This book is devoted to the Ixil Maya from the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Amidst sacred mountains and caves, coffee plantations, and hydroelectric power plants, the Ixil persistently weave their narratives into the textures of their ancestral lands despite war and genocide. Through an analysis of these narratives, this book seeks to bring the reader closer to the subject of relationships that Indigenous Peoples hold with sacred landscapes and the environment. Cultivating those relationships through ritual, ceremony, and communication with earth-beings is part of the spiritual practices described, depending on the context, as Maya spirituality and costumbre. Reflecting on how those relationships and practices are represented in oral tradition, history, and contemporary testimonies, this book hopes to bring closer some of the aspects of the Ixil philosophy of tiichajil (“good life”) and traditional ecological knowledge, particularly that of women Ancestral Authorities.

An important contribution to the redefining of animism within the current extraordinary efforts within ontological turn methods, but also when examining contemporary religious dynamics, analytical work with narratives and the relationship to the landscape. Above all, however, it is excellently processed as a unique non-linear view of the local history. […] It brings completely new data to the field of Maya studies.

Professor Milan Kováč, 

Department of Comparative Religion at Comenius University