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Research Design Course Report
Module Code: AN71062A
MPhil Visual Anthropology
Anthropology Department
Goldsmiths, University of London
Performing Shifting Identities: a Participatory Film Experiment in a Mayan Community of the
Eastern Yucatán
Abstract
Through the lens of film practice and performance, this research explores how participation in global
processes may affect traditional identities and livelihoods. Taking identity as a fluid and relational
concept, the project focuses on Yucatecan Mayans, addressing two significant phenomena: male
migration to the tourist centres on the Mayan coast and women workers in US and Chinese maquilafactories. By involving a group of local actors in a participatory film experiment of cultural selfrepresentation, I will explore the ways in which Mayans redefine, embody and express notions of
ethnicity, cultural belonging, gender and labour through their performances and representations. By
combining politics and economics with gender and performance, and using film to capture the
perspectives of marginalized groups, this research aims to generate a nuanced and multilayered account
of the shifting cultural, political and economic landscape in contemporary Mayan Mexico.
This report outlines my proposed research project by addressing its theoretical issues. The
methodological and ethical approaches that will be used are discussed in the research method report.
Overview of the Research
Through the lens of film practice and performance, this project investigates the relation between
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globalization and processes of identity construction among Mexican Maya people of Eastern Yucatán.
My research will focus on the effects of two specific economic and social phenomena on the definition
of Mayan identities: the male rural migration to the Mayan coast (Riviera Maya), where indigenous are
forced to seek temporary and underpaid work in the tourism industry, and the female wage-labour in
the US and Chinese maquiladoras, that is deeply affecting the traditional indigenous hierarchical
structures. Framing the analysis of these two phenomena within the dialectics local/global and
tradition/modernity, I will direct my research to the involvement of a group of indigenous actors in the
production of an ethnofiction, understood in terms of participatory cinema, collective creation and
staging of cultural identity.
Maquiladoras and migration reflect the broader political economy and inform local ideas of
modernity. There are two hypotheses regarding the repercussions of transnationalization on indigenous
traditional ways of life. The first emphasises the “erosion” (Jameson 1990) of indigenous political,
economic and cultural models, while the second posits that these are “reshaped” (Kearney 1996) as
effects of globalization. I argue that erosion and reshaping are best approached theoretically as
dialectically related forces. By proposing a view of Mayan identities as performative constructions, this
research aims to highlight how Mayans themselves elaborate on this dialectic, orally, bodily and
visually. How then, do local communities use performance and film to decipher changes and express
their identities as men and women, Mayans and Mexicans, peasants and workers?
The research will involve 12 months of fieldwork in the Mayan community of Xocén, Eastern
Yucatán, and will be put forward in collaboration with the Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e
Indígena, a Mexican social theatre network I worked with for my MA research into the relation
between performance and Mayan identity. The project will be developed in two phases: ethnographic
data collection and film production. In the first phase I will conduct participant observation, focus
groups, life story narratives and in-depth interviewing. For the film production I will use ethnographic
filmmaking, improvisational cinema, improvised acting, shared anthropology and reflexivity (see
Rouch’s ethnofiction films) together with theatrical sociodrama (Boal 1979) as subjectification
techniques, in order to create dialogical and analytical paths and promote self-expression amongst
participants. Using participatory methods (Pink 2001) and documenting the film process, including
discussions, debates and responses of the actors, the research will provide a unique insight into urgent
questions of identity and change.
Integrating my academic (BA, MA) and professional filmmaking experience with skills from my
training in theatre and ethnographic studies (MA), I will engage with research participants in an
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exercise of visual translation of the complex inter-relations between Mayan and Mexican, local and
transnational, past and future, oral and embodied/performed/filmed.
I argue that such a film experiment, conceived in a perspective of public activism and into the wider
practice of the shared anthropology, can provide the researcher with important heuristic tools for
ethnographic analysis. On the other hand, it can represent for communities involved in the creative
process, not only a tool of visibility, personal and collective awareness in contexts where indigenous
are subject to structural racism, cultural denial, political invisibility and economic inequality, but also
an opportunity to critically rethink the community’s “traditional” identities in relation to the hybrid
contexts of “global modernity”, of which maquiladoras and migration are exemplar results.
