Traditional utopias to face the crises of modernity

Number 14 of Encartes section is dedicated to the Dossier to present several articles that focus on the interest and vocation of Mexican anthropology with the following title: "La confección de la utopía comunitaria. Doubts, certainties and imaginaries in the construction of the future".

Indigenous communitarianisms are not only vestiges of the past and tradition. From them emanate models to face the contemporary world by providing alternatives of social organization that offer communitarianisms, self-sustainable models in the face of the environmental crisis generated by capitalist extractivism, revolutionary projects, as well as avant-garde artistic and literary expressions. As Mary Louis Pratt mentioned a few decades ago,

The inability of neoliberalism to generate belonging, collectivity and a credible sense of future produces, among other things, enormous crises of existence and meanings that are being experienced by the non-consumerists and consumerists of the world in ways that neoliberal ideology can neither predict nor control. On the other hand, from places that seem insignificant or marginal, the inscrutable agents of a future whose contours we do not know emerge (Pratt, 2007: 29).

In this sense, addressing the utopias that are being generated from indigenous communities seems not only tempting, but also very relevant.

The Dossier includes an article by Eduardo Zárate, "Utopías comunitarias como apuestas del futuro entre los purhépechas", in which he describes how indigenous organizations are structured around imaginaries of the desirable future by claiming recognition of their ethnic difference. Carlos Casas is the author of "Nahua writers: community utopias and practices on possible futures in the Sierra de Zongolica, Mexico", an article in which he shows how literary creation in the vernacular language encourages creative practices aimed at the construction of community and utopian projects. Javier Serrano makes his contribution with "El futuro en común. Indigenous communities in the cities of the lower Negro River, Norpatagonia, Argentina", in which he explains that these communities do not have a common past and lack territory, although they identify themselves as Mapuche and Mapuche-Tehuelche and achieve cohesion through their participation in shared projects for a common future.

Rogelio Ruiz Díaz presents the article "Ejido El Porvenir in Valle de Guadalupe, Baja California. Experiences and memories of an agricultural community". This ejido is located in the border zone of Mexico and the United States and must articulate a double reality: that of the corporate practices of the Mexican State and the pressures of the market. Delázkar Rizo Gutiérrez writes "Composing and fragmenting community utopia. Living autonomy between dreams and disappointments", in which he describes the value of making the milpa, recovering religious traditions, holding assemblies and eating as a family as practices of what he calls the project of "utopianization of traditional life".

In the section Realidades socioculturales includes three articles that address different topics. The list is headed by "Learning to accompany Mexican amateur digital athletes. Elementos para pensar la presencia y construcción del campo mediado por tecnologías" by Iván Flores, who introduces a novel topic for anthropology: digital ethnography on digital athletes and their activity in video games. The second section is entitled "Learning to see and feel the invisible: somatic pedagogy in alternative spiritual practices" by Yael Dansac, who discusses the importance of studying the neo-pagan spiritual ceremonies that take place in an archaeological site of ancient megaliths located in Carnac, France, which has become a place of celebration of contemporary Celtic spiritualities. His methodology focuses on bodies and their sensitivities. He calls it "somatic pedagogies". Thirdly, we publish the text "Dancing for the saints in the time of covid-19: responses to the confinement of 2020 in central Mexico", co-authored by David Robichaux, Jorge Martínez Galván and Manuel Moreno Carvallo, who analyze the religious festivities in the regions of Teotihuacán and Texcoco as part of a votive act -a manda payment for a favor received- during the confinement caused by the pandemic of covid-19, which implied making this tradition a tradition lived on digital platforms.

The section of Encartes multimedia consists of the article "Zamorano's insomnia. What is not talked about, but what the night allows to show". It is a photographic essay by anthropologist Laura Roush in which she records the timid expressions of pain, grief and fear during her night walks through the dangerous and unsafe city of Zamora, Michoacán. Her camera uncovers the symbolic and ritual resources (such as crosses, altars of the dead and cenotaphs) that, in the midst of pain and fear, appear at night. The camera made possible the gift as an exchange of stories of the people wandering through the night city in exchange for photographic portraits of the anthropologist at a meeting point: a street food stand. We also publish the photographic essay by Pablo Uriel Mancilla Reyna entitled "Photographing a ritual process: an approach to the agency of the Xantolo masks in the Huasteca Potosina", whose images show the agency of the masks in a Nahua festival in that region, which symbolically materialize the dead during their passage in the world of the living.

In the Entrevistas we include the conversation between anthropologist Arturo Gutiérrez and artist Tony Kuhn, as well as the second part of the interview Renée de la Torre conducted with Claudio Lomnitz, in which the creative and artistic face of anthropological work is addressed.

The section of Discrepancias was intended to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Essays on the gift by French anthropologist Marcel Maus. Marcelo Camurça accepted the invitation to organize a panel as a tribute that aims to reflect on the current relevance offered by Mauss' theory of the gift with two specialists who have appropriated his concepts with very different but very current approaches: Marcos Lanna and Renata de Castro Menezes.

In Reseñas críticas In the first one, Patricia Arias comments on the book by Inés Vachez Palomar entitled Remittance architecture. The transformation of a Mexican townAnna Braconnier comments on the book Settling the score: Guatemala, the end and ends of the war and Karla Ballesteros reviews the book coordinated by Antonio Zirión: Rediscovering the ethnographic audiovisual archive.

On behalf of the editorial team of Encartes We hope that this issue will be of interest to our kind readers.

Renée de la Torre
Editor of Encartes

Bibliography

Pratt, Mary Louise (2007). "Globalization, demodernization, and the return of the monsters", History Magazine (156), pp. 13-29.