Becoming Bird

Notes on Colonial and Planetary Memory

Abstract

The following essay seeks to think of the notion of the creative act as an interruption in colonial epistemology, through the analysis of the Guatemalan saint-god Maximón. This colonial entity is proposed as a rare cultural object, which challenges any notion of a fixed ethnic identity, in the context of the historical racialization of Guatemalan society. The essay therefore proposes, by going beyond an orthodox anthropological approach, that this saint-god be understood as living material memory, which can become political only in the performativity of its complex movement and time.