Sacred Sustenance: Maize, Storytelling, and a Maya Sense of Place

A sense of place is key to identity, and for Maya agriculturalists of Guatemala, maize is the central cultural object that represents a Maya connection to the land. Stories are ideal tools for communicating a shared identity, and should be considered indispensable to ethnogeographers who wish to understand an indigenous sense of place. This study explores the subject of maize through oral storytelling traditions in order to answer the question of why maize is considered sacred to Maya peoples, how it is representative of a Maya sense of place, and to illustrate the value of stories and storytelling in ethnogeographic literature.