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Accepted Paper:

Echoes on a broken world. Nawa narratives and reflections on modernity, spirits, and human actions.  
Alessandro Questa (Universidad Iberoamericana)

Paper short abstract:

For Nawa people, in the highlands of Puebla, Mexico, the world is broken. According to their cosmology, it was originally fragmented when an envious god tore in half. Nowadays however, the world faces new ways of destruction, locally diagnosed as produced by people.

Paper long abstract:

For Nawa people, in the highlands of Puebla, Mexico, the world is broken. According to Nawa cosmology, it was originally fragmented when an envious god tore in half the pillars which connected the sky and the earth and whose remnants are the mountains in which they live today. Nowadays however, the world faces new ways of destruction—erosion, droughts, and economic poverty— that have been diagnosed by Nawa people as produced by humans. They have forsaken the gods of the land in pursue of economic ambitions and a life away from landscape spirits. Under this new cosmology, even the old gods are now the victims.

Indeed, the accumulative effects of decades of intense urban migration paired to the advent of mining and the progressive abandonment of traditional cultivation are all locally perceived as linked processes that have effectively destroyed the land. The land is, in turn, an intricately inhabited space in which humans and spirits of all kinds jointly intervene on all relevant activities. Currently, even some of the spirits are leaving the mountains bringing by their dissociation only more calamities. State corrupted agencies, urban vices, mining corporations and disastrous changes in weather patterns are all elements of the same cosmic cataclysm. These are all major spiritual grievances caused, ultimately, by collective 'forgetfulness', leading the world to end, again. Nawa people are thus rekindling their relations with said spirits in hopes to change their grim consequences, returning to a renewed mythology of co-dependence.

Panel P27
Climate change as 'end of the world': mythological cosmogonies and imaginaries of change
  Session 1