Renée de la Torre Castellanos She holds a PhD in Social Sciences with a specialty in Social Anthropology and has been a research professor at CIESAS, Unidad Occidente, since 1993. She is a member of the National System of Researchers (Mexico) level III and Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. Her different researches have as a central interest the study and understanding of contemporary religiosity, with special emphasis on the study of its transformation. Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3914-4805?lang=en

EncArtes multimedia

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.

Entrevistas

Anthropology under the eye of COVID-19

Interview with
  • Virginia Garcia Acosta

  • Olivia Teresa Ruiz Marrujo
  • Renée de la Torre Castellanos

O n June 16, 2020, we had a conversation with Virginia García Acosta about the importance that history and anthropology should have for the planning of public policies implemented during the covid -19 pandemic. García Acosta has a wide and recognized trajectory in the historical study of different catastrophic events.

EncArtes multimedia

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

  • Anel Victoria Salas
  • Renée de la Torre Castellanos

Keywords: altars, popular Catholicism, aesthetics, religious images, materiality, lived religiosity.

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.

Reseñas críticas

Las transformaciones de los exvotos pictográficos guadalupanos (1848-1999)

Margarita Zires, 2014 Iberoamericana Vervuert, Spain, 342 pp.

Biography of the Guadalupano Ex-Voto

  • Renée de la Torre Castellanos

The votive offerings are pictographic materials that were made to ask, thank and witness the miraculous power (Faser, 2000), in this case of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Its ritual practice is carried out within a system of votive practices that occur in the system of the Catholic popular religion. But in addition to this original meaning, votive offerings have been valued by collectors and art lovers as aesthetic works (the Frida Kalho collection accounts for this), but they have also been considered by anthropologists and historians as period testimonies (see works by Patricia Arias and Jorge Durand, 2003). In this book, Margarita Zires takes them up as social texts that can be interpreted and analyzed as discursive genres.