ABSTRACT
I first composed this essay in 1992, on the occasion of the Columbus Quincentenary, as a symposium paper at the University of Virgina. It was published in two English versions in 1994 and 1995. Its life history is given in the acknowledgments. As it was going to press in the American Anthropologist (1994) and in the symposium volume (1995), the Zapatista insurrection exploded in January 1994. What I had conceived as a commissioned piece on the role of animals in the collective and individual representations of identities of Native Americans quickly became larger than the spirit of the invited paper, for the Zapatista movement presented to the media an unusual configuration of personalities, among them the mysterious and eloquent Subcomandantc Marcos and his directorate of then (and still) relatively unknown Indian Comandantes. These personalities were (and still are) relatively obscure, yet it seemed to me that Maya ideas about self person, and society might illuminate why this opaque prof ile of the Zapatista leadership was a preferred mode of self-representation. I present here a brief postscript alluding to these issues (published in the 1995 version) that leads directly to the rationale for the essay that follows as chapter 10 .
