EncArtes multimedia Archives

Sweet saints: devotions to Cosmas and Damian in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The essay reproduces a synthetic version of the virtual exhibition “Doces santos: as devoções a Cosme e Damião no Rio de Janeiro”, originally exposed on the Instagram of our anthropology laboratory, Ludens. It is one of the results of a long-term collective anthropological research on the devotion to the twin saints Cosmas and Damian, which in Rio de Janeiro is characterized by the distribution of bags full of sweets and candies to children every September 27 or on upcoming dates. This work seeks to understand the relations of reciprocity, interreligious relations and urban flows articulated by the celebration of saints from the perspective of the people who make it possible.

Lucas Bártolo
Morena Freitas
Renata Menezes

The essay reproduces a synthetic version of the virtual exhibition “Doces santos: as devoções a Cosme e Damião no Rio de Janeiro”, originally exposed on the Instagram of our anthropology laboratory, Ludens. It is one of the results of a long-term collective anthropological research on the devotion to the twin saints Cosmas and Damian, which in Rio de Janeiro is characterized by the distribution of bags full of sweets and candies to children every September 27 or on upcoming dates. This work seeks to understand the relations of reciprocity, interreligious relations and urban flows articulated by the celebration of saints from the perspective of the people who make it possible.

The awareness of being looked at: giving a view of the tianguis stall

Frances Paola Garnica Quiñones

This photographic essay shows the process of giving view, a practice of presentation of the stall conformed by certain aesthetic elements that allow a crucial communication flow with other actors of the tianguis to ensure its continuity. The importance of the materiality and visuality of the stall is exposed in terms of its aesthetic production and the affectivities and values that are associated with it and that result in a visual language of the market. This essay is derived from the ethnographic work carried out between 2012 and 2013 in collaboration with Ruta 8, one of the associations of merchants enrolled in the Mercado Sobre Ruedas (msr) program, coordinated by the Secretaría de Desarrollo Económico (sedeco) of Mexico City (cdmx).

Praise of Diversity: The New Monuments of the Rural World

Imelda Sánchez García
Julio César Castro Saavedra
Martha Muñoz Durán
Patricia arias

The video and text accompanying this article are based on a peculiar type of source: the monuments and statues in public spaces that account for three major and profound transformations in the Mexican rural world. On the one hand, the change in the axis of economic activities, a process that has given rise to specializations that have helped neighbors to remain in their communities or, at least, to mitigate the exodus that has led to depopulation in so many places. On the other hand, although closely linked to the above, the emergence of local actors with interests, resources and projects that have been able to appropriate the new development discourses. Finally, the monuments show the current ways of intervention of the public space by emerging collectives in traditionally agrarian societies.

“If God Doesn’t Pronounce It, We Don’t Die”: Multimedia Chronicle of the Otomí Ceremonial Circle Against Covid-19

Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila

The Otomí peoples’ perception of covid-19 was marked by their historic experience facing exogenous illnesses from the colonial period to the present day. In the face of the arrival of the pandemic and a lack of precise information, ritual specialists both in the Sierra de las Cruces and Sierra de Montealto (in Mexico state) and in the Sierra Norte de Puebla were driven to identify it, determine its origin, and, using their ritual proficiency, give it a body and a face in order to battle it with greater efficacy.

Community Justice and Ritual Spectacle: A Case of Mayan Law in Guatemala

Carlos Y. Flores

This essay that accompanies the documentary Suk' B'anik (Correction) is based on the follow-up of a robbery case resolved by the so-called "Mayan ancestral law" in the municipality of Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala, where more than 80% of its inhabitants self-identify as Maya-K'iche'. The material seeks to delve into the collective reasons and emotions that took place in the community trial that prosecuted him. Given the constant weakness of the state justice system, in this region popular tribunals coordinated by local community mayors and supracommunal coordinations of ancestral authorities have become common to collectively prosecute delinquents or alleged delinquents and apply some type of corrective sanction to them. Such judicial proceedings take place within their own cultural understandings, often featuring highly ritualized spectacular choreographies for both local and wider consumption. Such visuality, often accompanied by community video practices, lends to the performance The participants' individual bodies are given a consubstantial status within these judicial processes, while at the same time reaffirming local power structures. In such collective scenarios, the individual body of the accused is exhibited and judicialized by local authorities in front of audiences that demand sanctions to expel evil, that which is perceived as harmful to the community. This exercise, in turn, acts as a metaphor of moral sanitation and rebalancing of a social body processing its own conflicts. As in the rituals of passage or in the theater, the popular judgments in these Maya-K'iche' communities frequently appeal to other times and spaces, even supernatural ones, which affect the effectiveness of the reorganizing message that also reinforces their own identity constructions.

