Catholic-Maya Sacrificial Commitments

Abstract

In their annual festival in an eastern village of the Yucatan state, participants verbalized, discussed, and disputed two main understandings of Catholic commitment after a Catholic priest asked his parishioners to reconsider the effects of their ritual offerings. His teachings about compromiso signaled other ritualized practices, which compose the concept: promises and sacrifices. In direct contrast to the priest’s teachings, local ritualists understand that solemn promises and sacrificial exchange work, however, as encompassments of the notion of commitment. On the other hand, the priest’s notion of engagement with the sacred takes its main force from the representation of the work of dying of sacrificial victims. Overcoming an apparently insurmountable pair of opposites, ritual and sacrificial, he defines commitment as vicarious sacrifice, inaugurating for his audience a new representational dimension.