This approach will highlight the ways in which gendered, labour and ethnic Mayan identities are
redefined in relation to the complex of processes and forces of change known as “globalization”. In
addition, it will allow for verification of the extent to which, and within what limits and contradictions,
the ethnographic film can aspire to be both representation and transformation of reality. Finally, it will
enable reconsideration of shared anthropology not only as methodology and theory, but also as a real
possibility for social intervention.
Context
The Yucatán Peninsula is located in the South-East of Mexico and separates the Caribbean Sea from
the Gulf of Mexico. Its indigenous population is constituted by Yucatecan Mayans, who inhabit
predominantly, but not exclusively, the rural areas of the state.
In the 1980s, the Yucatán had to go through a severe economic crisis that brought to deep sociocultural changes. In the era of transnationalization even the “isolated” and “traditional” Mayan villages
have had to deal with the growing penetration within the communities of the so-called “cultural
modernity”, conveyed by the diffusion of mass media, the massive implementation of a linguistic and
cultural policy of “castellanization”, the national and international tourism, and the increasing territorial
mobility of Mayans. The economic, social and cultural processes that affected the Yucatán in the last
thirty years, not only blurred the boundaries between city and countryside, but also fragmented the
ethnic identity, making virtually impossible to clearly define the contemporary Maya. The Yucatán,
which historically has been the first port of European travellers crossing the Atlantic to arrive in
Mexico, due to its proximity to international cult tourist destinations as Cancún and Playa del Carmen,
ended up again at the centre of a movement of people, cultures, and economic and symbolic capitals
which are projecting new identitarian models on indigenous communities.
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Yucatecan Maya people started to experience these processes since the 1980s, when the crisis of the
traditional economies linked to the cultivation of henequén (a type of agave known as Yucatan’s “green
gold”), corn and citrus, and the reduced government support for small farmers, forced many indigenous
peasants to relocate as workers in the American maquiladoras or, alternatively, to migrate to urban
areas of the region (Baños Ramírez 1996).
Maquiladoras were installed in Yucatán since 1984, when the “Plan de Desarrollo Integral
Reordenación Henequenera y de Yucatán” (Henequén Development Program of Yucatán) was
launched, but spread widely only from 1994, when the “North American Free Trade Agreement”
entered into force. From this date, the maquiladora industry in Mexico has become the main source of
foreign investment for its government, far surpassing the foreign currency brought into the country by
tourism and petroleum combined (Kopinak 1996). In general, the social costs of maquiladoras were
high. Instead of absorbing those peasants that lost their jobs into employment, as hoped by the Mexican
government, maquiladora plants preferred to hire mostly young women who have never worked
outside of their home, considering them a more “docile” human capital and much cheaper in wages
than their male counterpart (Prieto 1997). This, combined with the economic pluriactivity of the
indigenous communities, has radically transformed the gendered division of labour within the nuclear
family, where men worked in the cornfields while women took care of domestic chores and kitchen
gardens (Redfield 1941, 1959; Elmendorf 1976). As maquiladora workers, women apparently gained
much autonomy and respect. Yet, their increased social and economic importance has corresponded the
socio-economic decentralization of the male figure, which has been related to increasing in alcoholism
and domestic violence (Canché 1997).
The alternative to maquiladoras was to exit the crisis via migration. For the indigenous migrants of
the Yucatán Peninsula, Cancún, cult destination for international tourism, is the principal landfall.
Here, Maya people make up more than one third of the city’s population. These migrants, many of
whom arrive in Cancún in their late teens, work underpaid in hotels, private homes, and construction.
Their minimum-wage salaries help support their family in the countryside while their ancestral history
and cultural practices become key tourist attractions (Castellanos 2010). For many migrants the process
of adaptation to the new conditions of life in the city is often slow and difficult. Language problems
(many Maya do not speak Spanish correctly or in some cases do not speak it at all), structural racism
and discrimination prevent their full integration into mestizo and urban society (Canto 2001). At the
same time, especially in the case of short-term migration, for many Mayans the return home produces
identity bewilderment whilst imposing on the community a comparison with the external cultural
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models brought by migrants.
