure is only extracted from ritual communication and turns out to be a system of classification of human related to various other ritual cognitive systems, like the ritual notion of the period. The other is that in societies the amount of "social theory expressed in the language of ritual" varies directly with the degree of social hierarchization i.e. the amount of the social structure, of the precedent in the present, of the ritual communication is associated with the amount of institutionalized hierarchy.

These concepts are of interest given the changes—the evolution, if you will—of Classic Maya political organization from Preclassic through Postclassic times. Among the Maya, the "sacred" and the "secular" are so deeply intertwined as to be inseparable, and early archaeologists commonly considered the Maya a theocracy or a theocratic state. The latter term has been out of favor for some time, as the recent emphasis among epigraphers and archaeologists has been on relatively continuous warfare among the hitherto fore "peaceable" Classic Maya. Yet despite some serious theoretical ambiguities, "theocracy" seems to best describe the Maya geo-socio-politico-religious system and the concept is worth reexamining. The importance to the Maya of ritual and ritual celebrations of time's passage and the clear hierarchy of their society underscores the applicability of the term.

A theocracy represents both a type of society and a stage of sociopoliti­cal evolution that precede "secular" states. When used in a typological sense, a la Thompson and Coe, it carries substantial baggage besides that of supernatural sanctions. The subjective connotations are of peaceful, nonmilitaristic, nonurban, stable societies, as compared to secular states. While these implications of "theocracy" are neither necessary nor necessarily accurate, they became the focal terms structuring debates about Classic lowland Maya political organization in the past two to three decades.

Whether type or stage, leadership in a theocracy is socially validated and legitimized by supernatural sanctions. Leaders come from socially advantaged kin groups and are religious specialists or priest-kings whose power to rule is derived from the power of cosmological sanctions, archaeologically visible through the deployment of labor forces in the con­struction of large civic-ceremonial buildings. This touches on the deli­cate problem of institutional balance.

 Questionnaire:

• Explain about The Classic Maya.