Territorio sagrado: cuerpo humano y naturaleza en el pensamiento maya

this paper studies mayan attitudes towards environment according to three different kinds of testimonial sources: landscape representations in some sculptures, mural paintings and prehispanic architecture; colonial manuscripts, specifically the mayan popol vuh, the books of chilam balam and the ritual of the bacabs; and contemporary ethnographic reports. it focuses on the way the human body was conceived as an essential part of the environment and considered a scale model of the cosmos. for the mayas, the inhabited territory was a coherent totality where humans, animals, plants, stars, planets, geographic orientation and time, each played a specific roles, all of them interdependent, and nature so became a human centred organization. human relationship with nature was religiously and morally framed since the world elements were seen as living entities as they were granted a heart and so possessed a holy essence. humans coexisted with vegetal, animals, minerals and meteoric entities through a biological interchange that could be shaped in terms of specific myths and rites. for the maya, body and nature were both part of a single territory, a sacred single one.