Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices

Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices examines the time-based dimensions of ritual activities in past and present Mesoamerican societies, including the prehispanic, colonial, and modern periods. The authors explore ritual around three principal categories of action—creating, transforming, and destroying—as significant cultural manifestations of the temporal dimension of transition processes.
 
Based on specific case studies, new analysis of fieldwork data, and long-term collaboration between authors, chapters engage empirically and theoretically with the multiple temporalities of ritual in relation to both the unfolding of ritual performance and its external and symbolic anchors. Taking rituals as a series of specific, formalized actions that produce transitory changes within an initial context, the authors examine activities that generate change linked to artifact production, life cycles, healing, conflict resolution, crisis management, the enthronement of rulers and transfers of responsibilities, and practices relating to the occupation, abandonment, reuse, or conversion of socialized spaces.
 
Adopting a multidisciplinary approach in archaeology, ethnohistory, anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices offers new insights into ritual time approached through multi-semiotic, material, sensorial, and pragmatic perspectives that encourage further interdisciplinary dialogue.
 
 

Valentina Vapnarsky is research director at the CNRS and holds a chair of linguistic anthropology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. She is currently president of the Société des Américanistes. Trained in both linguistics and anthropology, she has worked with the Itza Maya in Guatemala and the Yucatec Maya in Mexico.
 
Dominique Michelet is honorary research director and associate researcher at the Archéologie des Amériques laboratory at the CNRS and associate researcher at the Centre d’études mexicaines et centraméricaines. He has worked in northeastern Mesoamerica, west Mexico, and the Maya lowlands. In 2020 he was elected member of both the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Academia Mexicana de la Historia.
 
Aurore Monod Becquelin is honorary research director at the CNRS. She has taught linguistic anthropology at various universities and received the Duc de Loubat Prize, from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, for her work with the Trumai (Brazil) and the Tseltal (Chiapas, Mexico).
 
Philippe Nondédéo is an archaeologist and investigator at the Archéologie des Amériques laboratory at the CNRS. He has coedited various books and received in 2018 the Grand Prix d’Archéologie, a prize awarded by the Foundation Simone et Cino del Duca. He has worked in Mexico (Balamku and Río Bec) and in Guatemala (Naachtun).