Coyote drums and jaguar altars

Ontologies of the living and the artificial among the K'iche' Maya

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2391189
AutoresAlonso Zamora Corona (0000-0002-6042-4521, University College London, UK, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen25
Número3
Páginas324-347
Fecha de publicación2020-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1359183520907937
OpenAlexW3010623613
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11
Referencias citadas38

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

Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Ethnography · Kinship · Maya · Mesoamerica · Personhood · Perspectivism · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy