Oralidad y teatralidad en el Popol Vuh

Abstract

The Popol Vuh is the book of the “beginning of the ancient stories” of the most powerful nation in the interior of Guatemala in the sixteenth century. It is also the book of “human
lineage”, the book that rewrites the original, hidden from the researchers and thinkers, about the creation of the human race. It is an approximation of mesoamerican knowledge about the beginnings of man, of certain animal species and vegetation, of the earth and the cosmos. The constant reinventions of the Popol Vuh, realized since the eighteenth century, have conserved certain features of the thought and expression, oral in nature, of the maya-quiché people. The word oral always constitutes the modification of a total existential situation that includes the body. In this sense it can be affirmed that theatricality is consubstantial to oral cultures.