The dossier that readers of Encartes have in sight today was born from a constant communication between this writer and colleague Renée de la Torre -especially from our conversations in person or in our respective social networks- about the transgressive role of several traditions that go through moments of crisis, censorship, threats or attacks before consolidating themselves as new formal spaces, either within institutional environments, or creating, from their own marginality, new models of canonical traditionality. When evaluating the trajectory of certain devotions, customs or celebrations, widely favored today by popular sympathy, it is necessary to recognize that their consolidation implied, at some point, severe ruptures within certain collectives, as has been demonstrated by classical anthropological theory dedicated both to rituals and to the analysis of the behavior of those involved in them, such as ritual specialists, laymen, divinities, the landscapes or sacred sites where they take place.

This situation is common to all societies and is observed with particular fury in complex societies: for example, today, scholars of the religious phenomenon in the United States are beginning to analyze the so-called “Christofascism” linked to the current government of Donald Trump (Goldstein, 2021), just as research has been done on the arrival of Islam among Tzotzil families expelled from San Juan Chamula in Chiapas (Bernal Hernández and Casas Mendoza, 2024). There are ruptures that leave in sight other possible scenarios for the creators of new traditions: in the midst of the crisis of Catholicism, millions of adolescents in Spain and Latin America approach with enthusiasm the new sonorous spiritualities, as we saw with the appearance of Lux, the latest album by the Catalan singer Rosalía, while another segment of young people explore the interactive experience of processions or Catholic masses on the Roblox platform, a site specialized in designing “virtual worlds” (Jordá Chávez, 2025). The vertigo of our own era places before us, almost in real time, a remarkable amount of news about traditions subjected to transformations or adaptations unthinkable until a few years ago, or about crises and ruptures that give rise to the construction of new cultural orders, increasingly unstable, ratifying the intuition of Franz Boas turned into the epigraph with which Claude Lévi-Strauss opens the pages of his wonderful text “The Structure of Myths”: “one would say that the mythological symbolic universes are destined to be pulverized as soon as they are formed, so that from their remains new universes are born” (Boas, apud Lévi-Strauss,1994: 229).

Thus, those engaged in the ethnography of rituals now have fertile ground beyond the societies considered “traditional”, an adjective challenged thanks to the work of colleagues who have become gamblers of transformations, disruptions and dilemmas. If Max Weber had conceded that ritual exerts an extraordinary efficiency thanks to its high level of routinization, contemporary studies have brought to the table the importance within ritual of innovation, creativity, mistakes and failures as proposed by Kathryn T. McClymond in her wonderful book: Ritual Gone Wrong: What We Learn from Ritual Disruption (2025), in which he analyzes cases in which ritual errors and their correction rehabilitate new symbols, always subject to debates and quarrels. For example, in Mexico, we have witnessed the decisions of the Mexican political class that incorporates indigenous symbols in their civic ceremonies, such as the delivery of “batons of command”, both to the presidents of the republic and to the new ministers of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (Aguilar, 2025).

Thus, the crisis of traditions often provides fertile ground for social research, since the emergence of new identities or the resurgence of others that we thought had disappeared propitiates the establishment of new cultural practices - “liquid”, if there is still room to speak of the work of Zygmunt Bauman-: ruptures and schisms are phenomena that keep both creativity and ethnographic imagination active in order to account for them. For this reason, this issue of Encartes proposes a dossier that addresses these questions in five texts, based on reflections shared by the authors. We begin with “Performance social and historical transformation in the anniversary celebrations of indigenous churches in Chaco (Argentina)”, by César Ceriani Cernadas, who talks about the region inhabited by the Qom (or Toba), Wichí, Pilagá, Mocoví and Nivaclé peoples, who, in open defiance of the dominant white, Creole and Catholic system, embraced the “gospel”, that is, evangelical Christianity since the beginning of the 20th century, and who have been living in the region since the beginning of the 20th century, and who have been living in the region since the beginning of the 20th century. xx, The author shows that the passage from Catholicism to Protestantism goes beyond the merely intellectual, moral and doctrinal order. As the author demonstrates, the passage from Catholicism to Protestantism goes beyond the merely intellectual, moral and doctrinal order, since, by coming into contact with the deep Qom and Wichí world, the “gospel” affects powerful ontological, aesthetic and political transformations that forge not only new communities enlivened by the Holy Spirit, but also new historical memories, alien to the official indigenist discourse.

