Q&A
What is Mayincatec?
• SHORT ANSWER
A pernicious media misrepresentation of the pre-Colombian civilisations
• LONG ANSWER
The vast majority of representations of indigenous peoples in Central and South America in film and television do not depict a single culture – say, the Maya – but a visual and societal hodgepodge of all of them into one screen-friendly image. This is derogatively known as ‘Mayincatec’, a conflation of Maya, Inca and Aztec.
Typical Mayincatec depictions are all human sacrifice, rituals and curses, and a jumble of artistic and architectural elements – plus a general focus on the white explorers in their lands, from conquistadors to Indiana Jones in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In real life, the Maya of Mesoamerica, Inca of Peru and Aztec of Mexico were their own distinct cultures and, separated by hundreds of miles, had nothing to do with each other.