Mindy McNeil
The Maya Ballgame: Not Just Re-creation
Mindy describes the gory details of human sacrifice from a Mayan mural.
Mindy offers an original critique of Girard:
(1) showing that Mayan myth did not conceal the deaths of arbitrarily chosen
victims and
(2) arguing that this openness was not because the Maya were "naïve
persecutors"
but because they were not ashamed of the violence. Girard assumes that the injustice
of human sacrifice
evokes guilt in the perpetrators, leading them to hide what they do. But that
response is grounded in
moral values the Maya apparently did not possess. Mindy thus suggests that
Girard's theory of cultural formation is conditioned by its own cultural location.