As indigenous people participate in the deterritorialized social space of migrant circuit (Appadurai
1990), how is community imagined and sustained among the Maya? How do migration, tourism and
women’s proletarization alter and redefine what it means to be Maya in contemporary Mexico? This
project aims to contribute to the understanding of how Mayan men and women forge their identities by
experiencing, resisting, and accommodating themselves to transnational capitalism, and how they
express this ongoing negotiation through their performances. These issues will be explored through
participatory methods and staged by indigenous actors in a filmic experiment of cultural selfrepresentation.
In the case of Yucatecan Maya, the staging of cultural identities is a matter much more
complicated the more intimately connected to the political construction of the Mayan self as “ethnic
active subject,” able to “speak” and to articulate their demands in a Mexico that, while in theory pleads
modern, democratic and plural, in practice continues to follow the colonial pattern of segregation
(Stavenhagen 1970), building its political practice on the myth of mestizo as the heroic product of
Revolution (Gruzinski 1999). In the relationship between nation building and ethnic pluralism, the
presence of natives continues to be denied or at most recognized as a simulacrum or “sign” of a
glorious but dead past: visible as a residue or “survivance” of the past in national museums, monuments
and murals, the Indians remain invisible as subjects of present, in concrete spaces of real action
(Beltrán 1967; Bonfil Batalla 1987-1989). Although the Cast Wars of 1847-1853 liberated the
peninsular Mayans from European colonization, for many of them the neo-colonial situation continues:
the remotest communities are also the poorest; economic opportunities are still unevenly distributed
according to ethnicity; and many Mayans serve as the exploited underclass in an exploitative tourist
industry, working as guides at the archaeological sites, producing handicrafts for sale in and around
tourist destinations, and performing with folkloric dance troupes in and near the tourist hotels. To the
extent to which ethnicity has long been used in Mexico as one axis around which cultural, economic
and politic distinctions are organized (Lomnitz 2001), it is hence a crucial factor to take into
consideration in order to understand how gender and labour identities are crafted by Mayans in relation
to modernity.
I argue that visual practice can participate in this process of indigenous identities re-construction,
representing for those involved in the project a “technology of the Self” (Foucault 1988) capable of
drawing paths of “conscientization” (Boal 1978) and “subjectification” (Freire 1970) in contexts of
“epistemic violence” (Spivak 1988; Bourdieu 1997), whilst delving with the issue of cultural identities
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as a dimension of social action in a changing global context (Skelton & Allen 1999). In this sense, the
documentary “is assumed to give a ‘voice to the voiceless,’ that is, portray the political, social and
economic realities of oppressed minorities and others previously denied access to the means of
producing their own image. From this perspective, the documentary is not only an art form, it is a
social service and a political act” (Ruby 1991: 51). To the extent to which the film aims to empower
research participants with new levels of self-awareness (Pink 2007), it is an attempt of applied visual
anthropology, directed to explore the limits, the power and complexity of the production of a “shared
anthropology” as an area of identity formation and critical comparison.
Within these themes and purposes, this research will contribute to bridge the gap between applied
and academic visual anthropology by bringing participatory methods into the public arena and inviting
debate about the role and the potential contribution of performance-based research to mainstream
academic anthropology.
Research Questions
This project aims to explore the following questions:
1.
How Mayan identities emerge, are maintained and revitalized in relation to maquiladoras and
migration? Objectives:
o Explore the identity structures within the research community and understand how gender and
labour intersect with ethnicity in the case of short-term male migration and female
maquiladoras employment.
o Determine how individuals and groups interested by these phenomena relate to them and how
they negotiate their identities and their sense of belongingness as men and women, Mayans and
Mexicans, peasants and workers.
2.
How participatory film practice and performativity can contribute to the process of cultural and
ethnic identity construction among Yucatecan Maya people? Objectives:
o Explore how research participants use performance and film to decipher changes and express
their identities as Mayans, migrants and maquiladoras workers;
o Define to what extent film and performance can represent a means towards visibility for
marginalized groups as well as a creative arena for identity formation and critical reflection;
o Assess if film process and participatory art can produce material changes on traditional
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livelihoods by creating new social relationships as well as new models of economic and
political micro-community.
Theoretical Framework and Researcher Positionality
This research crosses several methodological and disciplinary terrains, drawing from applied visual
anthropology, economics and politics, cultural, gender and performance studies in order to explore the
relationships between Mayan identities and change within the performative frame of the film. While
the methodological approach - which draws heavily from social theatre, participatory art and
ethnographic film - is outlined in my research methods report, in this section I will build up a crossspecialization conceptual toolkit in order to highlight the connections between identity, performance,
labour and transnationalization.
