Abstract

BALSANELLI, Alice. “Burning Bones Is a Thing of the Devil”: The Prohibition of Burning the Skeletal Remains of Preys Among the Northern Lacandons. Entrediversidades rev. cienc. soc. humanid. [online]. 2021, vol.8, n.2, pp.30-55.  Epub Feb 26, 2024. ISSN 2007-7610.  https://doi.org/10.31644/ed.v8.n2.2021.a02.

In many indigenous hunting societies, we observe the presence of the taboo that prohibits burning the bones of the prey. The same was noticed among the Lacandons of Chiapas, in the course of my studies on Lacandon hunting as a ritual complex. We will seek to explain the reasons for this prohibition: we will introduce the Mayan eschatological notions and the symbolic significance attributed to the bones. Later, we will seek to establish a comparison between the handling of human and animal remains, demonstrating that bones are considered as active elements, carriers of animic essences and that, therefore, cannot be handled as waste. We will resort to ethnographic works carried out in other hunting societies, along with unpublished field data, to demonstrate the importance of the taboo concerning us in this paper.

Keywords : Lacandons; hunt; bones; cremation; underworld.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )