1031 - Natural and Built Environments, Sacred Landscape, and Religion in Mesoamerica

18.07.2012 | 08:00 - 13:30

Coordenator 1: Williams-Beck, Lorraine A. (Universidad Autónoma de Campeche , Campeche, Mexico / Mexiko)
Coordenator 2: López, Javier Hirose (Universidad del Oriente, Yucatan, Mexico / Mexiko)

The symbolic significance of natural and built space environments, landscape, and religion in Mesoamerica will be discussed through an interdisciplinary lens (Archaeology, Architecture, Art History, Ethnography, Ethnohistory, Religion, and Sociocultural Anthropology). These particular contexts through space and time are both the foundation for collective human activity areas and parts of an arena in which social life unfolds. Such cultural and natural features conceived as specific pieces within a unified social backdrop offer an intricate myriad of interconnected levels between actors and stages upon which to perform quotidian, political, administrative, economic, and religious pursuits. Collective stage sets as individual actors and, at the same time, as supporting cast within larger spatial theatrical productions are envisioned by Mesoamerican peoples through time as part of preconceived templates upon which cultural agents act and react, thereby modifying and eventually designating hierarchical levels of space later transformed into culturally significant places. Once recognized and adopted by the populace these aesthetic tropes constitute an inalienable means of expressing collective identity within finite spatial contexts. Their constituent members form integral design kits for conceiving places of creation, foundation, and power legitimatization, among other functional attributes.