Byrt WAMMACK WEBER
Yoochel Kaaj: Cine Video Cultura, A.C.
Email: sombra@yoochel.org

"Between Ritual and Simulacra: Spectacles of Religiosities Among Mayan Speakers of the Yucatán Peninsula".

This paper offers a brief look at mesoamerican spectacles of religiosities with the objective of thinking them another way, not to present definitive conclusions. After examining two key concepts, simulacra and exteriority, I suggest that contemporary Mayan-speaking communities employ these concepts in ways that are not shared by the dominant Christian religions of which they often are a part. Simulacra are not employed as bad copies of something orginary or authentic, but rather are employed for their own power. At the same time, Christian interiority is reversed and redeployed as a fold of exteriority and in this way, religious performative practices are used to reproduce spatial and temporal relations within the community and their environment. I suggest that these differences also imply different relationships with the non-human part of nature.
These differences are concealed as long as religious spectacles are examined in isolation rather than in the context of the cosmovisions of which they form a part and of the temporal and spatial practices that accompany them.