This work explores the Maya of Yucatan, the Maya of academic institutions, and the Maya tourist industry. It examines the interplay between the local and the external, academic categories of the Maya, and seeks to transcend the paradoxical and incongruent relationship between the social spaces that breathe life into the categories. The notion of "shared social experience" is introduced to embody a focus on reflexivity that goes beyond the subjective position of the author and helps demystify the co-existing subjectivities characteristic of ethnographic fieldwork. It provides a basis for overcoming the exclusive focus on "author", "text" and "discourse" in contemporary postmodern ethnography, while still conveying important ethnographic information. Hervik plays close attention to the immediacy of fieldwork in examining the relationship between the local and the perceived, practiced meanings and the external perspectives on the Maya, thereby bringing recent advances of anthropology into Mayan anthropology and history.