If your students are looking for a Second 8 Weeks course with GenEd and/or CASE S&H credit, they may well be interested in a newly opened section of ANTH-A200, focused on 2012 prophecies and the Maya. Please see below for full details and feel free to contact me or the instructor directly with questions.
2012: THE END OF THE WORLD, MAYA, AND THE NEW AGE
ANTH-A200, Spring 2012, Second 8 Weeks
MW, 5:45 – 8:00 p.m. Sycamore 105
Course carries GenEd and College (CASE) S&H Credit
Professor Quetzil Castañeda
quetzil@osea-cite.org
This course explores the western fascination with “the Maya,” specifically focusing on New Age spiritual appropriations of the Maya and New Age prophesies of a Maya doomsday or apocalypse. Where do these ideas of a Maya prophesy of the end of the world come from? Who believes in this and why? If the end of the world is upon us, why take this course? Why go to school? But, then, if the world is ending, why not?!! Why not: take out a loan, buy a yacht or a pyramid, forfeit on your loans, go hog wild doing all those things you dreamed of but never thought you would do? What does all of this have to do with ethics, belief, morality, and self?
This course brings together several approaches and perspectives in order to better understand our own place in the world today. Participants should note that this course is not an archaeology course or a course on Maya archaeology or Mesoamerican civilization. This is an ethnography course that puts into historical and anthropological perspectives the 2012 phenomena. Briefly, this is the idea that according to New Age interpretations of Anthropological interpretations of Maya interpretations of calendrical interpretations of astronomical phenomena, the world is going to end on the day December 24, in the year of the current Christian calendar two thousand and twelve years “After Death” of Jesus Christ.
One section of the course explores the emergence of new age spiritualism out of heterodox Christianities and medical-health cults in the USA, for example, mesmerism, hydrotherapy, and massage. In this section we learn about new agers’ religious practices, rituals, and beliefs in the USA and in Mexico. We read New Age religious texts by José Argüelles, Hunbatz Men, and Major Jenkins, among others. A second section provides students with basic knowledge about Maya beliefs and practices related to calendars, astronomy, notions of history and prophesy, and health-healing. We read selections from colonial period Maya books such as the Chilam Balam and the Popol Vuh as well as contemporary ethnographies of Maya culture. A third brief section uses comparative sources from throughout the Americas to learn how the Indian has been exoticized by European-culture descendants as a figure of redemption and salvation. We read ethnographies about shamanic use of hallucinogenic drugs for spiritual healing. We will also have recourse to numerous films.
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