‘Imaginar el Fin de Los Tiempos’
New Book Publication
‘Imagining the End of Time: Stories of Annihilation, Apocalypse and Extinction’ is the edited collection accompanying the exhibition showcased at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City. This collaboration between the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and CAPAS, curated by former CAPAS fellow Adolfo Mantilla Osornio, delves into nearly 160 expressions spanning diverse temporal contexts. The exhibition, along with the corresponding publication, contemplates varied perspectives on envisioning conceptions, emphasizing the cultural and axiological dimensions embedded in eschatological narratives and their imagery.
Taking as its starting point the fact that over the centuries societies have imagined the end of the world in the most heterogeneous ways, the project provides a searching view of the symbolism implicit in the eschatological narratives referenced by artistic and cultural production. It furthermore offers the possibility of encountering a variety of perspectives on eschatological systems, in an attempt to understand the many ways in which images reflect cultural universes.
‘Imagining the end of time: stories of annihilation, apocalypse and extinction’ explores discourses that have as central referents the alleged effects of the so-called Great Acceleration in the Earth System, the advent of the sixth mass extinction, from different anthropological approaches. Additionally, it examines their interplay with apocalyptic figurations within modern cosmologies, possibly linked to the Judeo-Christian eschatological tradition. In the Mexican context, it functioned as a tool to shape Mesoamerican categorization mechanisms, aligning cosmologies and visions of human groups in Mexican territory regarding events that could bring about the world's end.
The narratives and figurations explored in this volume shed light on numerous facets of a complex cosmopolitical scenario, suggesting that the contemporary understanding of these themes has taken on an exponential scale.
After a thematic introduction by Adolfo F. Mantilla Osorio, Luis Mores Alatorre, Joaquín Arroyo-Cabrales, and César A. Rios Muñoz delve into the question of whether we should speak of "procesos de cambio" (processes of change) or species extinction. In the following chapter, Patricia Ledesma Bouchan explores narrations, mitosis, and rituals of beginnings and endings of cycles among pre-Hispanic Nahuas. Miriam Judith Gallegos Gómora investigates the narrative of the apocalypse, which was supposed to occur in the year 2012 according to the Maya calendar. Subsequently, Alejandra Cordes Guzmán examines the origins of apocalyptic narratives, analyzing the colonial history and associated apocalypses of the Americas. Luis Eduardo Darío Gotés Martínez, in his article "Suwabáma. Mapuarí Guwanibe Wichimoba," focuses on the languages and ways of life of Mesoamerican populations. In "Los fines del mundo y la antropología" (The Ends of the World and Anthropology), Johannes Neurath provides readers with insight into anthropology and its perspective on apocalypses. Lourdes Báez Cubero delves into the stories of the Nahuas, their world endings, and other tales. José Carlos Melesio Nolasco concludes the volume with apocalyptic visions in the chronicles of Carlos Monsiváis.