Bazaar Economy on the Puente del Papa (Pope’s Bridge). Monterrey

Efrén Sandoval Hernández

The aim of this essay is to show the co-participation of vendors and merchandise in the reproduction of particular ways of making and being in the widest context of urban reality. The essay consists of a reflection and photographs taken in the place in which vendors sell their goods. Characterizing this form of trade as a bazaar economy, the focus is on the goods, their type, characteristics and layout, as well as those of the vendors. The geographic centrality of the location of this commercial activity contrasts with its marginality in relation with the economy and the hegemonic discourses in the city. In the same way in which goods find a second or third life here, vendors seem to achieve the same thing by remaining here despite having been discarded by the labor market and other circumstances of life. The essay is composed of photographs taken as part of fieldwork aimed at knowing the dynamic of informal trade in Monterrey. In this framework, these vendors are the simplest and clearest example of the bazaar economy that is then reproduced, in certain aspects, in the hundreds of markets throughout the city.

The Border Wall in Tijuana. Photographic Prints of the Art Oblations/Interventions in Memory of the Dead Migrants 1999-2021

Guillermo Alonso Meneses

Post-ethnography pursues “micro-occurrences” and visual findings that have taken place in Tijuana in the past 28 years. These photographs show an iconography of white crosses, skulls, empty water jugs and cempasúchil flowers. Postphotography helps redimension this ethnographic evidence. Thus, the photo-essay speaks of sociocultural and artistic guerrillas against the strategic oblivion promoted by the governments of the U.S. and Mexico towards the deaths of migrants and the border walls as necro-artefacts in which art, solidarity and memory meet.

Altars for the Dead: The Changing Heritage of a Mexican Tradition

https://youtu.be/prN7997stxs

Cristina Gutierrez Zuniga
Renée de la Torre Castellanos

The video is the result of an investigation into the effects, adaptations and displacements experienced by the Day of the Dead tradition in Mexico during the month of November of the first year of the covid-19 pandemic. By this time, public Day of the Dead ceremonies valued as intangible national heritage had been cancelled. We undertook an online survey to find out what would be the effects of isolation on the Day of the Dead tradition: would the tradition cease or would it shift or mutate to new uses, places and expressions? And what new creative uses of the tradition would emerge and in what new media would it be carried out? With the data obtained from 720 questionnaires and 280 photographs received from the altars of the dead, we made a video to explain the spatial displacements, the aesthetic changes and the new senses with which the practice of this ancestral Mexican tradition was renewed.

“Cabby Altars”: Random Miniethnographies of Daily (Religious) Life

Alejandro Frigerio

This paper shows and analyzes the assemblages of magical-religious symbols and images that many cab drivers1 in the city of Buenos Aires hang from the mirrors of their cars or attach to their sun visors. She uses the word "altars" cautiously to make visible these minimalist traces of the daily religious life of the porteños, objects that at once provide protection against the dangers of everyday street traffic and testify to relationships with specific superhuman beings. In these heterogeneous assemblages appear saints and virgins, popular saints and oriental and/or esoteric symbols -that testify to the rich magical-religious diversity of the city- as well as photos and memories of individuals and social collectives with a high charge of sacredness (children, relatives, soccer clubs). These "altars" are evidence of singular religious and familial journeys, but they also result from random interactions with passengers and evidence more general and little recognized patterns of how porteños relate to superhuman beings.

Images of the Conquest in Tlacoachistlahuaca, Guerrero, A Story out of Many…

Carlo Bonfiglioli

The dance that is the subject of the images presented in this photographic essay dialogues with many stories. It all depends on where, when and for whom those stories are danced. For the missionaries of the xviiAccording to the first promoters, this dance was a means to inculcate and celebrate the arrival of the new religion. But in the first century xixWith independence and later with the victory of the Juarista army over the French, the vision of the victors changed sides and with it the dances changed as well. The rural teachers took the place of the missionaries and became protagonists of a new way of thinking and presenting the past; the first pro-indigenist variants began to occupy the stage or else they mixed or coexisted with the pro-Ispanist variants. Through the work of a certain Casimiro Jiménez, probably a native of the neighboring state of Oaxaca, one of these pro-indigenist variants began to spread in the Mixteco-Amuzgo region of the Costa Chica of Guerrero, between 1910 and 1915. My Amuzgo friends loved to reconstruct its diffusion in the region, and today this is the story they are most interested in telling. The other, the history told through dance, also makes them proud because despite the defeat, their ancestors shine for their bravery and their resistance. I hope that the connoisseur and the specialist in these subjects can appreciate in the photos that I present the echoes of these stories whose protagonists are surely much more numerous than those who appear on the screen.

