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Alessandro Questa, Phd Dissertation's Final Version Dissertation Dancing spirits. Towards a Masewal ecology of interdependence in the northern highlands of Puebla, Mexico Alessandro Questa Rebolledo Anthropology Department, University of Virginia Alessandro Questa, PhD Dissertation’s Final Version, November 2017, V4.0 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. I N T R O 6 I.I Breathing in a living world: animism and non-anthropocentrism 6 I.II. A yearning, communicative, social and inhabited world 13 I.III. Masewal people and Modernity 19 I.IV. Ritual Practice as Knowledge 21 I.V. Dancing as an opportunity to think and to relate 25 I.VI. Dances are moralizing acts 33 I.VII. Dances are part of a larger kostumbre 38 I.VIII. Categories… supposedly 42 I.IX. Sections and Chapters 47 II. PEOPLE, LANGUAGE, PLACES, REGIONS, AND TEPETZINTLA 50 II.I. Coordinates of a field site 50 II.II. Anselmo, Rosalba, and xochipilli 51 II.III. Masewal and Mexican people 58 II.IV. The rugged highlands of northern Puebla and its peoples 61 II.IV.I. AnthropogeniC mountain gardens 67 II.IV.II. A loCal eCology 70 II.IV.III. DemographiCs and loCal eConomy 74 II.V. Sketches of time: historical notations on the highlands of Puebla 76 II.V.I. HistoriC regimes: from Teotihuacan to Tajin 77 II.V.II. Barbarians from the north: the altepetl politiCal system 79 II.VI. The idea of Mesoamerica as a transcendent civilization 87 III. KINSHIP, CARGO SYSTEMS AND COMPADRAZGO 94 III.I. Protocols to relate 94 III.I.I. Co-parenthood and ritual kinship 102 III.I.II. Barrios and family Cults 112 III.I.III. The CirCuit of Mayordomías 115 III.II. Divination: seeing spirits and ‘the gift’ 120 III.V.I. Kixpatla: Change of vision, Change of face 125 Alessandro Questa, PhD Dissertation’s Final Version, November 2017, V4.0 2 III.III. Modernity elsewhere, émigrés, and religious change 128 III.IV. Remembering again 136 III. V. The end of the background 145 IV. WHAT IS A HOUSE? 148 IV.I. Houses and mountains: altars, hearths, and sweat lodges 148 III.II. Overcrowded houses 158 III.III. Houses are everywhere 160 III.IV. To cure a house: kalwewetsin 162 V. MASEWAL EXPANSE: SPIRITED BODIES AND ENCOMPASSING WORK 173 V.I. The multiple Masewal person 173 V.I.I. Spiritual desCent 183 V.I.II. The person’s spirits outside the body 191 V.II. Kayotl: Flesh, Work and Form 195 V.II.I. Bodies are maize dough 196 V.II.II. Working bodies 201 V.II.III. The sadness in laziness 211 V.II.IV. Bodies and form 214 V.II.V. The importance of having a head 217 V.III. Sick bodies and the after life 219 V.IV. Hunting and growing maize in the mountain 221 VI. DANCING IN TEPETZINTLA 231 VI.I. Dancing is inventing culture 231 VI.II. Dancing is a way to know 235 VI.III. To dance is but a word: bailes, mijtotia and Danzas 241 VI.III.I. Bailes 243 VI.III.II. Mijtotia 248 VI.IV.III. Danzas 253 VI.V. Rehearsing dances 262 VI.VI. Dancing together: “participación”, “respeto”, and “gusto” 264 VI.VII. Dancers as spirits 266 VI.VIII. Dancing ancestors, mountains, winds, devils, necromancers and bears 270 VI.VIII.I. Dancing mountains: TipekayomeJ 270 Alessandro Questa, PhD Dissertation’s Final Version, November 2017, V4.0 3 VI.VIII.II. How the world works: Wewentiyo 273 VI.VIII.III. Masewal ApaChe 279 VI.IX. Heads, and faces, masks and crowns 283 VI.IX.I. Tipekayomej crowns: mountain heads 284 VI.IX.II. Masks: faCes of the forest 290 VII. ENCOMPASSING MINES, HURRICANES, AND MOUNTAINS 298 VII.I. Tentacular mountains 299 VII.II. Monsters, bigness and anxiety 304 VII.III. Between local and foreign monsters 313 VII.IV. An accumulated environmental crisis. Water and winds 321 VII.IV.I. ExperienCe with anCient storms 324 VII.IV.II. Pauline, 1997 328 VII.IV.III. Earl, 2016 332 VII.V. Wind spirits 335 VII.VI. Megaproyectos 339 VII.VII. Resistance and the invention of culture in the highlands 340 VII.VIII. A conspiracy of spirits 344 VII.IX. From non-environmentalism to a native ecology 350 VIII. CONCLUSIONS: THE REEMERGENCE OF DANCES AND OTHER UNEXPECTED MASEWAL EXPANSIONS 354 VIII.I. The end is the beginning 354 VIII.II. Ifigenio: the least probable source of inspiration 357 VIII.III. Mountain’s bowel movements: summing up what we know so far 362 VIII.IV. Unexpected images: art, murals and reviving concerns 371 VIII.V. Remembering and forgetting are ways of being in the world 375 VIII.VI. Dances as active models of relations 378 IX. REFERENCES 384 Alessandro