| Popis: |
For the Masewal people in the highlands of Puebla, Mexico the world is broken. According to local cosmology it was originally fragmented when an envious god tore in half the pillars that connected the sky and the earth and whose remnants are the mountains in which they live today. Nowadays, however, the world faces new forms of destruction—erosion, droughts, and economic poverty—that have been diagnosed by the Masewal people as produced by humans. They have forsaken the gods of the land in pursuit of economic ambitions and a life away from landscape spirits. Under this new cosmology the old gods are now the victims. Indeed, the accumulative effects of decades of intense urban migration paired to the advent of mining and the progressive abandonment of traditional cultivation are locally perceived as linked processes that have effectively destroyed the land. The land is in turn an intricately inhabited space in which humans and spirits of all kinds jointly intervene in all relevant activities. Currently, even some of the spirits are leaving the mountains bringing even more calamities. State-corrupted agencies, urban vices, mining corporations, and disastrous changes in weather patterns are all elements of the same cosmic cataclysm. These are all major spiritual grievances caused ultimately by collective “forgetfulness,” leading the world to its end. The Masewal people are thus rekindling their relations with said spirits in hopes of changing these grim consequences, returning to a renewed mythology of interdependence. |
