This op-ed was co-authored with Rick Stepp, a fellow cultural anthropologist. It first appeared December 26, 2005 in Jacksonville's Florida Times Union.
Mel Gibson received initial praise from film critics for having casting unknown Native American actors in his most recent film epic, Apocalypto.
While Gibson's bloody rainforest romps may make for rousing cinematography, what will be the film's impact upon ordinary living Maya?
As anthropologists who work among contemporary Maya peoples in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, we are troubled by Gibson's fantasia about a real civilization that has suffered more than 500 years of genocide at the hands of Euro-Americans.
The rural Maya farmers we know would scarcely recognize themselves or their history on the screen.
Gibson has chosen to focus on perhaps the lowest moment of Maya history, a time of internal political chaos before the Spanish invasion.
Missing from the film are any high moments of more than 1,000 years of ancient Maya civilization with advanced agronomy, medicine, astronomy, calendrics and trade. Through agricultural experimentation, the ancient Maya gave the world many domesticated crops including corn, tomatoes, cacao, avocados.
The Maya also invented one of the world's earliest writing systems and invented the concept of "zero" hundreds of years before Europeans, along with other examples of highly advanced mathematics.
The filmgoer learns nothing of the astronomical sophistication of Maya architecture, nor that at their peak, some Meso-American cities were larger than London at the time.
The Spanish invasion brought this all to a grinding halt. The film ignores well-known historical evidence about the second Maya "apocalypse."
Within a century of the Spanish invasion, about 90 percent of Meso-American peoples perished as the result of pandemic European diseases, massacres, forcible resettlement and political executions of their leaders.
Not only did the Spanish slaughter the Maya, but they also destroyed their intellectual traditions by burning thousands of Maya books.
Somehow, the Maya people recovered from this onslaught. Over 6 million Maya are alive today, speaking some 29 distinct languages across Southern Mexico and Central America and even the U.S. as a result of emigration.
In Guatemala, the Maya people now constitute a majority of the country's population, despite a third "apocalypse" of genocide.
Three decades of civil war in Guatemala left an estimated 200,000 people dead or "disappeared," 200,000 children orphaned, 1 million internally displaced, and 50,000 international refugees. Fueled by U.S. military aid, the Guatemalan military massacred at least 400 indigenous villages in the early 1980s.
Liza Grandia, Ph.D. is a cultural anthropologist who has lived and worked in Guatemala and Belize for over six years. She is an assistant professor of International Development and Social Change at Clark University and is currently on leave at Yale University with a postdoc fellowship in Agrarian Studies. She is an emeritus board member of ProPeten, a Guatemalan environmental organization, with whom she has worked since 1993 (www.propeten.org). Liza speaks Q'eqchi' Maya and Spanish fluently.
