The Maya Gender System
Reading: Joyce, "The Construction of Gender in Classic Maya Monuments"
Trying to reconstruct the Maya gender system increases our understanding of archaeological data and its biases. According to Conkey and Gero (1991), a gender system consists of gender roles, gender ideology and gender identity. Gender roles consist of the economic, political and cultural activities of men and women as well as their status within society. Gender ideologies include the expectations, associations, and sentiments attached to gender categories. Gender identities refer to any individual's affiliation with a gender category and his or her feelings about that identity. The study gender systems populates prehistory with people, conflicts, and passions! It fills Maya houses and temples with people (Joyce 2000).
Information on Maya gender can be obtained from:
- pictures and texts on stelae
- pictures on vases
- ceramic figurines
- burials
- skeletons
- living spaces
Which would best reflect gender roles? Which would best reflect gender ideologies or identities? Which would be the most representative and reliable? [Stelae and vases are controlled by elite males and project an elite male point of view. That is, they would represent the gender ideologies of the dominant males. Figurines and burials are created by commoners, but they too are representations of people and social roles, and thus reflect gender ideologies. However, analysis of skeletons (their trauma, their bone chemistry, their disease patterns, and their activity patterns) provide a view of the workings of society that are not subject to deliberate manipulation by past actors. Since skeletons reflect past activities, they are well suited to the study of gender roles. Domestic space may be deliberately ordered, in which case it reflects gender ideology. But, the structure of domestic space may reveal possibilities of surveillance, communication, and collaboration, and thus reveals gender roles.]
Stele: refer only to the elite stratum. They were commissioned by rulers to serve their political purposes; therefore, they are gender constructs. At first, Maya scholars believed that women were not present at all, that the skirt-wearing figures were male priests! But stelae tell us something about both gender roles and ideologies.
Joyce distinguishes men and women by clothing: men wear loin cloths and women wear net skirts or long blouses (huipils). Joyce suggests that these items of clothing are associated with gender ideology: men's largely unclothed bodies represent nature, while women's bodies, swathed in cloth, represent culture. Stelae bearing male and female figures are also differentiated by position. Stelae with male figures are positioned to the right, above, in front of or to the east or north of stelae with female figures. Similarly, stelae with female figures are positioned to the left, below, behind, or to the west or south of stelae with male figures. This suggests priority for male figures. In addition, the directional associations suggest other elements of gender ideology. Among modern Maya speakers, east and north are associated with the sun and with the heavens; west and south are associated with the underworld and with the earth. This suggests that males were associated with the sun and heavens and women were associated with the underworld and the earth.
The implements held by men and women on the stelae suggest something of gender roles. Men and women can hold many of the same implements such as double-headed bars, shields, spears, staffs, and manikin scepters, suggesting that both men and women could wield political power. But only women hold bowls with paper and blood-letting instruments, bundles of cloth and bowls of food. These must be things that women produced, frequently appropriated by male rulers to promote their power. When men and women are present in relation to a third figure, they are the parents of that figure. Women more often appear as mothers rather than wives, which seems to express their importance in establishing royal lineage. No women appear on the stelae at the largest of all Maya sites, Tikal.
However, the inscriptions on stelae at other Classic Maya sites suggest that women figured prominently in forging alliances between ruling families, and in some cases, governed in their own right (Marcus 1976, Josserand 2002).
Vases: Marvin Cohodas arrives at similar conclusions in his analysis of gender on Late Classic Maya ceramics (1996). These were produced by male craftsmen for royal patrons. Like the stelae, they provide some information on gender roles, emphasizing the activities of elite men. Only men appear in certain scenes, those depicting warfare, hunting, ball games, smoking, enema-taking. There are no scenes that depict only women engaged in activities. When men and women are both present, women appear as the mothers and as secondary companions to rulers. They dance in the courtyard in front of elite residences, or they are seated behind men on the seat of authority, or they appear as servants and attendants. The rarity of women suggests that palaces were male dominated courtly life. Royal palaces are depicted as a place where men publicly negotiated relationships with other men. Of course, negotiations between men and women probably occurred in circumstances not depicted on the vases.