Śiva: nothing of him vanishes, he only transforms. Visual anthropology of urban mythological art

Arturo Gutierrez del Angel
Greta alvarado lugo

Whe present essay seeks to show, through a singularity of images, how myths, in one of their many expressive ramifications, materialize in a narrative way in what we call plastic expressions of the good errant. Its minimal units operate with signifiers built on a multiplicity of objects that refer the errant to meanings linked to those beings of the universal endeavor. To demonstrate our plastic hypothesis, we will exemplify the mythological complex related to Śiva, one of the most outstanding deities of the Indian cosmogony, referring to various manifestations and presences of this god in the colorful streets of India.

San Juan Huetziatl: Popular religiosity and the cult of saints in a communal stewardship of San Miguel Canoa, Puebla

Ana Isabel Castillo Espinosa

The following work is a photographic essay that aims to reflect on the value of the photographic record to ethnographically analyze the expressions of popular religiosity in San Miguel Canoa, Puebla, where, based on the analysis of the festive ritual of San Juan Bosco, it is seeks to contribute to the reflection of the ethnographic construction and the use of photography in anthropological research.

Where Do We Stand To Shoot Abriendo Senderos De Justicia. La Sentencia Y Comisión De Ayotzinapa?

Margarita Zires

This text presents a review of the investigation and production of the documentary Abriendo Senderos de Justicia (Opening Paths of Justice. The Ayotzinapa Sentence and Commission). It shows the analytical perspectives and narrative approaches taken in the different stages of its creation. In this sense, it tries to show the researchers and filmmakers in the Ayotzinapa Movement’s process of subjective involvement or political and ethical commitment. Additionally, it explains the importance of an unprecedented and uplifting sentence for this movement due to its legal creativity in the field of the struggle for human rights in our country, as well as of a commission that recovers said creativity during the government of López Obrador, beyond the difficulties it has faced.

Travelling the spanish-moroccan border: a historical and visual tour. Field experiences in a border landscape

María Isolda Perelló Carrascosa

This photographic essay intends to show some of the results of the ground research carried out within the context of a doctoral dissertation, during the months of July through September of 2014 in Ceuta, as well as Melilla and locations near the Spanish-Moroccan border. As the text shows, the maritime enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla have once had a crucial geostrategic position in the Mediterranean. Currently, its purpose as an external European border in the African continent has been reinforced with the securitization of the border region to contain the threats related to criminal activities and “undesired” trans-Mediterranean migration, although it has also ended up affecting “atypical” trade or trafficking with Morocco.

The documentary “Over The Wall / Sobre el muro”: a look at the social transformations caused by the border wall between Mexico and the United States in Tijuana

Alberto Hernandez Hernandez
Jhonnatan Curiel

BAsado in the documentary Over the Wall / Sobre el muro (El Colef, 2019), this text discusses some social effects from the transformations of the barriers and divisions that have demarcated the border of the states of California, the United States and Baja California, Mexico, until the construction of fences and border walls promoted by the last four US federal administrations. Based on interviews with specialists in migration and borders, residents, and an investigation of archives and documents around the wall and its effects on the Tijuana-San Diego border, this documentary captures periods of change and border reinforcement by States. States, as well as the recent situation with the arrival of new migratory flows such as the caravans of Central American migrants to Tijuana and the challenges for this border.

Altars we see, meanings we do not know: material sustenance of lived religiosity

Anel Victoria Salas
Renée de la Torre Castellanos

This work consists of a photographic essay on domestic altars that is accompanied by narratives of their owners and aims to address the Catholic religiosity that is practiced on a daily basis in non-ecclesial spaces. The ethnographic work (based on photographic records and interviews) focuses on the materiality of the altars (which make beliefs visible) and on the narratives that account for the symbolic meanings, appropriations and uses of Catholic images in ordinary life. of believers. We address three scenarios for assembling and practicing altars: domestic (they are generally private and individual and are found within homes); semi-private (in workplaces, such as offices, market stalls, canteens and workshops), that although they are cared for by a person, are not for exclusive use, are exposed and are sometimes the reason for practices of those who attend that place, and public (street or neighborhood), which are placed in open spaces (on a sidewalk, square or corner) and activate collective practices and are even protected by a community. We consider it to be a novel methodological proposal to approach the understanding of religious experiences and their non-ecclesial logic.

