A World of Many: Ontology and Child Development among the Maya of Southern Mexico

1

Introduction

In this book, I describe how children (and adults) from two small communities in southern Mexico create the different worlds they live in. By doing so, they fashion themselves as different kinds of human beings, being differently in the world. I combine ethnographic data with experimental research from the cognitive sciences to explore how different ontologies emerge within a small-scale indigenous community and how they affect children’s being in the world not only figuratively, but literally.

The larger context is Chenalhó, a small, mainly Tzotzil Mayan municipality of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. A rural municipality, Chenalhó covers a wide area of small hamlets all linked through the municipal center town, the focus of most administrative and market dealings. While most outsiders would describe Chenalhó’s center town as a small rural village, hidden away in a valley about a 45-minute drive from San Cristóbal de las Casas, the township takes on a different meaning locally.

Locally the center town of more than 3000 inhabitants represents somewhat of a bustling marketplace, where people come to buy and sell, conduct business, connect to out-of-town travels, or attend the equivalent of high school. Several restaurants and stores cater to travelers, visitors, and residents, and most everyone speaks Spanish (to some extent). Several basketball courts serve as the entertainment for youths and adults; cell phone, the internet, and cable TV are part of the life of the more affluent. The town harbors a small Ladino—nonindigenous—population.

All this stands in stark contrast to the small hamlets that are linked to the center town. Often the home of fewer than 200 people, these hamlets usually represent extended family groups living close to their agricultural land. Stores and restaurants are largely absent as are higher-level schools, internet connections, administrative offices, and often even cell phone service. No Ladinos live in any of the hamlets and very rarely does one hear Spanish spoken.

Clearly, the life worlds of the children growing up in these two locales could not be more different, despite the fact that everyone is usually subsumed under the name of Pedrano, people from Chenalhó, usually referring to the entire municipality treated by and large as a culture.

The book engages different disciplines (mainly anthropology and psychology). It uses an ethnographic perspective to inquire what it means to be human, exploring issues of ontology, child development, and the politics of power (in the widest sense). It combines aspects of the ontological turn in anthropology with questions of child development in new ways. The outcome is not a prescription of how to be or not to be human but hopefully a recognition that different ways of being human are possible. Acknowledging this potentiality comes with a recognition that all living is activism, the enactment of ontologies and concepts as real, whether we like the outcome or not.

I explore child development and ontology within the paradigm of complexity theory, where complex interactions and feedback loops harbor constant change, making concrete predictions impossible. I relate different forms of being and the creation of different worlds to concepts in niche theory, where organisms specify which environmental factors represent significant components of their world, actively modifying and transforming their environment rather than simply adapting to it. Ontologies form part of the tool kit to do so. While I do not think of ontologies as exclusively human, I do not engage the concept beyond the human realm.

The actors are children experimenting—consciously or not—in producing new worlds by making sense, accommodating, or resisting models and practices in their surroundings. They do so by exploring and testing forms of knowing, knowledge, and ultimately, being.

However, being is not a simple state of affair but represents products of complex, intertwined processes, in which many people and institutions play a role. Different ways of being are usually described as ontological or epistemological differences. However, ontologies are not to be thought of as group matters but represent individuals’ ideas, undermining any static understanding of groups usually expressed as culture (such as the previously mentioned municipality). This does not undercut self-proclaimed cultures or identities. It does, however, reject culture or ontology as analytical categories (see Ross 2004). Group-based accounts—here the comparison of two communities—must explore who agrees with whom and on what (within and across populations), focusing on the why of such agreement. Answers to these questions have to be understood as the outcome of complex interactions between a wide array of factors (including self-assigned identities as well as existing racism).

This then is the main point of the book: an exploration of systematic patterns of environmental input and resultant knowledge production, whereas knowledge production is expanded to the level of ontology. I explore how children and adults in the two communities produce different ontologies, ways of being in the world, creating not only different environments but different forms of being in the world—different human beings. I argue that through the different meanings we create, humans engage in different relations, becoming different beings, differently defining and affecting other beings surrounding us as well. In this account humans no longer endow their environment with meaning, with a meaningless environment as a starting point (the nature constructed by Western science). Instead, the human environment is constructed through the very act of meaning making and being in the world.

