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.

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