Corpo-Reality, Voyeurs and the Responsibility of Seeing: Night of the Dead on the island of Janitzio, Mexico

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Notes

¹ Although there is a national day, designated as Day (or Night) of the Dead, this is commemorated in multifarious ways with no one ritual for Day of the Dead or, indeed, any one belief. A common perception is that the country is united through a coherent belief system. Imagery of skulls and skeletons is ubiquitous, with the common concepts of defying death and laughing in the face of death. The tourist guide Lonely Planet describes the Day of the Dead as ‘a hoot’ (Noble 2006: 60). Yet the common myth of death as festive, beloved and always mocking does not go back further than the twentieth century. Skeletons of paper cutouts, skulls of sugar, and festive prints were converted into ancestral models and sources of inspiration for the multifaceted iconography that floods markets, schools, public buildings, bakeries and cemeteries every November. In the postrevolutionary decades intellectuals disseminated these new aesthetics and solidified the myth that death inspires little or no fear in ‘the Mexican’. With this was a picturesque and above all nationalistic twentieth-century vision.

² See Dean MacCannell's concept of ‘site sacralization’ (1999). MacCannell outlines five stages by which a tourist attraction or destination is created: naming, framing and elevation, enshrinement, mechanical reproduction and social reproduction.

³ Creating the attraction of Night of the Dead on Janitzio was not a spontaneous and unplanned occurrence. In the postrevolutionary years of the 1920s and 1930s, within processes of fervent nation-building and a burgeoning tourist industry, the commemorative death ritual of the islanders of Janitzio was appropriated, promoted and reified. Initiating the trajectory that leads directly to configurations of the twenty-first century, a party of official onlookers visited the island in 1923 for the ritual occasion, marking the beginning of the process of transformation of the ceremony from intimate, private ritual into a public spectacle, national and touristic trope and icon and patrimony of the nation. The activities and bodies of the Janitzio inhabitants undertaking their rituals for Night of the Dead were subsequently documented, disseminated and exhibited in words, still photographic imagery (see Toor 1928 and 1947, González 1925), live theatricalized performances on stages in Mexico City and elsewhere (see, for example, Domínguez and González 1930) and films (including Janitzio [1935] and Maclovia [1948]). By the mid-1940s, Night of the Dead on Janitzio was attracting Mexican and global tourists, and had ‘become one of the most famous spectacles of Mexican indigenous life … . Great crowds of tourists have come, and the Tarascan [P'urhépecha] women show no hesitancy in talking with them’ (Foster 1948: 220–1). For a detailed examination of these processes see Hellier-Tinoco (2004, 2008, 2009 and forthcoming).

⁴ Capturing and displaying Night of the Dead on Janitzio through photographic imagery has played a major role from the outset. Francis Toor, one of the original visitors in 1923, even gave advice on how to photograph the scene in the cemetery, with the observation that ‘before dawn so many candles are lit that it is possible to take pictures’ (1947: 244). ‘Taking pictures’ was therefore presented as a viable and acceptable activity for visitors to the ceremony, enabling sightseers to return home with the ultimate memento of their encounter with the dead.