ABSTRACT
In many ways, this book is a reminder of what we already know – that ancient Maya societies were always made up of foreigners, the foreign, and outsiders. As Marshall Sahlins (1999:xi) noted, “Anthropologists have known at least since the work of Boas and his students that cultures are generally foreign in origin and local in pattern”. In our engagements with other peoples, things, and places, we remake ourselves. For ancient Maya peoples, such contacts, conflicts, travels, forced displacements, pilgrimages, hospitality, and gazing from afar were no different in that they were essential ways in which more local regional identities were constituted. At the same time, however, it is important to consider that alterity also appeared from within. Those who were part of the same household, those in the same neighborhood, or nearby communities could be outsiders and treated as foreigners.
