Making History and Telling Stories: Bernard de Colmont and the Lost Maya: Conable Futures Lecture Series Presentation
Making History and Telling Stories: Bernard de Colmont and the Lost Maya
Speaker Info.: Historian Richard Ivan Jobs (Pacific University) and Anthropologist Steven Van Wolputte (KU Leuven) have reconstructed this story as a short graphic history, In the Land of the Lacandón (MQUP, 2025). They used the text of de Colmont’s narratives (periodicals, lectures, letters) and his images (photographic and filmic) as primary sources to tell the story in the form of a 1930s adventure serial comic using a story arc of de Colmont’s design. In doing so, they expose the imperial history of exploration, science, and media and the legacies embedded in pop culture.
Abstract: Explorers! Jungles! ‘Lost’ Tribes! History! Anthropology! Comics! France! Mexico!
Bernard de Colmont, a French amateur ethnologist, went to the borderlands of Mexico-Guatemala to study, film, and record the Lacandón people in 1933 and 1935. The Lacandón were considered a “lost tribe” remotely located in the mountains of Chiapas and deemed to be the closest living relatives of the Maya. De Colmont’s trips generated extensive media coverage as he related his trip as a popular narrative that fit within the ideas and images of European exploration of native peoples.
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