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Time and the Ancestors – Aztec and Mixtec Ritual Art

By Maarten Jansen – Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez

TIME AND THE ANCESTORS – AZTEC AND MIXTEC RITUAL ART

Book Preface

The central aim of this book is to contribute to the understanding of the religious heritage of Mesoamerica, an impressive and original civilisation shared by the scores of indigenous peoples who live in the region that stretches from the deserts of northern Mexico to the tropical lands of Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

The cultural tradition of these peoples is characterised by a specific worldview with its values, symbols, ethics and ritual enactments, expressed in ancient visual art and in present-day oral traditions.

This heritage is usually first and foremost seen as a topic of archaeology, history and anthropology, but it has also a clear topicality and urgency in our time.

 Indigenous peoples all over the world have made and continue to make important contributions to human cultural diversity and development, but are still living in deprived and excluded conditions, which have all kinds of social and political implications.

It is that problematic situation, that consequence of colonialism, which ‘defines indigenous peoples. If taken in isolation, the term ‘indigenous’ may cause confusion, as it seems to refer primarily just to inhabitants of a specific place who did not come from elsewhere.

Here it should be understood, however, in the specific combination ‘indigenous peoples’, which is not just about having been born in a specific place, but also about a specific social condition.

The concept itself stems from the colonists’ vocabulary and refers to the original inhabitants of invaded territories. Today a full social and cultural decolonisation has not yet taken place in many former colonies, even after they have obtained formal national independence.

Injustice and inequality often still reign within their frontiers as a form of internal colonialism, in which bourgeois élites who descend from or identify with the former colonisers are in power, while the descendants of the colonised still suffer the consequences of that historical process of domination. In fact, that plight has been intensified through the onslaught of modern transnational neo-colonialism as an expression of global capitalism.

In international debates, for example in the un, the term ‘indigenous peoples were chosen to characterise this continuing effect of colonialism: discrimination, exploitation, social marginalisation and linguistic-cultural genocide, now often combined with (neo-) colonial extraction of resources or other (neo-) imperial invasions. Indigenous peoples are peoples who still suffer colonial oppression in an era that claims to be postcolonial and consequently tries to deny their existence.

The struggle of indigenous peoples for recognition, vindication and liberation is nowadays the context for academic research on their cultural heritage.