Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices

By: Valentina Vapnarsky and Dominique Michelet and Philippe Nondédéo and Aurore Monod Becquelin

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Synopsis: Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices examines the time-based dimensions of ritual activities in past and present Mesoamerican societies, including the prehispanic, colonial, and modern periods. The authors explore ritual around three principal categories of action—creating, transforming, and destroying—as significant cultural manifestations of the temporal dimension of transition processes. Based on specific case studies, new analysis of fieldwork data, and long-term collaboration between authors, chapters engage empirically and theoretically with the multiple temporalities of ritual in relation to both the unfolding of ritual performance and its external and symbolic anchors. Taking rituals as a series of specific, formalized actions that produce transitory changes within an initial context, the authors examine activities that generate change linked to artifact production, life cycles, healing, conflict resolution, crisis management, the enthronement of rulers and transfers of responsibilities, and practices relating to the occupation, abandonment, reuse, or conversion of socialized spaces. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach in archaeology, ethnohistory, anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices offers new insights into ritual time approached through multi-semiotic, material, sensorial, and pragmatic perspectives that encourage further interdisciplinary dialogue.