Aruxes and the Limits of Epistemological Certainty
The Mayan forest in a mural painted by Luna Vega and Víctor García. José María Morelos, México. 2023. Image by Kata Beilin. Copyright Kata Beilin, 2023.
Bernardo Camal, the Arux, speaking to Maya people at a seed fair. Chocholá, México. 2023. Image by Kata Beilin. Copyright Kata Beilin, 2023.
Aruxes are woken up stones, stones that have come to life. They are pieces of ancient temples carved by pre-Hispanic Mayas that contemporary Mayas find while opening new patches of forest for milpa or exploring the areas of cenotes, little yet deep lakes in the Yucatan karst that are sacred. These ancient remains are then brought back to life by the breath of jmen (Mayan shamans) and knowledgeable milpa growers. Activated, they turn into little people —they only reach up to the height of a human knee— and guard what remains of the past. It is believed that Aruxes defend Mayan forests and Mayan milpa from harmful intrusions. Some jmen make Aruxes from wood or clay and animate them by blowing sacred energy into their noses. That energy connects humans, stones, plants, sun, past and present.
Aruxes are then materialized energies of three-thousand-year-old Mayan nature and culture. Mayan people, regardless of status and education, rarely doubt their existence. Everyone knows how they fight on behalf of their land with tricks and mischief. In Mayan culture, the love for the forest is connected to the belief in Aruxes. If Aruxes consider the people who move into the forest to be disrespectful, they make life impossible for them. The newcomers lose their way in the forest. Aruxes steal their shoes and produce dozens of swirls in the water when they look for the reflection of their faces on the surface. Aruxes whip dust into their eyes, confusing them. At night, Aruxes throw little stones at newcomers’ roofs to spook them. Eventually, dizzy, and disoriented, the intruders move away, back to where they came from.
My friend, Marta K’uj, told me that the only way to appease Aruxes is to feed them sak ha, a mixture of maize and honey. They accept people who pay homage to them, but this requires a change in perspective that is impossible for those who do not believe in Aruxes. Thus, Aruxes force newcomers to leave or to change their views and become more respectful towards their world. This is one more way in which Aruxes protect Mayan culture. Their mischief proves that the land is permeated by spiritual energies that cannot be separated from its material aspects, that these spiritual energies are powerful, and that one cannot simply disregard them.
What are the limits of your certainty about your knowledge and about the infallibility of your epistemology? This question becomes particularly significant when researchers travel to lands inhabited by cultures whose beliefs about what is and what is not real are different than the ones we have learned. When modern anthropologists dismissed indigenous peoples’ beliefs as a superstition, they may have perpetrated what Boaventura de Sousa Santos called epistemological injustice. After all, the superiority of the Western academic epistemological stance, for hundreds of years since colonization, was guaranteed by the power of the countries and institutions funding and administering their research.
The assumption of the superiority of Western epistemology has indeed been the very basis of the way we have understood research until now. This assumption led to what indigenous academics and activists call today “academic extractivism.” Western (or westernized) researchers objectified the non-Western people, extracted from their knowledges information and ideas that allowed them to publish manuscripts and build their own academic capital in centers of power, oftentimes for monetary gain. They rarely returned the results of the research to the original informers. Western geographers, anthropologists and oftentimes scientists acquired most of their knowledge thanks to their local guides. These were, however, rarely credited in their manuscripts.
Decolonial methodologies aim at transforming this state of affairs. Among the postulates of Mayan activists and academics are: (1) respect: researchers need to ask for permission before starting their work on Mayan territory and with Mayan communities, (2) community centeredness: the research should be focused on issues that Mayan people need to be addressed rather than filling lacunae in the production of a given academic field, (3) reciprocity: the results of research need to be returned to the communities which made the research possible, (4) epistemological justice: researchers need to engage in a dialogue with Mayan knowledge, rather than examining it as a superstition, tradition or a mere metaphor. At the ending scenes of Maya Land: Listening to the Bees, Mayan poet, Pedro Pablo Chim Bacab phrases it in the following way:
We continue to hear only the voices of Westerners. It is their monologue in the sense that they ask questions but always answer their own questions themselves. They are talking about us, not with us. … what we need is that they also include [into the dialogue] the original voices of knowledge. From that perspective, the knowledge that we have within our contexts must be treated with the same respect as the knowledge created by these Euro-American voices.
