Vol. 6, No. 11 (2023)

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Editorial

Fifth Anniversary in the Society of Images, Socio-digital Networks, Super Artificial Intelligence and Techno-powers

Including images, voices and sounds does not detract from academic rigor, nor does it weaken the critical voice, on the contrary, it amplifies it and gives it tones that lead science towards census-thinking uses and appropriations. In this journey of eleven issues we have made this project, which was perceived as unthinkable, become a reality: the consolidation of an alternative way of communicating science in a different way.

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Coloquio interdisciplinario

Essays on the abyss: politics of the gaze, violence, technopolitics.

  • Rossana Reguillo

The essay incorporates three large areas of transformations that have shaken up the contemporary scene: institutional deterioration, the detonation of the social pact(s), and the exhaustion of ecosystems, both biological and sociopolitical. The objective is to think about the impacts of these transformations on our mindsets and address the critical work involved in the production of knowledge about the world. This essay brings the question of methodological imagination to the center of the discussion in an attempt to illuminate an area that often is opaque in academic work. Three dimensions that have marked the work of ros as a researcher and thinker about the modern world are addressed, deepening understanding of the social production of meaning and the dynamics of power.

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Comments

The Methodological Imagination at the Edge: Notes about the Production of Knowledge

  • Dorismilda Flores-Márquez

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Beyond binary oppositions

  • Nestor Garcia Canclini

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The Spin of the Planet and the Crisis of Futures: Brief Commentary on the Text of Rossana Reguillo

  • Mary Louise Pratt

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The Event Barges In: The Horror of Modern Violence and the Erosion of the Social Pact at Mexico’s Northern Border

  • Salvador Salazar Gutierrez

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“They Are Fumigating the Coronavirus.” Conspiracy Rumors on Social Networks and Their Political Uses in Mexico

  • Amparo Marroquín Parducci

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Realidades socioculturales

"They are spraying the coronavirus". Of conspiracy rumors in social networks and their political uses in Mexico.

  • Margarita Zires and Aldo Cicardi Gonzalez

In this article we examine a rumor that claimed that governmental sanitization measures against the coronavirus are actually strategies to infect the population and eliminate it. This rumor circulated in various regions of Mexico, generating multiple community protests. This study separates itself from an approach that condemns rumor and conspiracy theories for being false, and takes into account that these phenomena help provide an understanding of what is considered plausible or not in a certain context. We present the versions that circulated in San Antonio de la Cal, Oaxaca, as well as narrative elements that confer plausibility and implausibility. The study is based primarily on an analysis of conversations generated on Facebook and personal interviews. It shows that the rumor was connected to conspiracy narratives and local accounts that discussed a lack of confidence in the authorities. Furthermore, its political use by groups opposing the authorities is examined.

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Present and Preterite: Anti-imperialist Critiques of the Mexican Revolution from the Iberoamerican Viewpoint of Cuadernos Americanos amid the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959

  • Juan Alberto Salazar Rebolledo

Keywords: anti-imperialism, intellectual commitment, Cuadernos Americanos, Cuban Revolution, Mexican Revolution.

In the 1940s the cultural, social, and political project of the journal Cuadernos Americanos was created. Iberoamerican intellectuals aligned with anti-imperialist ideas and intellectual commitment gathered with the publication’s director, Mexican economist Jesús Silva Herzog. Beginning with Cuaderno’s first issues, the viability of the Mexican Revolution was deliberated, where the mistakes and distortions of the process, as well as the need for more radical measures to be undertaken, were discussed. These reflections were catalized by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, as it presented various possible guidelines for the revival of its Mexican counterpart, or at least for it to come under more severe criticism from the anti-imperialist point of view.

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Encartes multimedia

Documentary

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

  • Carlos Y. Flores

This essay, which accompanies the documentary “Suk’ B’anik,” is based on a case of theft settled by the so-called “ancestral Mayan law” in the municipality of Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala, where more than 80% of the populace self-identify as Maya-K’iche’. The material seeks to deepen understanding of the collective reasoning and emotions that took place in the community trial of the case. In the face of the systemic weakness of the state’s justice system, in this region popular courts coordinated by local community mayors and supracommunal structures of ancestral authorities have become common to collectively try criminals or alleged criminals and to subject them to some form of corrective punishment.

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Documentary

“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.

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Documentary

Praise of Diversity: The New Monuments of the Rural World

  • Patricia Arias, Julio Cesar Castro Saavedra, Martha Muñoz Duran and Imelda Sanchez Garcia

The video and its accompanying text are based on a particular source -monuments and statues in public spaces– to account for three large and profound transformations in Mexico’s countryside. On the one hand, there is the change in the axis of economic activities, a process that has given rise to specializations that have helped neighbors remain in their communities or at least mitigated the exodus that has brought about depopulation in so many places. On the other hand –although it is very much tied to this change– there has been an emergence of local actors with interests, resources, and projects who have learned how to appropriate the new language of development. Finally, the monuments bring awareness of the current methods of intervention in the public space through emerging collectives in traditional agrarian societies.

