Shifting Ontologies inHuichol Ritual and Art

Abstract

In regard to anthropology's contemporary ontological turn, it seems to be necessary to raise the question of polyontologies. Using Descola's terminology, the Huichols (Wixarika) of Western Mexico seem to be a case combining animistic and analogist tendencies. I avoid declaring analogism to be the dominant ontology of the Huichol, and animism to being a secondary tendency. Rather, my project is to elucidate the ontological implications of ritual complexity. Huichol ontology and cosmology appear to be unstable and based on contradictory schemes of practice. During the Peyote dance people deny the free gifts of the feathered serpent and oblige it to accept "payment." The cloud serpent's ethos of free gift clashes with the villagers' insistence on reciprocal exchange. The transition from reciprocity to free gift and back to exchange is always a problematic process. There is no easy complementarity between the two. These same tensions are also expressed in the Huichol's peculiar style of art. Contemplating a yarn painting like The Vision of Tatutsi Xuweri Timaiweme by José Benítez Sánchez, the viewer can go back and forth between incompatible forms of knowledge and ways of viewing. [Wixarika, analogism, animism, ritual, anthropology of art] Neither Monoontology nor PolyontologyA couple of years ago, anthropologists started discussing ontologies. At times, it appeared as though they grew tired of the concept of culture. However, according to the main proponents of "anthropology of ontologies," it is more than a trendy synonym for culture (http://coa.sagepub.com/content/ 30/2/152.refs.html). It is an attempt to revitalize the critical potential of anthropology based on ethnographic experience. As Martin Holbraad remarks in the 2008 GDAT debate on the topic, "the key tenet of an ontological approach in anthropology, as opposed to a culturalist one in the broadest sense, is that in it anthropological analysis becomes a question not of applying analytical concepts to ethnographic data, but rather of allowing ethnographic data to act as levers-big Archimedean ones!-for the transformation of analytical concepts" (Holbraad 2010).The "ontological turn" meant that anthropological relativism was taken to a level beyond the dichotomies that determined Western thought since antiquity: culture/nature, spirit/matter, knowledge/practice, concepts/things, and the like. Avoiding those metaphysical dualisms (cf. Latour 1993) allows us to take more seriously our informants' practices and beliefs. "This, then, is what an 'ontology' is: the result of anthropologists' systematic attempts to transform their conceptual repertoires in such a way as to be able to describe their bs_bs_banner

If Not all Stones Are Alive…

“…This could mean something as basic as knowing whether tobacco or beer is an appropriate gift, but it might also involve knowing whether gift-exchanges (reciprocity) or the one-way process of offering or receiving free gifts is expected. Neurath's (2015) discussion of the complex shifting patterns and performances of ritual relations among the Huichol (Wixarika)-in which both reciprocity and free-gift dynamics can be engaged-is enlightening here.…”

Coyote drums and jaguar altars: Ontologies of the living and the artificial among the K’iche’ Maya

“…This conception is widely recognized as being based on the notion of a ‘shared humanity’ by the different beings that populate those universes, such as animals, plants and even objects. However, despite promising recent ethnographies and proposals (Lamrani, 2008; Lorente, 2011; Pitarch, 2013a; Millán, 2019; Neurath, 2015), Viveiros de Castro’s ideas and the ontological models akin to them have had a hard time finding acceptance among Mesoamericanist scholars, who prefer to stick to old-school symbolic approaches, 1 arguing that the phenomena that are regarded as effectively ontological by Viveiros or Descola are merely oneiric, ritual, metaphorical or mythical (Martínez González, 2016). While Descola’s (2005: 207–221) classification of the central Mexican Aztec and other Mesoamerican peoples in the group of ‘analogical’ or mostly symbol-oriented ontologies may be one of the main reasons for this situation, 2 I believe that some of the lack of acceptance of the perspectivist model in the Mesoamerican context derives from a certain failure of accounting for material culture in a way that is meaningful and specific instead of being based on general analogies.…”