Gradients of Humanity in Nahua Thought: Beyond the Humans and non-Humans Dichotomy
Based on the cosmogonic myths and the process of the conformation of the person among the Nahuas of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, this paper shows that “humanity” and “human being” are not fixed categories but acquired conditions that depend on the adoption of certain behaviors and practices. Conseque...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2023 |
| País: | México |
| Institución: | UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO |
| Repositorio: | Anales de Antropología |
| Idioma: | español |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/83951 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://www.revistas.unam.mx/index.php/antropologia/article/view/83951 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | cosmology personhood ontology Nahuas of the Northern Sierra of Puebla Puebla Northern Sierra of Puebla Nahuas Cosmología Concepción de persona Ontología Nahuas de la Sierra Norte de Puebla Sierra Norte de Puebla |
| Sumario: | Based on the cosmogonic myths and the process of the conformation of the person among the Nahuas of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, this paper shows that “humanity” and “human being” are not fixed categories but acquired conditions that depend on the adoption of certain behaviors and practices. Consequently, the person who stops behaving according to the Nahua moral is “transformed” into an “animal”. At the same time, if human beings do not comply with the rules of interaction based fundamentally on reciprocity, they can regress to a state of “animality”, which would be equivalent to the “end of the world” or the disintegration of the values and institutions that make up the Nahua or Maseual society. With ethnographic examples, this article problematizes the indiscriminate use of the human/non-human dichotomy in recent anthropological works to refer to and classify the inhabitants of the indigenous cosmos. The purpose is to demonstrate that according to the Nahua ontology the set of existing beings is not fundamentally divided into these two antagonistic and essential categories but is rather thought of in terms of gradients of humanity. |
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