Abstract

LIFFMAN, Paul M.. Wixarika histories, chronotopes and geographies. Relac. Estud. hist. soc. [online]. 2018, vol.39, n.156, pp.85-122. ISSN 2448-7554.  https://doi.org/10.24901/rehs.v39i156.307.

Certain Wixarika (Huichol) histories locate relations of domination and ancestral powers of transformation in a temporality of power that fuses conventional historical periods and cultural identities. This intercultural historiography embodies what Cadena (2010), adapting Strathern (2004), calls “partial connections” in indigenous cosmopolitics, which produce “a complex formation, a historic-political articulation of more than one, but less than two socionatural worlds”. But who gets access to that inter-world? Amid a struggle that deploys mass-mediated images of indigeneity to new publics opposed to transnational mining, in return for public support from outsiders (teiwarixi), Wixaritari renegotiate the requirement of having Wixarika personhood (tewiyari) in order to access the temporality of power. This uneven field of positionings regarding ancestral agency destabilizes (the indigenousness of) ontological alterity. It also underscores the performative production of partial connections in Wixarika geography -the topopoeisis that permeates the images presented here-.

Keywords : chronotopes; historical narrative; cosmopolitics; alterity; Wixaritari (Huichols).