Maya Apocalypse

Book excerpt: Maya Apolcalypse is the record of fieldwork that, as often happens, ended up quite differently from the way it was originally planned. In conducting a research project about speaking in tongues (glossolalia), Felicitas Goodman recorded this non-ordinary behavior among English- and Spanish-speaking members of Pentecostal congregations. A Mexican Apostolic Pentecostoal minister introduced Goodman to the preacher in a Maya village in Yucatan. The congregation she came to know in 1969 experienced a 'crisis cult' in response to a prediction of the end of the world, which was to take place on September 1, 1970. Goodman subsequently spent a part of every year until 1986 with the women of the congregation. Maya Apocalypse is a record of that fieldwork, which eventually covered not only the events in the temple, both ordinary and extraordinary, but also the lives of the women who acted as informants, especially Doña Eus, to whom this work is affectionately dedicated.