361 [translation of « Futuros en contrapunto: proyección, predicción y deseo en maya yucateco.” Publ. in Numéro Hors-Série. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, pp. 127-166. Chap. 10 Senses of time : Exploring temporality in Mayan discourses, experiences and remembrances. Manuscript presented for the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches, EHESS, 2017] FUTURES IN COUNTERPOINT: Projection, prediction and desire in Yucatec Maya la memoria custodisce il silenzio ricordo del futuro la promessa quale promessa? questa che ora arrivi a sfiorare col lembo della voce e ti sfugge come il vento accarezza il buio nella voce il ricordo in penombra un ricordo del futuro. Italo Calvino, Un re in ascolto 1. The future past Many specialists in pre-Hispanic, colonial and more modern Mesoamerican cultures see the perception of the future as laying in the past as a principal facet of Maya temporality. Memorable phrases have been coined to evoke it: The Ancient Future of the Mayas; Remembering the future, anticipating the past; Building the future past … (Edmonson 1982, Farriss 1987, Okoshi 2015). And numerous arguments have been made to support this idea in disciplines such as epigraphy, archaeology, history, ethnology and linguistics. For instance, cyclical conceptions of time and history motivate a search for the future in the past, and the recurrence of historical events allows foreseeability (de la Garza 1975, Bricker 1981a). Others have remarked on prophecies that convert the future into a known horizon, and repetition of the transformational schema that subsumes individual political actions within cyclical events (Gossen 1974, 1999; Bergeret, to appear). There are also dream encounters with ancestors which assist in taking decisions, as well as documents that announce the future based on the past (Okoshi 2015). Some Mayan languages are said to refer to the future as being behind (Schumann 1981), and in some cultures co-verbal gestures express it as a recurring circle (Le Guen 2012, Le Guen and Pool Balam 2012).