Mesoamerican Ritual
Todd Stillman
Richard Montgomery HS, Rockville MD
Subject: IB Social and Cultural Anthropology
Grade Level: High School Juniors and Seniors
Time: 6-45 minute periods
Mesoamerican Ritual Served Five Ways
Essential question: What role has ritual played sustaining the cultures of Oaxaca for over two
millennia?
Unit Description: This unit is designed to investigate how rituals work using examples from the
Mesoamerican cultures of Oaxaca. The lessons will sensitize students to different aspects of
rituals, introduce classic anthropological perspectives on the subject, and engage students in a
variety of classroom activities that apply these perspectives to Mesoamerican culture. Upon
completing this unit, students will be able to compare anthropological perspectives on ritual and
analyze rituals that have contributed to the maintenance and reproduction of Mesoamerican
cultural identity.
Background: Mesoamerica is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions in the
entire world, rivalling Papua New Guinea and Western China in the number of discrete ethnic
identities the region supports. Like other highland regions, mountainous Mesoamerican
geography lent itself to the development of insular ethnic groups with societies characterized by
intense social bonds, and elaborate cultural practices in the Pre-Columbian period. The largest of
these ethnic groups are the Zapotec and Mixtec peoples, whose roots in the region have been
traced into antiquity by archeologists and historians. Since the arrival of Cortes in the early 16th
century, these ethnic groups have experienced successive challenges to their traditional lifestyles.
The Spanish brought new crops and livestock, technologies, religious institutions, and
government to the region. In the 19th century, the Mexican revolution brought nationalizing
efforts including linguistic homogenization in courts of law and educational institutions. And in
the late 20th century, neo-liberal economic policies brought large-scale tourism and export
production of craft products to the region while intensifying out-migration of primarily workingage males to northern Mexico and the United States for work.
In spite of these successive challenges, Zapotecs and Mixtecs continue to comprise a large
proportion of the population of the state of Oaxaca. All told, demographers estimate that more
than half of the state population speak a language other than Spanish, a strong indicator of the
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resilience of Mesoamerican ethnic identity. This unit plan offers Mesoamerican cultural
institutions, especially the continual practice of a variety of ritual traditions, as an explanation for
the maintenance of ethnic identity in the face of five centuries of conquests.
Course Context:
This unit plan was developed for a social studies elective course taught to course in Social and
Cultural Anthropology taught in a large public high school in the United States. It uses the
traditions of Mesoamerica as a case study for introducing anthropological approaches to ritual.
The unit could be adapted to courses in Human Geography, Latin American Studies, or even
World History. Although the lessons assume that students are unfamiliar with the cultural
traditions of the region, the analytical goals of the unit will actually be enhanced by teaching the
unit to students who are more familiar with the region than mine are.
Outcomes:
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Students will be able to explain the economic, political, religious, demographic, and
environmental challenges faced by Mesoamerican peoples since the conquest.
Students will be able to describe how several varieties of Mesoamerican ritual work
including the cargo system, Pelota Mixteca, and the Guelaguetza.
Students will be able to compare classic anthropological perspectives on ritual.
Scheme of Work:
Day 1: Ritual and Symbolic Power: Mixtec Chiefs and the Theater of Politics
Day 2: Ritual as Rite of Passage: Contemporary Zapotec Rites of Passage and Social Status
Day 3: Gender, Ritual and Social Obligations: The Cargo System in a Zapotec Village
Day 4: Ritual as Collective Identity: Pelota Mixteca in the Mixtec Diaspora
Day 5: The Commodification of Ritual: Tourism and the Guelaguetza
Day 6: Summative Assessment
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Reading Assignments:
The instructor should assign students to read the following articles for homework in advance. As
scaffolds, either readings could be excerpted for weaker readers or divided into parts for a jigsaw
activity. The instructor could also provide focus questions for central passages in the texts:
Terriciano, Kevin (February 2000) The Colonial Mixtec Community, The Hispanic American
Historical Review, pp. 14-27.
This section of a larger article about the Mixtecs introduces the concepts of toniñe—hereditary
rule--and aniñe—the ruler’s house, to provide insight into the theater of power in the Mixtec
society before and in the years following the arrival of the Spanish. The reading level is
appropriate for advanced high school students.
Stephens, Lynn (2005) Fiesta: The Gendered Dynamics of Ritual Participation in Zapotec
Women: Gender, Class and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca, chapter 9. Raleigh: Duke University
Press.
In this ethnographic analysis Stephens uses interviews with Zapotec collaborators to analyze the
wide variety of cash and time obligations placed on women who participate in the periodic ritual
feasting of the cargo system in Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca. The reading level is appropriate for
advanced high school students and features extensive quotations from the perspective of the
women of the community.
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Lesson Outlines:
Day 1: Ritual and Symbolic Power
“The whole of the Negara--court life, the traditions that organized it, the extractions that
supported it, the privileges that accompanied it - was essentially directed toward defining what
power was; and what power was what kings were.”
–Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1981)
Essential question: How did the rituals of Mixtec chiefs legitimate their reign?
Procedures:
1. This class will serve as an introduction to the topic of ritual based on a passage from
Kevin Terraciano’s article about Mixtec chiefs and land. (see readings above)
2. Assign several students who will be asked to reenact the rituals described in the passage.
Group other students into observer roles including local peon, neighboring potentate,
Dominican friar, and anthropologist.
3. After the students reenact the rituals, ask each group to reflect on how the ritual has
affected their view of the participants, community and land.
4. Reconvene in a group discussion of political theater then and now with the instructor
leading students to an appreciation of the optics of power and the power of ritual.
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Day 2: Ritual as Rite of Passage
“I have tried to separate out all the ceremonial patterns which accompany a passage from one
situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another. Because of the importance of
these transitions I think it legitimate to single out rites of passage as a special category.”
--Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage 1908
Essential question: How does the Zapotec engagement ritual affirm a change in social status?
Procedures:
1. Warmup—Ask students to describe the elements of an ideal marriage proposal.
2. Deliver a lecture describing Victor Turner’s classic perspective on ritual and limnality.
3. Show students examples of Zapotec rituals including engagement candles, a fiesta, and an
adorned church. For each slide, ask students to analyze how the ritual establishes or
reinforces social status in the community.
4. Conclude with a teaser for lesson three by asking students to brainstorm what kinds of
community resources are necessary to make these ritual work.
Day 3: Ritual and Social Obligations
“In primitive or archaic types of society what is the principle whereby the gift received has to be
repaid? What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?” -Marcel Mauss, The Gift
Essential Question: What is the function of the extensive ceremonial agenda of Zapotec
communities?
Procedures:
1. Assign students to read chapter 9 of Lynn Stephen’s Zapotec Women, “Fiesta: The
Gendered Dynamics of Ritual Participation,” in advance of this class. The chapter
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describes the female role in Zapotec weddings and festivals and especially the extensive
economic and social costs of holding these traditional events.
2. In small groups, ask students to develop a “mental map” of the extensive obligations of
Zapotec women.
3. Divide students into teams, and assign positions in a debate about costs and benefits of
Zapotec ritual for women.
4. Conclude with a meta-discussion of whether costs and benefits are the correct framework
for understanding ritual with the instructor highlighting the difference between etic and
emic views of ritual in the article.
Day 4: Ritual as Collective Memory and Identity
“Invented tradition is taken to mean a set of practices normally governed by overtly or tacitly
accepted rules and of ritual or symbolic nature which seek to inculcate certain values and norms
of behavior by repetition which automatically implies continuity with the past.”
–Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invented Traditions (1983)
Essential question: Why do people play pelota mixteca today?
Procedures:
1. Prepare a paddle ball paddle and a ball and mark off a long narrow field roughly 10 x
100.
2. As a warmup, lead students in making a list of the social functions of sports on the board.
3. Then describe the origins and development of pelota mixteca in a brief lecture.
4. Lead class for a rousing game of pelota mixteca.
5. Once students realize that ritual is more than symbolic, it is embodied, follow up with a
concluding discussion of the meaning of pelota Mixtec when it’s played in the diaspora.
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Day 5: The Commodification of Ritual?
“The individual act of sightseeing is probably less important than the ceremonial ratification of
authentic attractions as objects of ultimate value.” Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (1973)
Essential questions: Does commodification affect the authenticity of ritual? Why has tourism
become such a prevalent modern phenomenon?
Procedures:
1. The instructor will show students a YouTube clip from the Guelaguetza highlighting the
variety of performance, but also the composition of the crowd.
2. Students will be informed that the modern Guelaguetza has been criticized for its
commercialism and elite control.
3. Conduct a whole class discussion on the pros and cons of a commercial version of
traditional ritual. What does the community get out of it? What do tourists get out of it?
What is lost in the process?
Day 6:
Summative Assessment: Students will compare a Mesoamerican ritual with a ritual from their
own culture through the prism of an anthropological approach to ritual. In a 700 word
(approximate two page double spaced) paper, students will assess similarities and differences in
the practices and functions of these two rituals. For example, students could compare
Guelaguetza to Mardi Gras, Pelota Mixteca to Chi Gong, or Zapotec wedding proposals to
American ones. Through this exercise students will appreciate the universality of ritual practices
while developing an understanding of the variety and intensity of Mesoamerican ritual
commitments. In short, they will see that Mesoamerican ethnic groups are more highly socially
integrated than the highly individualized dominant culture of modern Western Society.
Extensions:
There are many fine films available on Mesoamerican culture and societies. Maureen Gosling’s
Blossoms of Fire, 2006, presents an excellent sociological analysis of the women of Juchitan.
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