The period extending from December 15 to the last day of the Fiesta of San Sebastián on January 25 is the richest segment of the annual ceremonial calendar of Zinacantan. The complicated rituals that characterize this period dramatize the e…The ceremonial schedule is divided into two major phases: (1) Christmas to New Year’s to Day of Kings; then, following a lull of equal time, (2) a phase of intense activity during the Fiesta of San Sebastián. The two phases are like the two…Edmund Leach (1961) suggests that "formality" and "masquerade" are paired opposites and, as such, modes for moving in and out of "sacred time." He suggests that, "A rite which starts with formality [e.g. a wedding] is likely to end in masqu…
Edmund Leach
anthropologist · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Edmund Leach was a British structuralist anthropologist whose theories of ritual punctuation and temporal liminality shape how we understand ceremonial cycles in non-Western societies. His framework of "formality" and "masquerade" as paired opposites that mark transitions between sacred and profane time is being used here to analyze how Zinacanteco communities structure their annual ceremonial calendar, particularly the intense ritual sequences around the winter festival period. This structural approach—treating ritual as a system of symbolic oppositions that manage time and social order—becomes relevant to the course's broader interest in how systems (whether anthropological, computational, or artistic) create meaning through recursive patterns and state transitions.
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