The second text, “The thematization of the religious in the samba schools of Rio de Janeiro (2016-2022): Performances In this article, the author offers us an analysis of the ”entanglements“ or scenic arguments that translate into powerful aesthetics that the samba schools exhibit in the Carnival parades of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In these ”entanglements“, the religious has penetrated with force in a critical and transgressive way. To amplify their satires, they take advantage of the highly stereotyped environment, which enjoys a powerful media apparatus, whose message does not usually pass indifferently, given the charge towards right-wing positions in Brazilian regional politics.

Back to Mexico, we have three suggestive works. The first one corresponds to José Joel Lara González, who, in his text “Etnofonías: Mexico's biocultural heritage”, explores the universe of sound in ritual and mythical environments, which is generally neglected when it comes to understanding the mechanisms that sound - expressed in murmurs, shouts, whispers, melodies - is part of a way of “being and being in the world” that overflows the human world and makes sound an ontological path that connects existing worlds and experiences in the ritual environment, a true field of acoustic diversities.

For his part, Yves Bernardo Roger Solis Nicot offers us a text that straddles history and ethnography entitled “Echoes of Christendom? Necropolitics and ‘priestly martyrdom’ in the 20th century. xxi Mexican”, in which the author links the historical episode called “la cristiada” - an armed conflict between the hierarchy and the Catholic people and the Mexican post-revolutionary government during the years 1926-1929 - and the murders of priests in the 20th century. xxi, This is a significant issue in a mainly Catholic country, where the figure of the Catholic priest is gaining importance, although since the revelations of the numerous cases of pederasty it has entered into a sociologically relevant crisis.

The dossier closes with a text of my own authorship, “Las ngäd'i-dokweRitual disruptions, altered bodies and bodily alterities in the Otomí world”, in which I present some reflections about the “locas”, characters of the Otomí carnival in the southern Huasteca, whose bodies, arranged to satisfy the desires of their lord (ar zithu, The “devil”), they put in crisis our ideas about homosexuality in the indigenous world, beyond a reductionist biologicism, making the bodies of the “crazy” women an arena in which a complex ethnic, ritual and, above all, cosmopolitical challenge is at stake.

The ethnographic possibilities offered by marginal, transgressive, counter-hegemonic and contesting worlds and environments are an urgent appeal, as I have already said, to maintain the pertinent status of anthropological disciplines. Feminisms and struggles for the defense of territories, new research on the arts and their political scope in a world challenged by new (and increasingly lethal) narratives of violence, extermination and death, remind us that anthropology usually flourishes where it is paradoxically challenged and, at the same time, at home: where everything breaks down, it is the professional duty of anthropologists to reconstruct pieces that make sense of every crisis, every innovation, every transformation. This dossier is a small effort in that direction.

Bibliography

Aguilar, Yásnaya (2025). “La scjn y su ceremonia ‘tradicional’: efecto Tizoc. Maxän”, recurso electrónico. Disponible en: https://elpais.com/mexico/opinion/2025-08-30/la-scjn-y-su-ceremonia-tradicional-efecto-tizoc-maxan.html

Bernal Hernández, Guillermo Raúl y Carlos Alberto Casas Mendoza (2024). “Tzotziles a la da’wa. Del éxodo protestante al comunalismo islámico en Chiapas”, recurso electrónico. Disponible en: https://www.redalyc.org/journal/1808/180879970006/180879970006.pdf

Boas, Franz, apud Claude Lévi-Strauss (1994). “La estructura de los mitos”, en Claude Lévi Strauss. Antropología estructural. Barcelona: Altaya.

Goldstein, Warren S. (2025). “Trump, la derecha religiosa y el espectro del fascismo”, recurso electrónico. Disponible en: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050303221997554.

Jordá Chávez, Abril (2025). “Las misas en Roblox: ¿una nueva forma de congregarse?”, recurso electrónico. Disponible en: https://christus.jesuitasmexico.org/las-misas-en-roblox-una-nueva-forma-de-congregar-a-fieles/

Manrique Sabogal, Winston (2025). “Rosalía y ‘Lux’ (1): mujeres, libros y misticismo que inspiraron su disco”, recurso electrónico. Disponible en: https://wmagazin.com/relatos/rosalia-y-lux-1-mujeres-libros-y-misticismo-que-inspiraron-su-disco/

Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila is a full-time research professor at the Centro inah-State of Mexico. He is a professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National School of Anthropology and History). He is an external expert in social anthropology for the Superior Court of Justice of the State of Mexico. Author of We would go to the countryside together (enah-inah, Mexico, 2023), and The hail on the blood: the catholic shamanism of the Otomi of central Mexico (sb Editores, Buenos Aires, 2022). His documentary Fractal virus: the faces of the pandemic won the Silver Venado of the Miradas sin Tiempo Contest, in 2023.