The pilgrimage to the living mountains: representationalism, animism, and the Maya

Abstract

In this contribution, I provide an ethnography of the Maya New Year’s pilgrimage and sacrifice ritual, in which a delicate relatedness between people and animate mountains is established, enacted, and expressed. Far from the body–spirit, object–subject, and nature–culture dualities, these mountains appear to be bodily-souled and immanent-transcendent beings that participate, together with people, in the ongoing process of shaping a single shared world. The pilgrimage, therefore, is a route along which a larger than human community is being formed and along which the world – in all its contingency, fragility, and precariousness – is continuously brought into existence. This existentially animist cosmology situates humans and nonhumans within the-world-in-formation, rather than the-world-in-representation of some pre-existent cultural and political contents. Finally, I discuss some of the recent attempts to challenge representationalist approaches in Maya studies, arguing that they have escaped the tenets of representationalism just to fall into the trap of western alternative spirituality.

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