Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Catherine Burdick reviews The Gifted Passage

Stephen Houston. The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018. 256 pp.

Review by Catherine Burdick

29 June 2018

In recent decades studies of ancient Mesoamerican texts and images have increasingly ventured into questions of the human experience, and Houston’s thoughtful inquiry into the crucial place of male adolescence for the Maya during the first millennium AD is among the most ambitious of these projects. Drawing upon evidence from the hieroglyphic record, the artistic corpus, and material culture, this study consolidates and recasts over a decade of Stephen Houston’s investigations into what it meant to be a young man in the ancient Mayan world. In investigating this facet of Classic-era culture and exploring the rites and processes by which Mayan males were socialized, this important book lends a critical new perspective to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican studies.

Houston’s intriguing argument that “the late Classic Maya world held a special place for male youth” (p. 178) takes shape across six chapters. The initial chapter, “A Splendid Predicament,” broadly introduces this book’s thematic and theoretical concerns through a panoramic and cross-cultural treatment of male adolescent challenges and opportunities. Here, drawing from gender studies and leaning upon diverse artistic representations of masculinity that range from Thomas Cole’s oil paintings to ancient Greek sculptures, Houston critically frames male adolescence as a period of heightened malleability. In other words, during the life stage when young men first begin to produce more than they consume, thereby transforming into social assets, they require guidance in order to channel their energies in beneficial directions. The remaining chapters of The Gifted Passage examine evidence from the graphic and material records to reveal how Mayan culture set about providing necessary structure for formative youths.

In the second chapter, “Growing Men Among the Maya,” Houston introduces the theme of boys becoming men in the particular case of the ancient Mayan world. Drawing from the Classic-era epigraphic record, the author uses linguistic cues for masculinity to tease out the cultural attributes awarded to Mayan adolescents. Of particular relevance for its frequent appearance in texts, the youthful title ch’ok is an apparent vegetal analogy for unrealized potential that likens the young man to a sprouting plant or to unripe fruit. Also relevant is keleem, a masculine title that emphasizes youthful strength and excessive energy. Taken altogether, such hieroglyphic labels give way to an ancient Mayan conception of the male adolescent as immature and unrefined, yet vivacious and promising.

The subsequent chapters lean upon hieroglyphs and imagery, primarily from monumental sculpture and portable ceramics, to treat the social practices that mitigated and directed elite Mayan males. Each chapter reveals particular cultural facets that guided the slow transformation of immature “sprouts” into productive adulthood. Chapter 3, “A Gifted Passage,” explores the role of refined ceramics, primarily cylindrical drinking vessels for chocolate beverages and plates for tamales, in noble rites. By methodically tracking expressions of ownership in vessel rim texts, Houston confirms that nearly one third of inscribed drinking vessels belonged to individuals who carried youthful titles. Not only do his findings shed light on the collection practices of young elites, but they also suggest that fine ceramics and their contents were central to the rituals that characterized their world. This emphasis upon ceremony continues in chapter 4, “The Taming Places,” through further attention to age-grade rituals. One notable rite of passage was ch’ab, a bloodletting ceremony that engaged liminality and physical pain in an act of elite duty. This section also takes up the theme of compulsory segregation for young males and examines the activities that were likely undertaken in homosocial settings under the guidance of elders. One particular strength of this chapter is the finesse with which Houston convincingly ties together disparate elements of Mayan material culture to show how k’ex offerings, ceramics, and jade dental adornments all played a role as markers of new masculine status.

In chapter 5, “The Good Prince,” Houston turns his attention to a singular artistic program, the mural paintings at Bonampak, and interprets these images as a “moral narrative for the transition of generations” (p. 155). Commonly understood as representing the designation of an heir to the Bonampak throne, the mural program and its texts focus upon three “princes” through a royal narrative that spans the walls of three rooms. While Houston sidesteps some aspects of recent scholarship on this artistic series (for instance, how would a nonlinear reading of the murals’ narrative inflect his understanding of its depicted princes?), his focused examination of emerging rulership permits us to understand this mural series and its texts in a new way. The concluding chapter, “Draining the Cup,” considers life’s later stages, and introduces the concept of “switching out” as grandsons become grandfathers and then, upon their death, semi-divine ancestors.

This final chapter also opens onto considerations of the objectified female in Mayan art through the lens of the masculine gaze—and grasp. In addressing the preeminent place of young men in Classic Mayan society, Houston does not turn his back on the peripheral place of young women; rather, he confronts and problematizes it. As the author points out, a provocative question that deserves consideration is why Classic Mayan texts and images pay so little attention to the age status of females, even at sites where references to women are relatively abundant.

Overall, this well-illustrated text reflects upon the “condition of being male through a Maya prism” (p. 178) and confirms that young men comprised a critical social category within this culture. A particular strength of this book is its artful shifting between Mayan evidence and cross-cultural examples, thereby making the specific case of a single Mesoamerican culture accessible to a broad audience. Finally, while proposing that the adolescent males of the late Classic period contributed valuable energy and bolstered the future of elite Mayan society, the author also alludes to enticing parallels between the impetuous attitudes of formative manhood and a threshold faced by the Classic Maya in advance of societal collapse.