EncArtes multimedia includes the publication of different products of ongoing research. Visual ethnographies / multimedia reports will be accepted with strong fieldwork support and use of frames of reference from the social sciences, photographic essays, documentaries, poetry, life stories and oral archives. All material will be judged in double blind.

Vol 7 No 14 (2024)

Vol 7 No 13 (2024)

Vol 6 No 12 (2023)

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.

Vol 6 No 11 (2023)

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.

Vol 5 No 9 (2022)

Vol 5 No 10 (2022)

Vol 4 No 8 (2021)

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.

Vol 4 No. 7 (2021)

Vol 3 Num 6 (2020)

Vol 3 No. 5 (2020)

Vol 2 Num 4 (2019)

Vol 2 No 3 (2019)

Vol 1 Issue 2 (2018)

Vol 1 Issue 1 (2018)