Paper Short Abstract:

In the Sierra of Puebla, Mexico, local Indigenous Maseual dances comprise an epistemology that fuses and relates humans with landscape beings, places, and events. For Maseual dancers such acts are a necessary technology to become and thus intervene in the form of a mountain spirit upon the world.

Paper Abstract:

In the mountainous Sierra of Puebla, Mexico, Indigenous Maseual rural villages have historically survived and thrived by observing and assessing landscape relations paired to spiritual maladies and life cycle’s events. Local multifaceted masked dances portray such complex relations comprising a form of knowledge that constantly fuses and relates humans with landscape beings, places, and events. To this day, this sophisticated both ecological and performative epistemology has been stereotyped as “traditional” and misconstrued as merely folkloric, ultimately to be subsumed under Catholic religion by dominant Mexican society and even anthropology. This presentation, based on my long-term fieldwork and participation in local dance groups, tells a different story. Maseual dancers consider that such an act is necessary to see, become, and, crucially, intervene in the form of a mountain spirit upon the world bringing favourable conditions and brokering in between human and non-human collectives. Such dancing entities are called tipekayomej (pl.) or “mountain bodies”. By decentering humanity, these assembled beings can “make real” an enduring form of ecological thinking and ecopolitical action.