Valentina Vapnarsky – författare

Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices examines the time-based dimensions of ritual activities in past and present Mesoamerican societies, including the prehispanic, colonial, and modern periods. The authors explore ritual around three principal categories of action—creating, transforming, and destroying—as significant cultural manifestations of the temporal dimension of transition processes.   Based on specific case studies, new analysis of fieldwork data, and long-term collaboration between authors, chapters engage empirically and theoretically with the multiple temporalities of ritual in relation to both the unfolding of ritual performance and its external and symbolic anchors. Taking rituals as a series of specific, formalized actions that produce transitory changes within an initial context, the authors examine activities that generate change linked to artifact production, life cycles, healing, conflict resolution, crisis management, the enthronement of rulers and transfers of responsibilities, and practices relating to the occupation, abandonment, reuse, or conversion of socialized spaces.   Adopting a multidisciplinary approach in archaeology, ethnohistory, anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, Temporalities in Mesoamerican Ritual Practices offers new insights into ritual time approached through multi-semiotic, material, sensorial, and pragmatic perspectives that encourage further interdisciplinary dialogue.  

The problem of lexical categories and root class determination is fundamental in linguistic description and theory. Research on this topic has been particularly stimulated by studies of Amerindian languages. The essays in this collection, written by specialists in languages from South, Middle and North America, provide new insights into processes, levels, functions, and the aquisition of lexical categories, from various recent theoretical perspectives. The volume also addresses recent debates about root indeterminacy. Focusing on morphosyntax, phonology, and semantics, the contributions offer invaluable material for typological generalizations and for comprehension of the nature of the mental lexicon.

Ruins and remnants of the past are endowed with life, rather than mere relics handed down from previous generations. Living Ruins explores some of the ways Indigenous people relate to the material remains of human activity and provides an informed and critical stance that nuances and contests institutionalized patrimonialization discourse on vestiges of the past in present landscapes.  Ten case studies from the Maya region, Amazonia, and the Andes detail and contextualize narratives, rituals, and a range of practices and attitudes toward different kinds of vestiges. The chapters engage with recently debated issues such as regimes of historicity and knowledge, cultural landscapes, conceptions of personhood and ancestrality, artifacts, and materiality. They focus on Indigenous perspectives rather than mainstream narratives such as those mediated by UNESCO, Hollywood, travel agents, and sometimes even academics. The contributions provide critical analyses alongside a multifaceted account of how people relate to the place/time nexus, expanding our understanding of different ontological conceptualizations of the past and their significance in the present.  Living Ruins adds to the lively body of work on the invention of tradition, Indigenous claims on their lands and history, “retrospective ethnogenesis,” and neo-Indianism in a world where tourism, NGOs, and Western essentialism are changing Indigenous attitudes and representations. This book is significant to anyone interested in cultural heritage studies, Amerindian spirituality, and Indigenous engagement with archaeological sites in Latin America.  Contributors: Cedric Becquey, Laurence Charlier Zeineddine, Marie Chosson, Pablo Cruz, Philippe Erikson, Antoinette Molinié, Fernando Santos-Granero, Emilie Stoll, Valentina Vapnarsky, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen