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

The Economics of Religion: Anthropological Approaches

ISBN: 978-1-78052-228-9, eISBN: 978-1-78052-229-6

Publication date: 12 December 2011

Abstract

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 the condition of possibility to successfully perform such exchanges. Decisive for 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 responsibility are expressed.

Citation

Dapuez, A., Dzib May, A. and Gavigan, S. (2011), "Promising and Engaging the Future Through Ritual Sponsorships in Eastern Yucatan, Mexico", Obadia, L. and Wood, D.C. (Ed.) The Economics of Religion: Anthropological Approaches (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 31), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 157-186. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-1281(2011)0000031010

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited