ABSTRACT
One of the fundamental ways in which strange and foreign landscapes, peoples, tastes, and objects were experienced in the Pre-Columbian Maya world was through pilgrimage. From the embodied perspective of those making a pilgrimage, moving through the landscape was a process of becoming and ambulatory knowing. Although much previous research on pilgrimages has focused on the travel of chiefs and leaders to far off regions as critical experiences in the acquisition of esoteric knowledge and as a prerequisite for obtaining political power, this chapter also examines exclusive male homosocial pilgrimages and feminine medical-spiritual pilgrimages. In all cases, the circulations through movement embodied not only ways of knowing, but an experiential unraveling of the “foreign” itself.
