Drawing on two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork among the Mixe in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, I propose that certain ritual miniaturizations are used as a technique for inaugurating a regime of co-activity between human and nonhuman agents. In this analytic model, miniature elements not only refer to macroscopic activity but also involve categories of actions that humans perform at their own level. Even as they are relevant to interpretations of ritual deposits (sometimes called mesas), food offerings made to establish a relation of exchange with nonhuman agents, I also suggest that the goal of some ritual deposits is to use miniature elements and the perceptive effects they have to create a collaborative framework so that human and nonhuman agents will commit to carrying out a shared task. I present some examples of co-activity in Mesoamerica and in the Andes to suggest that this kind of regime of action constitutes, from both pragmatic and phenomenological points of view, a relational system that these peasant societies have in common.
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