Life Form and Form of Life within an Agentive Configuration: A Birth Ritual among the Mixe of Oaxaca, Mexico

• Autores: Perig Pitrou
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Vol. 58, Nº. 3, 2017, págs. 360-380
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Drawing on two years of fieldwork I carried out among the Mixe of Oaxaca (Mexico), I have suggested that the multiplicity of phenomena linked to life can be studied by using a pragmatics-based approach to map the agentive configurations within which vital processes appear and to delineate the participation of human and nonhuman agents in these processes. As an example of what this approach can do, this paper uses some of my ethnographic data to make some new arguments for interpreting life as a process of making in the context of a birth ritual. I will show how, within a regime of coactivity, humans and nonhuman agents participate together in changing the status of a child so that he/she can become an active person within his/her society. More generally, my aim is to explain how, beyond simple wordplay, the notions of �life forms� and �forms of life� can be conceptually articulated in anthropology.