Postcolonial and decolonial studies have progressed towards respecting other knowledges. Decolonial discourses validating indigenous knowledges are constructed not only by Western researchers, however, but significantly by indigenous peoples themselves. For example, the Mayan research team called Xook K’iin vindicates Mayan knowledge of forecasting weather by leading research, publishing and popularizing its results among Mayas and others in Yucatan. The leader of the group, Mayan agronomist and communicator, Bernardo Caamal, adopted the name of Arux to make clear his perspective and his epistemology. Bernardo calls all those who gather data about the weather and the behavior of animals for the collective Xook K’iin “Aruxes.” When clouds cover the skies of Yucatan, he appeals to his friends on Facebook: “Aruxes report from the territory!” If you say that here the fantastic is applied as a metaphor, I will argue that this is a simplification. Bernardo believes that his land energies employ him for its defense.
While I worked at the Yucatan peninsula, gathering materials for my book, Mayan academics and activists led a workshop on academic extractivism. Their questioning of academic epistemologies made me very aware of my attitude towards the knowledges and beliefs of the people I interviewed, including their ideas about Aruxes. Besides, it seemed that Aruxes did not accept me. The lock snapped hurting my finger every time I closed the gate. My car got scratched, and my laptop got fried making me lose all of my data that was not saved elsewhere. The list of disasters was longer, but I did not want to leave Yucatan. Then, one day I decided to offer sak ha to the Aruxes. This was the first step in my respectful dialogue with what according to Western science does not exist. For Daniel Manuel-Navarrete et al. this moment of research, when beliefs of the land are acknowledged and paid respects, requires ontological flexibility (Manuel-Navarrete 2021). The researchers believe that ontological flexibility is a necessary step in the transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge with indigenous people.
In my view, however, this is not just a question of research structure, but rather a deeper question about reality and truth. Coherence, consistency, and consensus have been considered by philosophers as important criteria of truth. Ontological proof for existence of God was based on God’s necessity. Aruxes’ existence is consistent with Mayan philosophy of nature and Aruxes, and other sacred beings are similarly necessary in the Mayan world as the Christian God is for Christians. Besides, while Modernity created a divide between science and religion, such a divide does not exist in the Mayan world. Aruxes, and other sacred beings cannot be dismissed as merely fantastic creations because they constitute a necessary component of indigenous science, which would lose its interior cohesion without these spiritual aspects. If there is a fear that Mayan culture would disappear without the forest, the forest would not be what it is without Aruxes and Yuum K’aax, Yuum Iik – guardians, and sacred patrons of the forest and of the wind. Richard Shweder, Professor of Cultural Psychology at the University of Chicago coined a term “universalism without uniformity,” suggesting that an objective existence of certain beings and norms is given differently in each cultural reality, which, however, does not amount to cultural relativism.
Mayan bioculturality extends beyond the intuitive meaning of the term. It does not only include material relationships between humans and plants, animals, and ecosystems, but also their spiritual personalities and agencies. Mayan writer and activist, Pedro Uk Be, tells me that sacred energies connect humans, animals, plants, and rocks, making all of them alive and aware. This vision of nature as spiritual and conscious based on series of exchanges between all its elements allowed Mayan people to maintain the largest forest in the Americas after the Amazon. Isn’t that a reason to serve sac ha to the Aruxes?
About the author
Kata Beilin is a Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her current research interests are focused on contemporary Mayan culture. She is working on a book titled The Return of the Mayan Moment; A Struggle for the Forests for which she was awarded Fulbright Fellowship in 2022. She directed the documentary film Maya Land: Listening to the Bees, released in English and Spanish in 2022 that has won two International Festival Prizes in 2023.
Works Cited
Bacab, Pedro Pablo Chim. Maya Land: Listening to the Bees, directed by Kata Beilin and Avi Weinstein, FelixMundo Productions, 2022.
K’uj, Marta. Interview with Kata Beilin, José María Morelos, 27 April 2023.
Manuel-Navarrete, David, Christine Buzinde, and Tod Swanson. “Fostering horizontal knowledge co-production with Indigenous people by leveraging researchers’ transdisciplinary intentions.” Ecology and Society, vol. 26, no. 2, 2021.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. “The epistemologies of the South and the future of the university.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, qhad038.
Shweder, Richard A. Thinking through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology. Harvard UP, 1991.
Uk Be, Pedro. Interview with Kata Beilin, Buctzotz, 17 May 2023.
