The Commitment to the Delicate World: Maya Sacrificial Giving and Existential Animism

ABSTRACT

Many Akatek Maya traditionalists in highland Guatemala regard sacrifices to living mountains as an essential world-creating act and an existential necessity. Drawing on my ethnography and description of a particular blood sacrificial ritual, preceding the advent of the New Year, I develop the concept of ‘existential animism’ to capture this dynamics of a continuous formation and constitution of the world and an existential, often precarious, difficult and painful, negotiation of a subject's position in it. Rethinking reciprocity as intersubjectivity, I explore sacrificial giving in terms of mutual relatedness and joint participation, characterised by the commitment to a fundamentally indeterminate, uncertain and delicate world of which we are a part and on which we depend. Finally, I argue that such phenomenologically inspired ‘dwelling perspective’ may be of relevance for further research on animist societies that strive to move within ambivalent landscapes and hierarchical relationships with other human as well as nonhuman beings.

KEYWORDS:

• Akatek Maya
• sacrifice
• reciprocity
• intersubjectivity
• dwelling
• animism‌

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although the Akatek region itself has not been studied much (but see Deuss 2007; Jafek 1996; Siegel & Grollig 1994), there is a large literature on the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes (e.g. La Farge 1947; Piedrasanta Herrera 2009; Wagley 1957 [1949]; Watanabe 1992).

2 In some respects, this ritualists’ organisation resembles the cofradía system as known from other Latin-American indigenous communities, but it is not recognised as such by the Akatek.

3 What is being referred to here is the end of the ceremonial year; in reality the current ritualists’ group remains in service until the end of the solar year, with offices handed over on 1 January.

4 This might be viewed through a perspectival optic, allowing one to assume the point of view of the other, thus enabling reciprocity of viewpoints.

5 There seems to be an interesting association between the ritualists’ sacrificial paying and asking for forgiveness and the actions performed by the progenitors in Popol Vuh, who are referred to as ‘sacrificers’ or ‘penitents’ in colonial dictionaries (see Christenson 2007: 202n.501, 203n.502).

6 Sustaining such an ethnocentric dichotomy, Bloch just replaced social/cultural representationalism with naturalistic representationalism. Perhaps the only difference between the work of Bloch and that of former cognitive anthropologists is that he accepts, as opposed to Boyer (2001; cf. Bloch 2005), that humans actually believe their deities to be real in some situations, and does not regard them as simply ‘counter-intuitive’.