Local Cultures and Globalization
The transformation of the economic relations among nations, the creation of regionally based economic
blocs, and the intensification of the worldwide flow of money are part of a new planetary reality we
call globalization. Although the trend toward autonomy and the trend toward globalization are both
deeply rooted in modernity (Wallerstein 1991), it is generally agreed that, since the 1970s, the scope
and pace of global integration cut across national boundaries, integrating and connecting communities
and organizations in new space-time combinations, and making the world more interconnected.
The fate of local identities in this transformation is debated in the social sciences from two
opposing perspectives. One view underscores the homogenizing force of capital, proposing the idea of
a worldwide “postmodern” condition or “global culture” that would tend to erase cultural specificity
(Jameson 1990). The other view points to a counter-tendency of increasing differentiation and
reconstitution of local identity (Kearney 1995). These two perspectives, however, are not necessarily
exclusive. Jean Baudrillard (1981), Scott Lash and John Urry (1994) propose that global economy is
concerned as much with the production of signs, sign systems and images as it is with the production of
commodities. Process of globalization and local reaffirmation of identity are thus found in a dialogic
relation in which local societies respond to the production of images and sign commodities from
outside their culture with a counter-production of their own images. More than a passive resistance by
clinging to traditional cultural values, social identity emerges in a process of political struggle and
response in the face of often aggressive outside influences. Local cultures are defining their identities in
the new global context, and in doing so they often appropriate “non traditional” elements from outside,
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a situation that gives cultural identities a “hybrid” appearance (García Canclini 1989).
Drawing on this latter approach, where Wallerstein’s core-periphery model is clearly challenged,
this research relies on a bi-focal perspective that sees local and global, tradition and modernity as
mutually inclusive and dialectically related dimensions (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Friedman 1996).
The idea of globalization as defined by a dual process of homogenization and heterogenization is
crucial to the understanding of how maquiladoras and migration are affecting Mayan traditional
livelihoods and, conversely, how Mayan traditional identities are shifting in relation to them. More
importantly, this perspective will allow me to better understand how Mayans appropriate, voluntarily or
involuntarily, economic, political and cultural aspects of the dominant, capitalistic society, re-crafting
them for their own ends.
Identity as a performance
Coherently with the assumption that “global” and “local” constitute inclusive dimensions, this study
approaches the issue of Mayan identities in similar terms of a relationship, dependant on parties and
circumstance, that is mutually influential - at least potentially. Drawing from the work of those social
scientists who engaged in the last twenty years in the re-definition of the notion of identity (Hall 1987,
1992; Pratt 2003; Escobar 2004), this research rejects essentialist perspectives of identity as a “whole”,
and embraces Clifford’s idea of identity as a fluid and ongoing “conjunctural” construction (1988: 11).
This potential for mutuality sheds new light on contemporary cultural politics, recalling Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1968) notion of culture as emerging “rhizomatically” (here and there, often unexpectedly)
rather than vertically (up though a root system to a single, predetermined trunk). A rhizomatic view of
cultural transactions provides a theoretical move away from persistent notions of the linear, irreversible
and unrepeatable nature of modern time and toward a special logic examining the ways different
cultural apparatuses produce the specific spaces, configurations, and circulation of power. These
spaces, configurations and circulations constitute not only the specific conjuncture or social formation
but also the relations between the local and the global.
On the one hand, this perspective can be fruitful in order to highlight the dynamic, active ways in
which Mayans reformulate their traditions and negotiate their agency within the international
globalism. On the other, though, it can overshadow the power imbalances that in Mexico, as in other
postcolonial societies, mark the relations and the exchanges between indigenous and non-indigenous.
Therefore, in order to emphasise the ability of Mayans to elaborate dynamically on the dialectic
local/global, tradition/modernity without neglecting to stress the power relations entailed in this very
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dialectic, I prefer to look at the constitution of their identities as a performative process.
The term “performativity” derives from Austin’s concept of the performative utterance (1962),
which does not refer to an extra-linguistic reality but rather enacts or produces that to which it refers.
