Promising and Engaging the Future Through Ritual Sponsorships in Eastern Yucatan, Mexico

Andrés Dapuez; Andrés Dzib May; Sabrina Gavigan

doi:10.1108/S0190-1281(2011)0000031010

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Research in Economic Anthropology

ISSN: 0190-1281
Series editor(s): Dr. Donald Wood

Subject Area: Sociology and Public Policy

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Promising and Engaging the Future Through Ritual Sponsorships in Eastern Yucatan, Mexico

Document Information:
Title:	Promising and Engaging the Future Through Ritual Sponsorships in Eastern Yucatan, Mexico
Author(s):	Andrés Dapuez, Andrés Dzib May, Sabrina Gavigan
Volume:	31 Editor(s): Lionel Obadia, Donald C. Wood ISBN: 978-1-78052-228-9 eISBN: 978-1-78052-229-6
Citation:	Andrés Dapuez, Andrés Dzib May, Sabrina Gavigan (2011), Promising and Engaging the Future Through Ritual Sponsorships in Eastern Yucatan, Mexico, in Lionel Obadia, Donald C. Wood (ed.) The Economics of Religion: Anthropological Approaches (Research in Economic Anthropology, Volume 31), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.157-186
DOI:	10.1108/S0190-1281(2011)0000031010 (Permanent URL)
Publisher:	Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Article type:	Chapter Item
Abstract:	In a village of Eastern Yucatan, Mexico, cargo or kuuch sponsors compare their ritual tasks to “buying life” from crosses, Catholic saints, and Mayan deities or “owners.” The local notion of compromiso, engagement, or commitment, helps these festival participants express the condition of possibility to successfully perform such exchanges. Decisive for these life renewals, promises, and compromisos depend upon empathy to authorize ritualists and subsume social and natural phenomena under exchange paradigms. By defining, critiquing and using the concept of “disposition” as an inherently self-other stance through which economy transforms into religiosity and vice versa, this chapter analyzes this particular regime of engagement and the temporalities it implies. Through a commitment to the past and the practice of promissory exchange, sponsors develop a new perceptual scheme in which the ritual cultivation of discipline, awareness, expectation, and responsibility are expressed.