The Talking Cross Speaks Again : UNFINISHED CONVERSATIONS: Mayas and Foreigners Between Two Wars <i> by Paul Sullivan (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 249 pp., illustrated 0-394-54803-1) </i>

‘Unfinished Conversations” is the fascinating story of encounters and formal correspondence over the last century between foreign investigators and Mayan spokesmen in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Among other rich ore, Yale professor Paul Sullivan has dug up excellent source material on the hazardous divide separating Occidental from Mayan rules of engagement. This is also a story of the myriad ways in which communication across cultures can be corrupted by veiled motives, official mendacity and mistranslation.

In 1935, when Prof. Sylvanus Morley was invited to journey from his base at Chichen-Itza to the sanctuary of Xcalal Guardia in Quintana Roo, he hoped to gather valuable documents and information for a major ethnological monograph on the peninsular Mayas.

The Mayan officers in charge of the Shrine of the Talking Cross, which had prophesied the coming of a powerful American ally, expected “Mr. Don Chief Morley” to provide them with arms for their interminable skirmishes with the hated Mexican government. Further, the Mayan officers became convinced, by misconstruing his correspondence, that Morley could influence his government to annex Quintana Roo as a North American state. Their expectations had a historical precedent. In the previous century, Queen Victoria’s emissaries from neighboring British Honduras had supported the Mayas in their Cast Wars against Mexico. (Peninsular Mayas still regard Queen Victoria as “one who spoke with God.”)

The officers invited Morley and his colleague Alfonso Villa--who passed himself off as a merchant--to participate in their ceremonies with a potlatch, or exchange of belongings. Afterward, they performed a juramento, or swearing, ceremony in order to ensure that Morley would collaborate with them.

But the Mayas had not counted on Morley’s own talents for subterfuge and genial duplicity. In 1919, Morley had used his archeological work in Pulum and Chichen-Itza as a cover for a spy mission for U.S. Naval Intelligence. Morley’s espionage, carried out with the tacit consent of the Carnegie Institution he represented, was concerned, among other things, with U.S. fears of a German U-boat fleet off the coast of Mexico.

This is stuff for a thriller in the John Macdonald mold. Instead, Sullivan, who writes in a somewhat plodding style loaded with multiple clauses and parallel constructions--the very idiosyncrasies he singles out for comment in the Mayan officers’ letters--has woven a compelling drama from a meeting of two diametrically opposite intelligences, each of which seeks to bend the other to its will.

Although Sullivan avoids saying it outright, this sorry record of Occidental exploitation and native intrigue provides ample ammunition for the intramural skirmishes presently under way within the social sciences, and in anthropology in particular. Here is a classic illustration of how amiable ethnologists of high repute can manipulate a target culture to make it fit preconceived assumptions. In the process, they leave behind a legacy of distortion and mistrust that prejudices future investigations.

To balance the ledger, the Mayan officers matched Morley’s friendly patronizing with an obsequiousness that masked ulterior motives of their own. We learn that the Mayan elite were caught in internal wrangles over the harvesting of chicle--the lucrative “white gold” that is the base of commercial chewing gum--and the responsibility for prophetic texts avidly sought after by foreign scholars.

Sullivan suggests that Capt. Concepcion Cituk and Sgt. Evaristo Xuluub may have suspected that Morley lacked the authority to issue weapons, much less incorporate them as the 49th state of the Union. But the formal negotiations for chimerical favors apparently enhanced their sense of self-importance. It is only after they had admitted Morley into their confidence, and his avowed and imagined promises had evaporated into thin air, that they angrily compared themselves to gullible women courted by false suitors.

“We know their tricks,” a Mayan elder had said to Morley in 1932 of the Mayans’ despised Mexican schoolteachers, not suspecting his characterization would fit anthropologists equally well:

“First they come with flattery and kindness, in order, later on, to manage us like children.

“El Maestro (teacher). . . . When he comes here, brings us cigarettes, medicines, and other things as presents.

“Why does he act that way? Does he think we are girls (to be courted)?

“Without any doubt, he is plotting something.”

The true hero of this story is Franz Boas, one of the fathers of modern anthropology, who took a courageous stand against the polluting of scholarly investigations with government-sanctioned espionage. In a letter to “The Nation” in 1919, he wrote:

“A person who uses science as a cover for political spying . . . prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed a scientist . . .”

Boas’ impassioned denunciation led to a motion of censure by Morley and other members of the Council of the American Anthropological Assn., who failed in their attempt to topple Boas from his high perch. His deposition, which seems timelier today than on the day it was written, speaks directly to the ongoing debates on the ethics of information-gathering methods. Astonishingly, it was not until 1967 that the American Anthropological Assn. formally endorsed Boas’ injunction and concluded, “Constraint, deception, and secrecy have no place in science.”

Many of today’s renegade Mayas or Masewal, who remain convinced of the inevitability of a generalized war, no longer seek alliances with the unreliable Americans. As for Mayan informants who have valuable documents or data at their disposal, the only quid pro quo they seek from Occidental interlocutors is hard currency.

The mounting interventions of foreign investigators after World War I coincided with the lapsing into silence of the famous “Talking Cross, Mouthpiece of the True God.” Earlier, the Christo-Mayan oracle had prophesied the “end of days” early in the 21st Century, to be preceded by a general conflagration that would sweep away all injustice and evil and reduce future warfare to sticks and stones. The oracle warned, “It is not the tears of your eyes you will shed as you cry, but rather the blood of your heart.”

In a smashing surprise ending, Sullivan reports the appearance in 1985 of a new talking oracle, in the form of a stone figure that attached itself to a campesino family at Quintano Roo. “Adopt me and I will adopt you,” the effigy announced to the peasant boys who found it, repeating the same pledge made by the Talking Cross of Santa Cruz. And the effigy added, “My older brother gave himself to the enemy, but I decided to stay with the Masewal.”

Sullivan, a scrupulous scholar, makes no attempt either to authenticate or expose this latest apparition in a tradition of talking oracles, one that antedates the Mayan pyramids. But he leaves room for the conjecture that the Mayan soul, after five centuries of Christianity, remains wedded to its ancient sites and rituals, wherein it continues to regenerate itself. Viewed through the prism of a Mayan calendar that reckons time in the hundreds of thousands of years, the appearance of pale-faced emissaries bearing tobacco, medicines and silken promises in exchange for ancient secrets seems but a momentary deviation from the cosmic wheel’s appointed course.