Abstract

In order to argue that contemporary performances of religious roles and theater in Middle America in fact are continuous replays of the original trauma of contact and its rehabilitation, and thus act as immanent conduits of the period of conquest and subjugation, the past sixty years of relevant anthropological texts are analyzed as discursive statements. These disciplinary archives rely on much older historical records and narratives, some of which contain ostensibly pre-Columbian accounts or descriptions. As well, anthropologists, and archaeologists with this regional specialization were interviewed concerning their understandings of culture change and conquest, and their observations regarding ethno-analogy and the interpretation of archaeological data and historical narrative. This project relies on a creative combination of sociology and anthropology to tease out the relationships amongst scientific discourse, historical narrative, and ethnographic observation. The problem that historicism renders what has been as what can only be both fragment and figment is judged to be partially assuaged by the performative interaction amongst non-Western pre-contact elements of cosmological beliefs and Western religious models of time, divinity, nature and the universe.

Key words: Cosmology, Meso-America, time, contact, conquest, Iberian.