The Materiality of Social Memory: The Potters’ Gremio in Ticul, Yucatán, México

Abstract

This paper explores the means by which potters in Ticul, Yucatán, Mexico, materialized their social memory in the gremio festival to honor a ‘Black Christ.’ The gremio’s ‘Black Christ’ is associated with the emergence of a unique indigenous Yucatecan identity in the 17th century, but the gremio activities also materially express occupation, social class, kinds of social relations, and multiple levels of social identity in their performance and in material culture such as banners and pottery. Our study demonstrates the kinds of phenomena involved in creating and evoking social memory with the assumption that the study of the present can reveal the many ways that memory about the past is performed and expressed.

Keywords:

• ritual
• pottery
• Yucatán
• contemporary Maya

We are grateful for the support of the American Republics Research Grant (awarded under the Fulbright Program) that supported Arnold’s field work upon which this article is based. George A. Pierce drew the map, and the Norris Aldeen Fund of Wheaton College provided support for the preparations of the illustrations. We also gratefully acknowledge the support and encouragement of Dr. Dorothy Chappell, Dean of Natural and Social Sciences of Wheaton College, Dr. Ward A. Kriegbaum, Assistant to the Provost of Wheaton College, and Dr. Stanton Jones, Provost of Wheaton College for their support of this project, and the preparation of this manuscript through the many awards from the Wheaton College Norris Aldeen Fund and Wheaton College Faculty Development funds. The National Endowment for the Humanities (Grant Number RK 20191-95) and partial matching funds from the Wheaton College Alumni Association provided for a two-year grant that released Arnold from 2/3 of his teaching between 1995 and 1997 and thus supported the analysis and write-up of these data.

 An early draft of this paper was presented at American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C. in 2005, and was later published as ‘Las Vasijas Como Símbolos.: El Caso del Gremio de Alfareros de Ticul, Yucatán.’ In Etnoarqueología: El Contexto Dinámico de la Cultura Material a Través del Tiempo, ed. Eduardo Williams, pp. 105–125 (El Colegio de Michoacán, Michoacán, México, 2005). A subsequent draft of this paper was presented at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in 2007 in Austin, Texas in a symposium entitled Collective Memory in Mesoamerica. The paper also benefited from many helpful comments and suggestions by Travis W. Stanton and peer reviewers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dean E Arnold

Correspondence to: Dean E. Arnold. Email: [email protected]. Hayley Schumacher Wynne. Email: [email protected]. Josiah Ostoich. Email: [email protected]