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

ANDRES DAPUEZ, ANDRES DZIB MAY, SABRINA GAVIGAN

Research in Economic Anthropology

Emerald

Lugar: Bingley; Año: 2011 vol. 31 p. 157 - 157

0190-1281

In a village of Eastern Yucatan, Mexico, cargo or kuuch sponsors compare their ritual tasks to ??buying life?? from crosses, Catholic saints,and Mayan deities or ??owners.?? The local notion of compromiso,engagement, or commitment, helps these festival participants express thecondition of possibility to successfully perform such exchanges. Decisivefor these life renewals, promises, and compromisos depend upon empathy to authorize ritualists and subsume social and natural phenomena under exchange paradigms. By defining, critiquing and using the concept of ??disposition?? as an inherently self-other stance through which economy transforms into religiosity and vice versa, this chapter analyzes this particular regime of engagement and the temporalities it implies. Through a commitment to the past and the practice of promissory exchange, sponsors develop a new perceptual scheme in which the ritual cultivation of discipline, awareness, expectation, and responsibilit