Metáforas antropoanimales. Un acercamiento metodológico para una etnografia de la alteridad multiespecie

Abstract

The objective of this text is to describe and analyze the relationships of interspecies coexistence of two entities -humans and dogs-, as well as the metaphorical artistic representations generated from the significance of this relationship in a Zapotec community in Mexico. We start from two basic aspects: the need to express the complexity of a world so diverse in its interactions; on the other hand, the metaphorical presence as a creative dimension, but at the same time, defining the ontological condition of the relations between species. The indigenous communities that have forged different long-term narrative traditions, whether oral, plastic or others, are based on these to recreate their imaginaries. This creative process conceives various possibilities of being and living with the entities with which the world is shared. Interspecies relationships are generated from inherencies and coexistence where "logocentrism" is not the basis of differentiation. The search for and closeness to the "animal" is generated through various metaphorical figurations where the action or the conjunction of its myth-praxis are latent. We make a description of the daily experiences that link dogs with humans, their coexistence spaces, contexts, assessments, to account for interspecies relationships, the foundations that inspire them and what it generates. A corpus of narratives was collected, from which we identified ethnocategories from a contextual analysis. We worked with three murals and fifteen artistic works called alebrijes, based on the creative intentions of the authors, their imaginaries and cultural inspirations -both from oral tradition and from everyday and artistic experiences.