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Entrevistas

Transnationalism and the Rupture With Epistemological Nationalism

  • Peggy Levitt

  • Cristina Gutierrez Zuniga

During the conversation -which she generously insisted to be conducted in Spanish- he reflected on his contributions to different areas of research, in which several threads can be appreciated that bring us closer to his vast work to discover the consistency of the look he has developed throughout her academic and cvic trajectory.

The Iridescence of the Lanterns: Hiroshima Behind the Lens of Seiji Shinohara

  • Seiji Shinohara

  • Arturo Gutiérrez del Ángel, Greta Alvarado Lugo and Frances Paola Garnica Quiñones

Seiji Shinohara's photographs seem to question this image and turn it upside down, because his gaze is not that Hiroshima, but that place that does not coincide with our imagination, lined with large gates, with Buddhist offerings among the alleys, architectural details of Shinto shrines, cobblestone roads, cherry trees reflected in the rivers and daily announcements that insinuate inhabited streets, vivid... leaving out of the frame any silhouette or individual.

Discrepancias

migrantes

Activisms and Biomedical Narratives on Gender and Sexuality

  • Mónica Cornejo-Valle, María del Rosario Ramírez Morales and Rafael Cazarin

  • moderator Cecilia Delgado-Molina

Sex has been problematized and is no longer considered only a biological phenomenon, to give way to the discussion on sexuality and to make the body visible as the space where meaning-producing relationships materialize.

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Reseñas críticas

Neogótico en Jalisco. Guía básica para la apreciación del entorno cultural edificado

Martín Checa-Artasu2021, Guadalajara, ESARG/Arquitónica, col. Corrientes Arquitectónicas, 207 pp.

Toward a Geographic and Historic Interpretation of Neo-gothic Architecture in Jalisco

  • Francisco Navarro

The book Neogothic in Jalisco. Guía básica para la apreciación del entorno cultural edificado, by Martín Checa-Artasu, presents an interesting investigation of the historical development, typologies and geographic distribution of neo-Gothic architecture in the Mexican state of Jalisco, as a cultural phenomenon of adaptation and reinterpretation on a regional scale of a global architectural trend. To address the subject, the author adopts an interdisciplinary perspective in which time and the territorial diffusion of ideas about the design and symbolism of Gothic Revival are central when interpreting the current panorama of Jalisco's neo-Gothic architecture built between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Los wixaritari. El espacio compartido y la comunidad

Hector Medina Miranda, 2020, Mexico City, CIESAS (Publicaciones de la Casa Chata)

The Wixarika Territoriality, Between Sacred Geography and Modern Rearrangements

  • Frédéric Saumade

Divided between historical anthropology and extensive ethnography, this short book focuses on a specific problem to clarify the political meaning of a shamanic culture and a mythical-ritual complex based on a cosmocentric relationship with the territory and the consequent dialectic of identity and otherness.

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El arte de hacer la primera comunión

Carlos Martínez Assad (coord.) Guadalajara: UNIVA/ITESO/INAH/Fundación Sara Sefchovich/ Tomás de Híjar Ornelas/Jesús Verdín Saldaña, 2021, 148 pp.

The Ideal and What Is Actually Experienced: The Ethnography of the Ritual of the First Communion

  • Guillermo de la Peña

The first communion of which this book speaks gives us a key to understanding the Catholic world of the 20th century, especially in Latin countries and in middle-class urban Mexico.

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Combinar para convivir: Etnografía de un pueblo nahua de la Huasteca veracruzana en tiempos de modernización

Anath Ariel de Vidas Mexico: Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos/Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social/El Colegio de San Luis, 2021, 500 pp.

Combine-ism: They Are the Gods Who Never Left. Spiritual Ethnography in Veracruz’s Huasteca Region

  • Mauricio Genet Guzmán Chávez

This book is a proposal for an analysis of ethnicity understood as the socio-cultural, historical and political condition in which broad sectors of the Mexican population find themselves, whose ancestors are counted as the original inhabitants upon the arrival of the Spaniards in the 16th century. Inhabitants bearers of a culture whose central characteristic has been its persistence, the capacity to resist and reinvent themselves as collectivities throughout five centuries and the years that have elapsed in the XXI century.

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Director

Renée de la Torre Castellanos

Edition

Arthur Temporal Ventura

Nury Salome Aguilar Pita

Correction

Cecilia Palomar

Isabel Orendáin

Design and layout

Veronica Segovia

Wordpress Desing

Arthur Temporal Ventura

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