The concept, in short, suggests that, at least with reference to some cultural realities, “doing” pre-exists
“being”, and that “being”, moreover, is something only observable in the “doing”. Therefore, by
putting aside once and for all the notion of an “essential” self inside the body, performativity crosses
the boundaries of the “intrinsically artistic and theatrical” and pervades the fabric of the social, political
and material world; it is an inalienable part of what constitutes power and knowledge. In this regard,
this notion is particularly useful to me to address and analyse through the film the performative social
construction of Mayan labour, ethnic and gender identities.
Key figure for the analysis of gender’s performative dimension is Judith Butler (1993). Drawing
from the work of Foucault (1978), who argued that power relations permeate social life and are
coextensive to acts of resistance, Butler posits that identity is not an abstract category, but a
performance regulated by social institutions. It is the very act of performing gender that constitutes who
we are, while identity itself is an illusion retroactively created by our performances. According to
Butler, therefore, the coherence of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality is culturally constructed
through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish
the appearance of an essential, ontological “core” gender. This assertion has political implications as it
unmasks the coercive strategies through which society forces people to act according to arbitrary rules
of conduct. However, Butler suggests that the quasi-ritualized reiteration of the social rules is like an
act of quotation which never reproduce faithfully the “original text”. In this very gap lies an alteration
that enables individuals to break the social rules (1993: 122-124).
This potential of performance for challenging the social normativity is underscored in Richard
Schechner’s performance theory (1985; 2002). Heavily influenced by Victor Turner’s idea of ritual and
performance as phenomena directed to the transformation of reality (Turner 1982), Schechner treats
performance and play as the “as if”. Within the context of performance, the imaginary becomes real,
and the “as if” is equivalent to the “is”. In the “subjunctive” performance space, then, a transformation
of the status quo can take place.
Writing about the relationship between performance and identity, John MacAloon (1984) suggests
that cultural performances allow us to “reflect upon and define ourselves, dramatize our collective
myths and history, present ourselves with alternatives, and eventually change in some ways while
remaining the same in others” (1984: I). MacAloon’s work is inflected, once again, by that of Victor
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Turner (1982), who assigns to formal theatre a special role in cultural coherence and change. For
Turner, theatre is a particular kind of cultural performance that occupies a liminal time somewhere
among the received past, the given present, and the possible future. Finally, what occurs in that space
and time provides, as MacAloon suggests, an opportunity for reflection and redefinition “as a culture or
a society”, an opportunity to reassert, reclaim, critique, and transform cultural tradition. This very idea
lies at the core of my research. As explained in my Research Method Report, I will use film and
performance as analytical, subjective and transformative spaces where Mayan identities can be
playfully re-thought and re-invented.
Culture as a performance
The concept of performativity can be also productively extended to the notion of culture. The
poststructuralist critique of and within anthropology suggests that culture is something ethnographer
writes, not something that enjoy ontological status in his own right. In the 1980s, following the insight
of Clifford Geertz, culture tended to be viewed, therefore, as a “text” to be read and interpreted (Geertz
1973). In the field of theatre semiotics, and in recent work in cultural anthropology, this cultural text
has come to be viewed more dynamically as a “performance text” whose meaning may never be fully
interpretable. In recognition of the myriad of exchanges that take place in a globalized environment,
culture is seen as dynamic, active, infinite, mutable and “performed” rather than “borne”. As
Conquergood stated (2002), the meanings of culture no longer reside comfortably within bounded
domain of verbal access, but can also be masked, camouflaged, indirect, embedded, or hidden in
context. As I explained above, in Mexico as elsewhere, local contemporary contexts are informed by an
increasing globalism that compels mass movements of goods and people across all previously
established borders. Thus, James Clifford (1997) has reconceived cultural identity as a matter of
“routes” rather than “roots”, building on his insight that “twentieth-century identities no longer
presuppose continuous cultures or traditions. Everywhere individuals and groups improvise local
performances from (re)collected pasts, drawing on foreign media, symbols, and languages” (Clifford
1988: 14). This view fits particularly well in the collaborative nature of my project, where, exactly,
Mayan actors will perform their re-invented selves by using a “foreign medium” (the film) in order to
produce those signs, sign systems and images Baudrillard referred to. The ways in which this process
will be developed are discussed in my Research Methods Report.
