Walking memory. Maseual explorations and anchors

Discover the sixth session of the 2024-2025 Americanist Anthropology Seminar: “Walking memory. Maseual explorations and anchors".

"In Mexico's Sierra Norte de Puebla, Maseual communities carry out numerous actions aimed at producing diverse relationships both among themselves and with beings, places and moments in their mountain environment. These actions, traditionally qualified by last century's anthropology as “rituals”, “offerings” or “processions”, and generally grouped under the abstract category of “religion”, are in reality indigenous spatio-temporal explorations aimed at establishing, maintaining or recalling relationships, or even exploring possible ones. However convenient they may be, these classifications in use in the academic world appear inadequate in today's contexts of territorial defense, uncertainty and socio-environmental stress. What's more, they lump together under the same label activities conceived as distinct by local players, whose interpretations suggest complex and creative concerns. Against this backdrop, the speaker will propose his own exploration, based on two decades of ethnographic work in Santa María Tepetzintla, demonstrating how the Maseual interweave ceremonies, places and memory around vibrant and historic local concerns."

• Alessandro Questa Rebolledo (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico)
• Discussant: Josemaría Becerril (LAS/Univ. Côte d’Azur, LAPCO)