Corporal reciprocities: lending the body to the dead in a Nahua community in the Huasteca region of Hidalgo

Abstract

In Chililico, a Nahua community located in the Huasteca region of Hidalgo state, Mexico, during the celebration of the Miljkailhuitl, or festival dedicated to the dead, the Cuahuehue dancers lend their bodies to the dead so that they can embody their existence. In this way, the dancers place themselves in a state of liminality by lending their body-tonacayo, to incarnate the dead, leading the dancers to juxtapose their personality with an “other” agent, during the days of the celebration.

Lending the body entails, from the Nahua perspective, the action of offering, tlamanalli, which leads to treating the data obtained through ethnography from the anthropological categories of reciprocity; since offering becomes the act upon which the relationship is based, this results in correspondence between the living and the dead: the experience of living.

Such a relationship of correspondence is jealous, since it requires that the living give corporality to the dead so that they can participate in the world, however, if the procedure is not carried out correctly, human life —and its body— run the risk of not being returned, thus being taken —together with the dead— to their world.