Economics as a performance
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Considering the potential for transformation which informs performative practices transferable to
economic transactions, and in order to investigate the relation structure/agency within indigenous
participation to capitalistic economy, this research extends the concept of performativity from the
artistic, cultural and identitarian domains to the political-economic sphere.
Michel Callon (1998a) has been the first to argue for the study of performative aspects of
economics, that is, the extent to which economic science plays an important role not only in describing
markets and economies, but also in “framing” them. According to Callon and those economic
sociologists who in the last ten years have studied the performative capacities of economic knowledge
(MacKenzie 2003, 2004, 2006; MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu 2007), to claim that economics is
performative is to argue that economics does things, rather than simply describing an external reality
that is not affected by economics. At a most general level, the term “performative” postulates that
“phenomena only exist in the doing of them” and “they have to continuously performed to exist at all”
(Callon 1998a). The essence of performativity, consequently, is to intervene in the reality rather than
reflect it.
An emphasis on performativity does not imply an evaluation, positive or negative, of the “effects” of
the aspect of economics in question. Economics “work” in the sense that market participants involved
see themselves as applying economics, view their uses of economics as having effects, and evaluate
those effects as desirable. Indeed, a feature common to most performative programs of economics is
that they share an identical choice, that of producing individual human agencies capable of calculating
their interests in one way or another (Callon 2005). Hence, where economic analysis postulates only the
importance of interests and resources, through a performative approach we can see instead how people
are creating, maintaining and transforming social relations.
By inviting us to consider actual economic organizations as the outcomes of explicit or implicit
performation struggles, the performativity thesis incites us to get rid of epistemological considerations
and to adopt a more pragmatic stance. Better, this approach argues for a “performative epistemology”
rather than a realist or reflective one; an ethical rather than a structural understanding of social
determination; an experimental rather than critical orientation to research (Gibson-Graham 2008). This
pragmatic orientation to knowledge recognizes the activism inherent in knowledge production and
installs a new kind of scholarly responsibility (Butler 1993; Law and Urry 2004; Callon 2005). “How
can our work open up possibilities? What kind of world do we want to participate in building? What
might be the effect of theorizing things this way rather than that? The goal is to produce a discourse of
economic difference as a contribution to a politics of economic innovation (Healy 2008). Starting from
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this idea and overlapping performativity of visual practice and performativity of economics, I will use
the film to reflect on the idea of economic democracy: how, then, a media, performative practice (the
film) can be useful for Mayan workers’ emancipation in terms of production relations? Can be the film,
for Mayans, a political praxis of conscious participation to the global economy domain?
A phenomenological approach to labour
In order to understand the extent to which labour can act as an identity generator for Mayan migrants
and maquila workers, I find particularly fruitful Callon’s notion of “embeddedness” (1998b), which
states that economic relations between individuals or firms take place within existing social relations
(and are thus structured by these relations as well as the greater social structures of which those
relations are a part). Therefore, each economic act or transaction occurs against, incorporates and also
re-performs a geographically and cultural specific complex of social histories, institutional
arrangements, rules and connections. To understand these connections and explore the way the
gendered, ethnic selves come into matter through labour, I will adopt a phenomenological approach to
work. Considering economic events such as human and social ones, phenomenology studies, analysing
and understanding, the economy in the human meaning that animates the actions and the impact they
generate in the social order. For these reasons, it affirms that economic phenomena are above all human
actions and as such presupposes a social meaning and intention, voluntary or not, visible or not.
Through an experience-centred approach, I will explore how Mayan migrants and women workers
shape this “social meaning” and how they transfer it to the sphere of economic relations.
Drawing on the work of those social scientists who adopted a phenomenological approach to labour
(Zuboff 1988; Mollona 2009; Hockey, J. and Allen-Collinson J. 2009), I will focus on the “working
body” in paid employment, particularly with regard to empirical research into the sensory aspects of
working practices. In doing that, I will keep myself attentive to gender and specificity. That is, I will
attend to the economic and political causes and consequences of the emergence of gendered subjects in
production.
A substantial body of literature has documented, especially during the ’90s, the experiences of
women in Mexican maquila-factory (Young 1994; Salzinger 1997, 2003; Cravey 1998; Prieto 1997;
Wright 1997; Abell 1999). Building on Goffman’s idea of “dramaturgy” (1959), I will enrich these
contributions by enunciating the ways Mayan women generate visual narratives of their experiences.
