Practicing resistance: Textiles, tourist markets and gender relations among Maya women

This thesis examines the way participation in Guatemalan tourist marketplaces influences the lives of Maya vendors by focusing on the symbolic relationship between cloth, gender and the body as sites of resistance. In this discussion, the interactions that occur between sellers and buyers are used to emphasize the ways Mayas, particularly women, carry out strategies of resistance via the marketplace. Although the tourist markets in this context continue to be places where goods are exchanged for cash, the dynamics that occur between buyers and sellers in these locations are not purely economic. Secondary ethnogaphic material detailing Maya women's domestic roles (as weavers and mothers) and their roles in the marketplace (as sellers and desired 'Other') is used to demonstrate the ways textile consumption significantly impacts social life outside the marketplace.;My analysis is rooted in theories of practice which recognize the constraints placed on individuals by the social and cultural order without denying that, as active agents, individuals also have the capacity to act upon that social order. In this way, the central roles assigned to Maya women in domestic and marketplace domains, though restrictive in some respects, are sources of empowerment in others. Purchasing textiles from Maya vendors, likewise, does not directly challenge wider consumptive practices, but may lead buyers to question these modes of consumption and seek alternatives. The possibility for resistance and social change, therefore, is not contingent on the overthrow of the social order. Rather, the inconsistencies and contradictions evident in that very order provide the means for the strategies of negotiation, contestation, and resistance marketplace participants carry out in their daily lives. It is in this context that tourist centres in Guatemala can be understood not only as locations that facilitate textile consumption, but also as spaces where Maya women are able to access considerable prestige and status, where indigenous groups are able to increase their visibility, and where buyers and vendors are able to engage in practices of resistance.