Figurines: Graves on the island of Jaina, forty kilometers north of Campeche City, have yielded many finely modeled ceramic figurines. Women are better represented in this medium than on stelae; women represent about a quarter of all the figurines found to date (Ruscheinsky 1996). Less elite in character, these figurines present a wider range of activities for men and women. As on the vases, men are shown as warriors, ball players, and hunters: all associated with aggressive, competitive, heroic behavior. Men are also depicted engaged in blood-letting and dancing, as captives and as sacrificial victims. Women are shown in their productive roles: weaving and rearing children and animals. They are also shown as the companions of men.
Burials: Two hundred twenty-four adult burials were excavated at Tikal (Haviland 1997). One hundred sixteen could be identified as males (52%), 47 (21%) were females, and 61 (27%) could not be identified. The highest ranking were those that had the greatest investment in terms of energy expended in the construction of their graves and the cost of grave goods. From 25 CE onward, all of these elite burials contained males. Many lower-ranking house groups contained "mortuary shrines" along the east sides of their patios, and these shrines more often contained male burials. Of 22 individuals from such shrines whose sex could be determined, 68% were males and 32% were females. This suggests that Classic Maya society was patrilineal, that is, group membership and property were inherited through from an individual's father (McAnany 1995). Patrilineality may also be reflected in the locations of the graves of later household members: males were usually buried beneath housefloors, as ancestors, while females and children were buried behind or beside houses. However, of the three elite founding tombs at Copan, two contain the remains of females (Bell 2002). Evidently, in-marrying women could be the founders new royal lineages.
Many of the same grave goods were found in male and female graves at Tikal; however, in five cases where weaving tools were found in graves, four contained female skeletons and one was a child's grave.
Skeletons: The male and female skeletons from Classic Maya sites show no differences in terms of childhood health and nutrition. In addition, tooth and gum disease are not different for males and females. Evidence of post-cranial trauma, such as wounds, fractures and dislocations, were found only on male skeletons, consistent with the depictions of men as hunters, warriors, and ball players in Maya art. However, overall, the evidence suggests few differences in the physical well-being of males and females in Classic Maya society (Danforth et al. 1991).
Living Spaces: As we have seen, women were associated with cloth production in Maya stelae and figurines, and weaving equipment was found in female graves. Mapping the distribution of weaving tools in residential space, Julia Hendon (1997) found that women's cloth production occurred in commoner and elite houses, although with greater intensity in elite houses. However, women's weaving tools (and presumably women) were not present in the most public parts of structures. Thus, Hendon concluded, women did not participate in political negotiations (or they did not weave while they engaged in these negotiations!).
Sweely (1997) examined the locations and orientations of six metates found in situ at the site of Cerén, El Salvador. Women positioned at these metates would have all been able to see each other, facilitating communication and the exchange of knowledge. Such relationships would have facilitated female decision-making and power in household contexts. However, one of the metates seemed exceptionally well positioned to allow its user to observe the behavior of the other metate users and, perhaps, supervise their behavior. Thus, women's work within households may have been overseen by a female (elder?) authority figure.
Robin (2002) observes that the Maya never depicted farmers in representational art, so we have few indications of who was responsible for agricultural labor in Maya culture. To gain some insight into this question, Robin considered the dispersion of Classic Maya homesteads and agricultural fields across the landscape at Chan, Belize. She observed that the interdigitation of houses and fields would have facilitated the collaborative participation of both men and women in agricultural work. At the very least, the proximity of houses to fields, and the large gaps between the poles used for house walls, would have facilitated interaction and communication between those who worked in the fields and those who worked in domestic spaces, promoting gender equality.
This examination of the Maya gender system suggests, then, that gender roles varied according to class standing. Elite men most often occupied the highest political positions in Maya states, although elite women could be important political players (McAnany and Plank 2001). Men dominated courtly life. But male dominance never extended to the physical abuse of women (as it often does in American society) nor did it affect women's nutritional and health status. Within commoner households, there is good reason to believe that men and women collaborated on many daily activities, and that a more egalitarian ethos prevailed. Less is known about gender ideologies, but the directional locations of Maya stelae depicting men and women suggest that as among many contemporary Mesoamerican people, men were associated with the dry, heat-energy of the sun, and women were associated with the moist, dark fertility of the earth. These were complementary roles, the combination of the two being necessary for continued life.