Attentionality in Aymara and Mapuche Cosmopraxis: A Transversal Approach to a Continuum of Ritual and Everyday Practices

Abstract

In this essay we aim at understanding how Aymara families in Bolivia and people in Mapuche territories in southern Chile prepare to attend to the intrinsic relationality of life along a continuum of everyday and ritual practices. We study these examples of habilitating cosmopraxis from the viewpoint of an anthropology of life, whose objective is to recalibrate the anthropological perspective in a fully biosocial sense. Through the complementarity of these long-standing ethnographic experiences, we show how these practices run indistinctively and in an interdependent way from the everyday practices to the so-called ritual ones and vice versa, giving way to communities of learning that prepare their members to care for the complex meshwork of life in which they participate. Our approach draws from the conceptual triad of agency-habit-attentionality in order to rethink in a critical and constructive way the ecological and social ‘agency’ and how it is supported by ritual praxis.