Promising and Engaging the Future Through Ritual Sponsorships in Eastern Yucatan, Mexico

Catholic-Maya Sacrificial Commitments

“…Most of it focuses on the fabric of sociality through a civil-religious hierarchy (Cancian 1965;Rus and Wasserstrom 1980;Freidlander 1981;Chance 1990;Nash 1970 among many others), a popular fiesta system (Smith 1977;Fernández 1994;and Fernandez and Quintal 1992;Quintal Avilés 1993) or mayordomía system (Chance and Tylor 1987) in relation to socio-economic reproduction or patterns of social change. My contribution to it has highlighted ritual rationales of cargo festivals mainly in relation to its regenerative aims (Christenson 2016;Dapuez et al 2011;Dapuez 2013). 4.…”

“…Although I do not consider myself Catholic today, I should recognize that such deviation from Catholicism may have been devised by Catholicism itself as an always open door that serves as both exit and re-entrance. In this way, I understand commitment as something more complicated than a disposition (Dapuez et al 2011). Scheid (2002Scheid ( , 2007 and Mayblin (2017) have shown that engagement with the sacred, in ancient Rome as well as in contemporary Brazil, involves more than initial doses of disengagement.…”

“…There are, of course, multiple ritual specialists among the Mayan speaking farmers, and the complexities of the cargo system are still far from being clear and well-known, but Padre Carlos set aside these complexities to represent them all as if they were directly dealing with God through sacrifices. Believing that experiences of illness or disgrace are in fact requests from spiritual-lords, these farmers understand that such requests result from unfulfilled promises they may have made in the past (I have described in detail some of these features elsewhere; Dapuez et al 2011; Dapuez 2013). As such, C1 entails, then, a direct communication with the sacred.…”

“…In all of my fieldtrips, I contributed with beer, liquor, soft drinks, and food to the main sponsors. By describing and comparing not only specific tasks of some ritual specialists (see Dapuez et al 2011 for further sponsorship details) but also, and more importantly, their representations of how it would work the sacrificial victim upon themselves. In a few words, I intend to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of Catholic joint commitment in its making.…”

“…In this Maya-Catholic case, identification with the victim’s fate of dying is a condition of possibility for the further composition of death’s remains into new combinations (Durkheim 1995, 203). Therefore, in the ritual compound I will describe (for further details see Dapuez et al 2011), Maya participants experience dying as necessary for rebirth, not because they engage in typical “representational practices” as “non-modern and nonwestern” people but because they signify by exploring “multiple modalities of representing as object creation, decontextualization, and distantiation” (Keane 2007, 11-12). However, some of the most influential sociological scholarship concerning commitment (Giraud 2011) and, specifically, religious commitment (Stark and Glock 1974; Stark and Bainbridge 1980), have overlooked representations of such complex agency in its making.…”