With the same approach, I will pay attention to the phenomenon of bifurcated social identity of Mayan
migrants, and their efforts to reinvent or re- and deconstruct a certain image of self in their everyday
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life.
Personal rationale
This project stems from the desire to further develop the research that I started in October 2010 for
my MA thesis with the support of the Italian Ethnographic Mission in Mexico, and which engaged me
in a 5-month fieldwork in Xocén, a Mayan community of a thousand people situated in the
Municipality of Valladolid, Eastern Yucatán. On that occasion, in order to investigate the role of
theatrical performance in the processes of indigenous identity construction, I worked closely with the
Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena (Farmerwork and Indigenous Theatre Laboratory), a
network of social theatres directed by María Alicia Martínez Medrano, a non-indigenous playwright
from Sonora who has worked for 30 years, in several Mexican states, with the poorest and most
isolated indigenous communities of the country. With its pedagogical, civic and artistic involvement,
the group has participated in the so-called “Maya Renaissance”, a general movement of revival of
indigenous cultural activities centred on “recovering” and “recapturing” the ethnic identity.
During my fieldwork I consistently used the camera as a tool for recording theatrical performances,
rehearsals and interviews, and I noticed a good disposition and a great curiosity of community’s actors
towards the audiovisual tool. From there I got the idea that my investigation of the performance as a
training tool of Mayan self can be usefully extended to the visual scope, assuming that film practice,
just like theatre, can represent for the community in question a means of personal and collective
awareness, social visibility and political/identitarian recapture.
I have already discussed my project with the maestros of the Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e
Indígena, who offered me their full support for making the film. My knowledge of the research field
and the relationship I have built with the actors of the Laboratorio, the inhabitants of Xocén and the
local authorities, enable the implementation of a shared anthropology visual project based on
involvement and consensus rather than invasion, growth opportunity for both the researcher and the
community involved.
Methods and Techniques
Please see my Research Method Report.
Practical issues
Whilst I speak a fluent Spanish, it is important to learn Maya due to the fact that, despite the
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community of Xocén is largely bilingual, Yucatec Maya (Màaya t'àan) is the language spoken in
familiar contexts and private interactions, which are likely to be recorded during the film shooting.
Initial classes have been undertaken in November 2010 at the Culture House of Valladolid during my
former fieldwork, but for sufficient fluency two months intensive training is scheduled.
Research Timetable
October 2012 - June 2013
Definition of the theoretical background of the research project,
ethical considerations and methodological approach.
September 2013
Writing up of the pre-fieldwork report. Complete MPhil.
October 2013
Progression to fieldwork. Leave for Mexico.
October 2013 - December 2013
Valladolid: intensive language training.
December 2013 - October 2014
Xocén: data collection and film production.
October 2014
Return to London.
November 2014 - May 2015
Transcription and fieldwork data analysis and organization. Final
editing of the movie.
June 2015 - September 2016
Writing up and thesis presentation.
Budget
Audio-video
Equipment
NVivo and End
Note
Living
expenses
(including
rent,
food and utilities)
Doctoral
Fees,
Goldsmiths
Books
Travels
Total
2012-2013
(London)
£ 5,000
2013-2014
(Mexico)
None
2014-2015
(London)
None
Total over three
years
£ 5,000
£ 215
None
None
£ 215
£ 10,800
£ 6,000
£ 10,800
£ 27,600
£ 3,828
Fees paid by
AHRC
£ 300
Fees paid by
AHRC
£ 300
£ 3,828
£ 1,200
£ 2,000 (including
open return flight
ticket + internal
travels within
Mexico)
£ 1,200
£ 4,400
21,343
8,300
12,300
41,943
£ 300
14
£ 900
Dissemination Strategy
I aim to publish articles on this research in academic journals and present findings to academic and
interest group conference in the UK, Italy and Mexico. As for the film, inasmuch it is a collaborative
project, I will discuss the more appropriate dissemination strategy with the actors and the community of
Xocén. In order to reach a wider audience, the film might be presented in the context of ethnographic
film festivals, exhibitions at cultural centres, museums, universities and schools both in Mexico and
Europe. Furthermore, it might be used by the Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena as the basis
for a multimedia theatre performance to be presented to the indigenous communities of the area.
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20