Coyote drums and jaguar altars: Ontologies of the living and the artificial among the K’iche’ Maya

For the current-day K’iche’ Maya of the Highland community of Momostenango, Guatemala, animals are conceived as having not human, but artificial souls: they are, in fact, objects that exist in the mountain dwellings of their gods. Conversely, artefacts like sacred altars are seen as being wild anima...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Zamora Corona, Alonso (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Sage Publ. [2020]
In: Journal of material culture
Year: 2020, Volume: 25, Issue: 3, Pages: 324-347
IxTheo Classification:AG Religious life; material religion
BB Indigenous religions
KBR Latin America
Further subjects:B Material Culture
B Aztec
B Ontology
B Perspectivism
B K’iche’ Maya
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:For the current-day K’iche’ Maya of the Highland community of Momostenango, Guatemala, animals are conceived as having not human, but artificial souls: they are, in fact, objects that exist in the mountain dwellings of their gods. Conversely, artefacts like sacred altars are seen as being wild animals of the gods and ancestors, which can bring illness and death to people when not fed by ritual offerings. Based on this and other data that the author gathered during his recent ethnographic fieldwork among the K’iche’, in this article he explores the ontological paradoxes of living beings and artefacts among current-day Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples of the past to propose a version of perspectivism that incorporates the ideas of technology, asymmetry and material culture to the more horizontal and personhood-based model proposed for Amazon cultures by Viveiros de Castro in his article, ‘Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism’ (1998).
ISSN:1460-3586
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of material culture
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/1359183520907937