Questa, PhD Dissertation’s Final Version, November 2017, V4.0 4 "As with astronomy, the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth's fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one's own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: "It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws," so also in history the new view says: "It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws." In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious." War and Peace, Leon Tolstoy Alessandro Questa, PhD Dissertation’s Final Version, November 2017, V4.0 5 I. I N T R O “When we saw all this, we were both frightened and sad at the same time because it tossed the houses about and we were saddened. We asked “Why is this happening to us?” “Why the winds?” “Why doesn’t the wind forget?” It always damages the entire maize field and we lose the fruits of our work, and now there is a poor harvest. The maize field grows, then, when it is halfway grown the wind comes again and tosses it all about so, what did we do? Well, I had a dream.”1 I.I Breathing in a living world: animism and non- anthropocentrism All around us, the overwhelming intertwining between what used to seem detached universes continues to emerge in powerful ways. The influences of air and water currents, pollution, and their correlation to industrialized waste are ever more evident to scientists as well as to fishermen and farmers. Arguably, historical human activity enhanced by the rippling invasions of modernity are experienced in multifarious ways and intensities 1 “Tos nono ojko otikitake otikmowilijke wan otimotlakoltijke porque nono ojko omochi siki mas kalmej nochi ope kintsinkopa, siki okixkop kalmej wan tos nono ojko otimoyoltlakoltijke wan tos timolwiya ¿Malke ojko timochiwaj? ¿Malke ye lak ejeka? ¿Malke ye amo kilkawa ejekatl? Nochipa ojko tlapojpolo ika tlamilol, wan titikitej tome, wan axa ke ijkini amo wili tlayoli; yoli mili ya tlajko yowi yakitlamotlatok ejekatl wan tos nono tlen otikchiwke? tos onitemik.” Macaria Rosete (Appendix, Entry II, fragment). Alessandro Questa, PhD Dissertation’s Final Version, November 2017, V4.0 6 by human societies according to their relations with specific, historical “branches” of capitalism, from husbandry and extensive agriculture to oil drilling and all sorts of mining. It’s not only capital, markets, and jobs that disappear or evaporate, but also, it would seem, the land itself. Apparently, an even larger foot has left its mark upon what we once understood as “conventional” and undisputed Globalization: the Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene was popularized by geologists to mark the geophysical effects of human transformations to the planet, having a wide range of impacts from the endangering of biodiversity (Cardinale 2013) to alterations to global climate patterns (Crutzen 2006). The Anthropocene has been mobilized by a bewildering range of disciplines beyond environmental sciences primarily to speak about risk, change, and various impending tragedies on a planetary scale. The Anthropocene has been also acknowledged and reimagined by the social sciences, including anthropology (Palsson et al. 2013, Ogden 2013, Latour 2014, Swanson et al. 2015), for in the end, isn’t the Anthropocene pushing the anthropos to an even more central stage? (Latour 2014:4). Understanding the Anthropocene indeed requires the inclusion of the social dimension of all human activities (Ellis et al 2016), and especially those dealing with massive transformations derived from large-scale economic endeavors, Alessandro Questa, PhD Dissertation’s Final Version, November 2017, V4.0 7 giving rise to expected variations such as the Capitalocene (Moore 2015) and unanticipated ones, such as the tentacles that emerge with the Chthulucene (Haraway 2015). Indeed, the long- term historic pan-Eurasian expansion has been proposed to set the preconditions for such a geological emergence (Hann 2017). It would seem that the advent of the Anthropocene constitutes the last undeniably universal evidence—backed by some of the best minds and most serious disciplines— of Western exceptionalism, only by the worst possible means. The Anthropocene seems to be perceived as a sort of post- industrial karmic return, or better still, as a secular version of the Judeo-Christian Apocalypse, and a fitting update on the ending of the world due to human transgressions and greed.
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