All of the Maya cultures with which we are familiar, both past and present, appear to be preoccupied with the passage of time. Witness the extraordinary accomplishments of the ancient Maya in the development of a calendar system. Witness th…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…
Miguel León-Portilla
anthropologist · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Miguel León-Portilla appears as a scholar of Mesoamerican temporal consciousness and indigenous knowledge systems, invoked here to ground arguments about how non-Western cultures conceptualize cyclical time and ritual practice. The course readings use his work (likely on Maya and Aztec cosmologies) to establish that preoccupation with temporal cycles—evident in both ancient calendar systems and contemporary ritual behavior like the ceremonies described—represents a fundamentally different epistemic framework than linear Western time. This matters for a seminar on AI and cybernetics because it challenges the assumption that computational or mechanistic models of time/order are universal, suggesting instead that alternative temporalities embed different relationships to knowledge, control, and social organization.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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