The story as it unfolds is complicated. It is not a simple one of change versus resiliency, where a traditional Mayan ontology resists the erosion carried out by neoliberal globalization. We need to resist the tempting tropes of the hinterland, traditions, and rather think in terms of positionalities and world-making. This shifts our focus from knowledge acquisition and learning to knowledge production, with children as active agents—rather than passive recipients—of their knowledge. This does not take away the power of neoliberal globalization, nationalism, and its institutions—schools, jails, churches, and so on. Yet it includes some hope for resistance, opportunities to envision and enact other, more humane, worlds. Dominant groups, whose way-of-being is threatened by such emerging differences, usually mark them in pejorative terms. The threats are real, as new worlds represent alternatives to what hitherto might have been thought of as the only (and natural) way of being.

The topic of being in the world can easily be appropriated for a romantic tale of traditional cultures, cultural change, and the loss of cultural knowledge. Such a tale, however, has to be regarded as part of settler colonial states denying rights to Indigenous people—including the right to create and re-create themselves. When traditional indigenous ways identified by outside experts, become the measure stick, people not fitting into this mold may no longer appear indigenous (see Simpson 2014). As a result, Indigenous people become static relics of the past rather than dynamic citizens of the present and for the future.

In Mexico, the settler state, is represented by the world of Mestizos/Ladinos (Sue 2013). They represent the institutional power to enact and perpetuate Western ontology¹ and its tropes of modernity. Schools and government offices, including law enforcement, enact and enforce its logic within the nation-state. These (and other) institutions are heavily intertwined by way of their ontological and epistemological foundations. I do not concentrate on the origin of these ontological/ideological frames but instead focus on how their omnipresence affects ways of being in the world. Children learn about the world as they construct it. Hence, we need to account for the institutional input they receive as they create their place, including their place in the world.

This line of thought points at a criticism of culture as an analytical category, by directly relating culture to questions of power, specifically the power of canonization and representations. Who gets to select and enforce certain ways of doing and being? Who gets to selectively describe such rules, behaviors, or ways of being as normative, and for what purpose? Said (1978) asked these questions when interrogating the role of the West in constructing the Orient, othering the people into domination. However, similar processes work within communities as well.

Hence, instead of bemoaning a golden past, this book provides ways of imagining possible futures, both for the children interviewed as well as humanity at large. Not a small task, yet the findings I present provide a bit of hope, if only a little, that decentering Western ways of being might be not only possible but indeed desirable. Global warming, the Me Too movement, and rise of critical race theory as discussed outside academia all indicate that people do search for alternative ways of being. I do not presume to outline specific alternatives nor the pathways to reach them. My intention is simply to open up our minds toward the possibility of such alternatives, even when the changes reach the core of our being. I specifically do so focusing on children, celebrating their creativity, yet also calling attention to the fact that their creativity is hampered by many institutional obstacles provided by people who soon will represent the past.

So, while the book is about child development, I also see it as an invitation to allow and create a world where many worlds can be at home, where being different can be cherished as an opportunity to reflect and consider possible alternatives of how we relate to the world and one another.

In Chiapas such change was called for when the Zapatista rebellion of 1994 took the world by storm, asking for Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos. In English, this phrase means a world where many worlds are at home.

This then is the larger ideological project of this book: producing a creative space to explore and allow different ontologies to emerge, creating awareness and appreciation for a plurality of worlds, worldviews, and being-relations. I do so specifically with the help of children, rejecting the assumption that the kinds of questions asked are the sole domain of adults.

As mentioned earlier, my goal is not to provide a romantic description of traditional Mayan worldviews. These are by definition ideological products. Different worldviews have always existed, each posing a different future or status quo. Traditions are invented and often circumscribed with an aura of eternity (see Hobsbawm 2012). They are inseparable from power and the intersections of class, race, and gender.

How then are these different worlds created? What happens when they collide? Which of them gain visibility and voice? Clearly, we cannot separate ontology from ideology and power, and hence dissenting voices are not simply leftovers from an idealized past but may represent the voice of children, voices for the future. Dissenting voices represent disorderly creations, disrupting the hitherto existing order. Building on their own idealized version of the past, these new orders constitute creative ways of engaging and interacting with the environment.

Within this context, environment constitutes an ontologically charged term that needs further exploration. For now, it is sufficient to say that environment and order are key terms in our conceptualization of what is what and how. In the context of a dominant settler colonial ontology we must see any efforts of contesting the existing order as acts of resistance—conscious or not. We have to regard such efforts as refusal to recognize the world as produced by dominant political projects, beneficial to only a few, often exploitative and destructive in nature. From the perspective of the institutions prescribing order, disorderly behavior constitutes an act of defiance.

