Entre santos y cocodrilos. Acercamiento a dos festividades en Tabasco y Guatemala

Abstract

Celebrations in honour of the Virgin of the Conception in Cúlico, Cunduacán, Tabasco, and the Virgin of the Assumption, in Tactic, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, share an unexpected ingredient for the foreign spectator: the crocodile. This is a symbol of enormous symbolic weight that acquires distinct functions —such as religious, festive, economic or medicinal— in the indigenous worldview of these and other communities, past and present. In this paper I will offer an ethnographic description of these festivities, and an analytical approach to some of the mythic-ritual expressions that include this animal.