From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico

Wangye practices online: From burning effigy vessels to digital networks

“…This article examines religious practice through the perspective of performance by highlighting the ways in which religious practitioners enact and stage their rituals and processions on social media platforms. Leaning away from an emphasis on the here and now of performance, I become what Leo Cabranes‐Grant (2016, p. 4) would perhaps call a ‘distanced observer’ of religious performance as opposed to an ‘attentive passenger’. Instead of being ‘right there when things take place’, the global COVID‐19 health crisis and my geographical distance from the religious phenomenon of vessels being burned (to drive away a pandemic) forces this researcher‐passenger to give a different account of the reenactments of religious vessels on live stream, now archived on the Internet.…”

“…Through an analysis of the performances of a range of Wangye and vessel burning practices online, this article explores the nature of a network of spirits, technologies, and vessels. As a performance, it consists of nodes of negotiation, resistance, mediation, and enactment and produced through what Cabranes‐Grant (2016, p. 5) would describe as ‘the relational webs of labor and maintenance that keep [intercultural] occasions going’. Digital mediums—recording devices, routers, drones, video streaming platforms, and algorithms—make up the intermediaries that disseminate and distribute existing intercultural relations and facilitate new identity formations and online behaviour.…”

“…Rather, each iteration of the religious performance follows a creative itinerary through satellite‐based radio‐navigation systems, IP addresses, wide bandwidth (broadband) waves, and tidal waves formed by bringing together agents, actors, and vessels. These are paths that, with the burning of the vessels, a change in elements, or a drop in bandwidth speed, constantly establish ‘new standards of identity that encompass and transform all the cultural materials involved as they go along’ (Cabranes‐Grant, 2016, p. 5). As Wuthnow and Offutt (2008, p. 209) note, ‘religion is increasingly viewed as a transnational phenomenon’, and transnational religious connections ‘consist of actual flows of people, goods, services, and information across national boundaries’.…”

Fiestas Fit for a King: Contested Symbolic Regimes of Power in New Spain

“…The latter often approach the chronicles and testimonies as reasonably reliable reconstructions of those events. Cabranes-Grant considers the plethora of signs and symbols as symptomatic of “intercultural scenarios” and “semiotic miscegenation” (Cabranes-Grant, 2016; Cabranes-Grant, 2011, 518). Other literary scholars have taken up the ways in which poets, novelists, and intellectuals in subsequent centuries anachronistically portrayed the deposed settlers as the first Mexicans to fight for independence.…”