The charge is not simply to pay attention to a potential pluralization of worlds. Such an approach not only misses the point but, worse yet, runs the danger of treating culture as something to be had and lost. It not only reiterates the colonial project by promoting an idealized notion of pure culture but also negates contemporary forms of being different. Culture and worldview become things that other people have, bestowing Western ontology with an appearance of naturalness, hiding the ideological aspect of ontology-political projects (see Blaser 2013). Assumed natural, Western ontology appears unavoidable, the only way of being in the world. This is what nineteenth-century anthropologists like Tylor had in mind (1871). In this view, resistance is not only pointless but subversive to the natural order.

Obviously, I take a different view. Creations of new worlds give testimony to the possibility of alternatives. They represent different ways of understanding, exploring, and being in the world, relating to one another and our surroundings. Understanding the conditions of their emergence not only sheds light on the underlying mechanisms at work but might also help us to imagine and construct a different and better world, rethinking the one we currently inhabit and create. This is important. If we take ontology seriously, it becomes clear that we do not simply inhabit the world. We create and live within our creation. To repeat, living is activism, even if we do not like the products of our own making.

In this sense, the Zapatistas of Chiapas are not the relict of a precapitalist indigenous past. Instead, they arose as an open refusal to participate in the continuous making of contemporary life in Mexico.

THEIR BASTA! (ENOUGH!) RELATES directly to existing racism, capitalist exploitation, and the continuation of settler colonial domination of Indigenous people. Theirs is the quest for alternative worlds, opposing the unifying dream of modern global capitalism.

The idea of resistance or refusal to partake is important. Active resistance to an existing world order is one way we can imagine ontological change. This might include revolutions, religious conversions, the creation of new religious forms, or simply the enactment of new ways of relating to ourselves and others. It is important to look below the surface. Changes to how we relate to ourselves and others often include less-visible attacks on ongoing moral schemes that train our bodies to behave in certain ways. This is politically important.

Theoretically, it is important too. Unless we are able to account for continuous ontological changes and the emergence of worldviews, we run the risk of simply turning ontology into a placeholder for an outdated concept of culture. Instead, if we allow for new ontologies to be formulated as acts of resistance (intentionally or not), they become at once projects of living and being.

Such an approach then opens up the question of whether there is a division between ontology and ideology. Asked differently, what role do belief, intention, and knowing play?

In Weapons of the Weak James Scott (1985) provides a strong argument to extend resistance beyond intentional acts, to include the often-hidden acts that target individual survival, such as foot-dragging and pilfering. Resistance loses the straitjacket of ideological planning. Open resistance might follow the hidden acts of survival. Similarly, Rappaport (1999) argues that rituals are not as much about enacting conscious belief as they are about the public acceptance of a general order. In his view, belief is possibly subject to deceit while manifest commitment is not. Commitment does not preclude actual belief, but by bringing the body into play, it allows for the emergence and continuation of an accepted order, even in times of doubt. This allows for action and commitment not only to precede belief but to supersede it. For Rappaport belief can be faked, but public display of commitment cannot. This also lowers the requirements to understand and plan ontologies, order, or the resistance to them. People enact certain ontologies with less than clear understandings or even with doubt (in fact that is how most of us walk through our lives). Failure to enact and embody represents refusal of an existing order, disorderly behavior, and resistance. Simply living is activism.

WHAT THEN DOES IT MEAN TO live in different worlds? In the context of this book, it means several things. First, it is the outward embodiment of an order different to the dominant one, where the dominant order represents specific ways of being and interacting with other beings (defined by the very interactions). Second, it means pairing this embodied order with projects (aspirations and values) different from the ones proposed by the dominant order.

In the following chapters I will show how different children relate differently to their surrounding world and by doing so become different beings.

This is a dangerous statement in need of clarification. The children I describe are different not because of some biological differences. They are not born differently and neither are they exotic others. I describe within community differences rather than differences compared to White U.S. middle-class urban children—who are different too. This is important, as being different from something or someone is a relational property. Perspective is important as it centers certain specific positionalities (in developmental studies usually Western White urban middle-class children).

I consciously chose not to include the standard population of psychological studies in my research. After all, if any group stands out as odd (when looking at humanity at large) it seems to be the people reflecting a Western ontology (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010). This is what my data show too. The Western focus on humans and EGO seems to be just that—one way of being in the world.