Building hope: the participatory social documentary as a research methodology in an evangelical rehabilitation center in Tijuana. Challenges and learnings

Eduardo Yael González Tamayo

The research methodologies that generate social scientific knowledge from the collection of empirical information have diversified thanks to technological advances and transdisciplinarity; Due to this, it is important to reflect on the way in which these disciplinary intersections nurture and complicate the role of sociocultural research. This article seeks to delve into the events, analysis and learning that emerged during the creation of the participatory social documentary Hombres de Esperanza (2017) and its various exhibitions to the general public, academics and experts in visual art. In this way, it is intended to dialogue the artistic discourse with that of the social sciences from the common points that converge in the creation of an ethnographic documentary, which was made in Tijuana and deals with an evangelical rehabilitation center.

Nasa Phtamnxûu. Nasa indigenous casorio

Nasa Phtamnxūu - Indigenous Nasa Casorio desde Aica Films on Vimeo.

Alejandra Muñoz Ruiz
Mateo Leguizamón

The purpose of this document is to show the historical framework in which, on the one hand, the audiovisual product produced by Aica Colectivo on the rescue of the indigenous marriage is developed and, on the other, to trace the route of consolidation of the knowledge that is generated from the indigenous Nasa, in an exercise that allows to limit the cultural distances that today are present in the rest of the cultures of the country. This work aims to sketch the story of the Nasa Paez indigenous people, a native people of the ancestral territory of Tierradentro, Cauca-Colombia and whose mother tongue is Nasaywe, a community in constant resistance and in a struggle to forge its own history following in the footsteps of their ancestors.

To make tuba in Mexico and the Philippines. Four centuries of shared history

Paulina Machuca

The main objective of this documentary is to show the art of making tuba in two geographically distant places, but united by history: Colima, in western Mexico and Bohol, in the Philippines. The tuba is a drink obtained from the sap of the palm tree (Cocos nucifera L.), whose technique was introduced in western Mexico in the 17th century, thanks to the Filipinos who arrived aboard the Manila Galleon. The public will be able to know, from a comparative perspective, the processes of its elaboration, its forms of consumption and commercialization, as well as its cultural importance in their respective contexts.

The thread of memory

The thread of memory desde Mariana rivera garcia on Vimeo.

Mariana Xochiquétzal Rivera García

During three months a tour of Mexico was made with the exhibition entitled Weaving with the thread of memory: stitches of dignity in the midst of war; It showed the work of a collective of Colombian weavers made up of women survivors of the armed conflict. Through weaving they have told their stories, denouncing the injustices and violence they have suffered. The exhibition was shared with groups of weavers from Mexico City, Guerrero and Chiapas; at the same time, weaving and memory workshops were given and an audiovisual exhibition was held. The thread of memory is a documentary that follows the route of the exhibition in its journey through Mexico, it reflects on the bridges that are woven between collective creation, creativity and the transforming potential of the reality that shared spaces have to tell and weave.

Chatting with the images: "it has to do with his life story"

Roberta Simon

WIn this video I present the conversations of Claudio Oliveira, one of the visitors who passed through the exhibition of the students of the Visual and Image Anthropology course of the Social Sciences course at UFRGS on the sensible ways of living in the city of Porto Alegre / RS (Brazil). Claudio's images, looks and talks are mixed with the images of the exhibition. Stories, spaces and times open up circular communication for new resonances from those who see them. I invite you to chat with the images.

Religion and immigration: The Lord of Miracles in Rome

Veronica Roldan

The present documentary is about the devotion to the Crucified Christ, called the Lord of Miracles by the Peruvian community residing in Italy. The history of such veneration dates back to 1651 on the outskirts of the City of Kings, as Lima was called during the Viceroyalty of Peru. Today that image of Jesus Christ, originally painted by an Angolan slave, is venerated during the month of October in Peru and in all countries where there is a community of Peruvian immigrants that form the Brotherhood of the Lord of Miracles. [.. .]

Vol 6 No 12 (2023)

Sweet saints: devotions to Cosmas and Damian in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Lucas BártoloMorena FreitasRenata Menezes