Decorous bodies and disordered passions: representations of emotion among the Classic Maya.

The Classic Maya (AD 250-850) represented emotion via the human body in stylized ways that reflected their categories of 'affect', the subjective states attributed by one person to another through empathy. Such displays, although rare, served as negative contrasts to a more ordered, restrained and controlled state that operated as an ideal for elite comportment. Control equated to morally appropriate behavior. the lack of it to non-human. supernatural or pre-human conduct. In anthropological terms, affect was 'hypercognated' -elaborated and explicitly highlighted -through both its presence and its absence in Maya images. The inclination of the Classic Maya to display overt affect increased dramatically by the seventh century AD, and was facilitated by the representational conventions of the time, which emphasized close correspondences to a perceived, external world.