In this book, I am specifically interested in how children understand what is usually described as the natural world, the realm of living beings. Yet instead of exploring living kinds as defined by the Western sciences (and taught in school), I explore how children construct being alive, what it means to be living, and what the role of humans is within this set up. My questions do not test children against any true answer key but target understanding potential differences of children’s developing assumptions about the world and the different biologies that emerge.

Children do not acquire knowledge in isolation. In fact, they do not simply acquire but produce knowledge, ways of knowing, and ways of being. This process has to be explored on the local level yet must be understood within the wider context of processes often summarized as globalization or modernization. This book then tells the story of emerging local modernity’s new worlds, created and constantly transformed in the eye of ongoing globalization. By bringing together concepts, theories, and methods from different academic disciplines and lines of research, I hope to shed light on the complex relationship between child development, emerging ontologies, and world-making as ways to refuse and resist. Of course, refusal, resistance, and world-making are not the sole domain of children. However, the focus on children might tell us more about the ideological workings of schools and parenting, especially when it comes to its outcomes. The focus on children also helps us to conceptualize children differently altogether.

Methodologically, this kind of work must combine the systematic comparison of data across contexts and populations with a detailed ethnographic description. The approach does not distinguish informal or formal approaches to craft a story of emerging differences in children’s concepts of the world. I specifically use the language of emergence and complexity here. As children create knowledge, their efforts shape the context within which they pursue their development. The outcome is never predictable, and emerging group differences cannot be understood as caused by independent variables. This guards us against essentialism.

On a theoretical level then, I explore questions such as these: How do ontologies emerge and change? How do changing ontologies relate to different ways of knowing and learning? How do these processes shape different ways of being in the world? On a political level, I see this book as a way of celebrating differences, not only as the creation of a looking glass for our own ways of being but as an active encouragement to take living as a form of activism. Other worlds are possible and desperately needed. Climate change, pandemics, the extinction of ever more species are real, as are sexism and racism. They endanger not only our own species but also, more importantly, life on the planet. I specifically do not argue for preserving the planet for our children and grandchildren. Other species have children and grandchildren too. They too need our attention.

In this scenario, alternative ontologies are no longer curiosities, commodities displayed and sold in books or on the internet. They are not remnants of the past, other cultures, or other people but represent alternative ways of being in this world. Living as activism reminds us to never stop working on the world we inhabit-create. There is only one planet, but there are countless ways of being, and being with and within it.

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A World Where Other Worlds Can Be at Home

Construir un mundo donde quepan otros mundos—To construct a world where other worlds can be at home

—Ejercito Zapatistas de Liberación Nacional, 1994

When, on January 1, 1994, the Zapatista uprising rang in the New Year in Chiapas, I was spending some time in San Cristóbal de las Casas. At the time I was living and working in San Andrés, a Tzotzil Mayan village neighboring Chenalhó. I had spent approximately twenty-five months there during the previous three years and had heard about the upcoming rebellion.

I was working on a book exploring a local uprising in the 1970s, when parts of the Indigenous people expelled most of the nonindigenous Mestizos from their community (Ross 1997a). I collected oral histories from members of both perpetrators and victims, worked through archives, and interviewed relevant state actors of the time. The emerging story was neither new nor surprising, aside from the fact that it ended in a local rebellion: racism, abuse, and exploitation combined with land scarcity and lack of opportunities were the driving forces behind this local uprising.

The scorn was not directed toward the state—entirely made up of Ladinos. The event was local, directed immediately against the aggressors and the racism lived by the Indigenous people on a daily basis. For them the opponents were not all Ladinos nor the system, but the abusive local landowners and merchants, whose families held the power and who continued to treat San Andrés as their own. They had taken most of the suitable land away from Indigenous people—often by fraudulent means—and circumvented the size limits on landholdings imposed after the Mexican land reforms. They controlled all commerce and held all important political offices. Physical assaults on Indigenous people were frequent; successfully filing criminal charges was not. The same families not only held the local power but also maintained important relations to the state and national powers.

All these behaviors had been described in detail for the Highlands of Chiapas (Colby and van den Berghe 1961a, 1961b; Goldkind 1963; Stavenhagen 1964; Pitt Rivers 1967; Siverts 1969a, 1969b), and all this was more than enough to understand the resulting uprising (Ross 1997a). However, not all Ladinos were forced to leave. In fact, I still encountered some Ladino families in San Andrés during my time