ABSTRACT
A number of important contributions have recently been made to the study of gender systems among the ancient Maya. These may be roughly grouped into two sets: scholars who use biological analogies exemplified with direct historic data to extend a timeless division of labor they believe to be empirical into the past of all Maya, and those who begin with archaeological data to argue for contingent realities, question generalized models of the division of labor, and evidence suspicion of claims to objectivity by archaeologists in general. The former approach, until recently the most common, is associated with the tenets of the “New Archaeology” and characterized as second wave feminism (Gilchrist 1999). It is exemplified in works by Bruhns and Stothert (1999), Clark and Houston (1998), Haviland (1997), McAnany and Plank (2001), Sweely (1999), and Tate (1999) among others. Haviland (1997) and Bruhns and Stothert (1999) will be considered here as representative of a processual perspective. The second approach employed by Cohodas (2002), Hendon (1996, 1997, 2002), Joyce (1992, 1993, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002), Robin (2000, 2002), among others, and associated with postmodern theorists such as Judith Butler (1990, 1993) and Marilyn Strathern (1988), more recent and more compatible with the perspective of this book, will be considered here through the work of Joyce.
