From left, Katherine Broughton poses with her thesis adviser Dr. Betsy Partyka), professor of Spanish.
Several Modern Languages students presented their research and projects at Ohio University’s Student Research and Creative Activity Expo on April 11.
Senior Katherine Broughton, Honors Tutorial College Spanish major, won second place in Arts and Humanities 2 with her thesis presentation, “Stories of Survivance: Revitalizing Mayan Culture through Public Art in Guatemala.” Her adviser is Dr. Betsy Partyka, Associate Professor of Spanish.
Broughton says that her thesis explains “how three forms of contemporary Mayan art – music, weavings and murals – form part of the larger effort in Guatemala to revitalize Mayan languages and culture.”
Known as the Mayan Movement, the effort began in the 1990s after the end of Guatemala’s 36-year genocidal and ethnocidal civil war. Broughton’s research examines three case studies, one on a Mayan hip-hop group whose lyrics retell ancient myths in Spanish and Mayan languages, another on a Mayan weaving cooperative that – to raise awareness about the lasting effects of the civil war – took advantage of the “often culturally damaging” tourism industry, and the final on a mural painted by a Mayan art collective that depicts the people’s history of Mayans in Guatemala from the first human beings through the present day.
Broughton analyzed the symbolism and cultural knowledge communicated by each case study and often related them back to ancient Mayan myths. She concludes that “each form of art constitutes a form of ‘survivance,’ a combination of ‘survival’ and ‘endurance’ that refers to the active presence of indigenous peoples, worldviews and ways of life in the world today that inherently defies the historical and contemporary attempts to erase them.”
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