Alcaldes on the fourth, or top level. These cargo positions must be requested in advance and are held for one year each, with rest periods in between the years of service. The officials occupying the positions are referred to as cargo holde…word for the 360-day year. As the calendrical deities of the ancient Maya are often depicted carrying the burden of the year on a tumpline on their backs, it seems evident that the t’ent’en embodies, above all, the symbol of the arrival of …By the 25th of January, the bull has been killed; the Mayordomos have relinquished their stick-horses; the stuffed animals have been burned; the Jaguars, Plumed Serpents, and Spanish Moss Wearers have put away their costumes; and the Spanis…
Frank Cancian
anthropologist · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Frank Cancian is an anthropologist whose ethnographic work on Mayan cargo systems and ritual practices documents how communities distribute power and symbolic burden through rotating ceremonial offices. His research on these systems appears in course readings examining how cultural technologies—like the cargo hierarchy and associated calendrical rituals—function as distributed networks of responsibility and meaning-making, relevant to understanding how systems (ceremonial, computational, social) allocate agency and load. Cancian's detailed observations of ritual performance and institutional structure offer a model for thinking about how human and non-human actors share in the "burden" of maintaining complex systems over time.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.