Ritual and festive environmental relationality in Ibero-American mountain areas (Vol. 17 N. 2 - 2025)
Coordinators:
Tobias Boos, Libera Università di Bolzano, (tobias.boos@unibz.it)
Koen de Munter, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, (koendemunter@ymail.com)
Daniela Salvucci, Libera Università di Bolzano, (daniela.salvucci@unibz.it)
Languages accepted: English, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
Deadline: June 1 2025
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Festivals and rituals, with their performative and emotional, artistic and religious, economic and political aspects, have been a central theme in many studies of Ibero-American societies and cultures. The role of festive and ritual practices in the articulation between indigenous resistance, colonising violence—material, symbolic, and ideological at the same time—and contradictory processes of mestizaje and cultural hybridisation, for example, has been investigated from different disciplines, sometimes intertwined, and by means of diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. In particular, the importance of festivals and rituals in the production and transformation of local communities and collectives—both national and diasporic—and their cultural heritage has been highlighted. A particular focus has been placed on the relations of power and social hierarchy that festivals and rituals express, reproduce, or contest; on the political alliances they generate; on the conflicts they unleash; and, in short, on the many orders—of kinship, gender, ‘race,’ class, among others—that festive and ritual practices maintain or challenge, reconfigure, or subvert.
Drawing on a complex, multi- and interdisciplinary, and wide-ranging body of studies, this dossier focuses on the spatiotemporal ecological dynamics of festive and ritual practices in Ibero-American mountain areas. Within the framework of what could be defined as the ‘ecological turn,’ we propose to focus on the festive and ritual interrelationships between people and other animate and inanimate actors. Although it is true that many studies address the ecological and spatial dimension of festivals and rituals, we would like to call for papers that investigate ‘ecology’ as ‘environmental relationality,’ together with the spatiotemporal dimension of festivals and rituals from perspectives that go beyond mere ecological functionalism or eco-determinism.
In recent decades, in fact, ecological issues have been gaining renewed importance in the humanities and social sciences, especially due to the socio-political urgency of the environmental crisis and climate change at regional and global levels. In this regard, many studies in the Ibero-American area have been pioneers in investigating ‘environmental relationality’—understood’ as the relationship between humans and non-humans—for example, rescuing ‘ontologies’ and ‘cosmopraxis’ (de Munter 2016) of Amerindian lifeworlds, questioning the nature/culture dichotomy, and evidencing partial but possible connections between indigenous ‘cosmopolitics’ and environmental activism.
In this framework, mountain studies constitute a crucial field for the investigation of processes that are both ecological and socio-cultural. Until the 1980s, this field of research was dominated by geo-ecological and cultural-ecological perspectives, in which economy, politics, society, and culture seemed to be determined by their ecological function. In contrast, in the last four decades, these scientific approaches have been combined with non-deterministic political, historical, and literary perspectives, and scientific approaches have been developed that investigate ‘biocultural’ spaces in a multi- and interdisciplinary way (Boos, Salvucci 2022). In Andean studies, for example, since the 1970s, the ‘ecological verticality’ of the Cordillera has been investigated in relation to the sociocultural dynamics of local populations and forms of territorialisation, in many cases highlighting the role of festivals and rituals. Today, in this field, the study of celebrations, festivals, and rituality is almost always associated with new relational approaches.
Considering the Ibero-American mountain areas, including the Andes, what is the role of festive and ritual practices in the production of environmental relationality, also in its political aspects of territorialisation and cosmopolitics? What interrelationships exist between environmental crises and changes, on the one hand, and festivals and rituals, on the other? Furthermore, how are the different sociocultural dynamics of populations, groups, families, and individuals articulated in mountain time-spaces? On the one hand, there are dynamics of ‘convergence’ in festive and ritual sites, such as those connected to family, community, and local places, and, on the other hand, dynamics of transnational, global, media, and digital ‘dispersion.’.
This dossier seeks to bring together empirical and ethnographic works, which are discussed with theoretical perspectives from humanistic disciplines and socio-cultural sciences, as well as interdisciplinary approaches, on the role of festive and ritual practices in the production of environmental relationality and in the articulation of spatiotemporal sociocultural dynamics of convergence and dispersion in Ibero-American mountain areas.
Boos T., Salvucci D. (eds.) 2022, Cultures in Mountain Areas: Comparative Perspectives. Bu,Press, open access: https://bupress.unibz.it/en/produkt/cultures-in-mountain-areas-comparative-perspectives/
de Munter, Koen, 2016, Ontología relacional y cosmopraxis, desde los Andes. Visitar y conmemorar entre familias aymara, Chungara, Revista de Antropología Chilena, 48, 4: 629-644.
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