Hach Winik

by Didier Boremanse

Hach Winik may be the last comprehensive study of traditional Lacandon Maya society based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork. Long isolated, culturally conservative, and bearing a mystique of Mesoamerican "primitivism," the Lacandon now live on the brink of cultural disintegration. Their habitat is all but destroyed by lumbering and by the large-scale invasion of other Maya peoples in search of land. In the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Didier Boremanse collected cultural data and textual materials from two groups of Lacandon who still remained relatively isolated. Hach Winik describes and compares the cultural traditions of these two groups. This book is an indispensable resource for scholars, Maya intellectuals, and lay people who are concerned with what the traditional Maya world can contribute both to our understanding of the Ancient Maya of the past and to the rapidly evolving pan-Maya ethnic consciousness of modern Mexico and Guatemala.