Books by Carlos Mondragon
This is an advance preview of sections of my principal anthropological study/monograph of personh... more This is an advance preview of sections of my principal anthropological study/monograph of personhood, environment and climate change in the Torres Islands. This is the extended version in Spanish, of which a more compact version in English is currently in preparation for submission to an academic publisher.
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Edited volumes by Carlos Mondragon
El cristianismo en el mundo. Diversidades religiosas en Asia, Oceanía, y las Américas, 2023
This is the Introduction, in Spanish, to an edited volume on comparative anthropological approach... more This is the Introduction, in Spanish, to an edited volume on comparative anthropological approaches to varieties of Christianity in Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. It offers an overview of the development and current trends in the anthropology of Christianity in Mexico as well as a broader international context. It then outlines the key themes and problems by which the various contributors were asked to approach their chapters, namely, rethinking histories and processes of conversion, adaptation and innovation, and heterogeneity. Each chapter is rooted in a specific ethnographic case study ranging from Cambodia to Eastern Indonesia, Papua-New Guinea, Vanuatu, and Mexico.
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This collective volume is the fourth in an ongoing series on key concepts in the archaeology and ... more This collective volume is the fourth in an ongoing series on key concepts in the archaeology and anthropology of religion. It offers a summary introduction about the history and current state of pilgrimage studies in anthropological and archaeological research, with a view to offering an updated set of critical insights to a broad international audience. Having said that, the main object of this series is to serve as a critical update on current trends and debates in relation to a Spanish-speaking readership of students and scholars dedicated to anthropology and archaeology. However the case studies that we offer are based on original (i.e. not previously published) research by Mexico-based colleagues working across a wide spectrum of global culture regions, and should therefore be of interest to other international readers. The studies in this tome range across North America (Mexico and the USA), Melanesia, East Asia (China and Tibet), the Berber regions of Morocco, and Southern Africa.
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Papers by Carlos Mondragon
Anuario Asia Pacífico el Colegio de México, 2021
Este texto ofrece un bosquejo de los antecedentes políticos, históricos y ambientales en los que ... more Este texto ofrece un bosquejo de los antecedentes políticos, históricos y ambientales en los que se dio la estación de incendios forestales 2019-2020 en Australia. En la parte política, el énfasis está en la tendencia que ha seguido la agenda ambiental de los distintos gabinetes federales durante los últimos 30 años, especialmente en relación con el control de emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero. En cuanto al medio ambiente, se trazan los contornos de los principales fenómenos climáticos que afectan la geografía australiana en el presente, así como la historia de las relaciones humano-ambientales que han esculpido esa geografía desde tiempos ancestrales. Posteriormente se hace un recuento de los incendios, sus consecuencias y sus costos.
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Anuario Asia Pacífico el Colegio de México, 2019
El Océano Pacífico ocupa más de 180 millones de kilómetros cuadrados, un área equivalente a la mi... more El Océano Pacífico ocupa más de 180 millones de kilómetros cuadrados, un área equivalente a la mitad de la superficie marítima de la Tierra. Dispersas sobre esta inmensa extensión de agua se encuentran más de 25 000 islas, de las cuales 200 son grandes y 2 500 pequeñas, todas habitadas de manera permanente desde hace más de tres milenios. La geografía humana de este continente oceánico se concentra en torno a una veintena de naciones, Estados y territorios conocidos como las Islas del Pacífico. Excluyendo a Nueva Zelanda, la población total de las Islas del Pacífico asciende a 8.5 millones de personas —una cifra que se eleva a más de 15 millones si se incluyen Nueva Zelanda y el archipiélago de Hawai—. Este horizonte humano está integrado por más de 1 200 grupos lingüísticos, lo cual hace del Oceáno Pacífico la región cultural de mayor extensión y diversidad lingüística del mundo.¹
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The Contemporary Pacific, 2013
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Final revised draft of paper originally presented at the two Association of Social Anthropology o... more Final revised draft of paper originally presented at the two Association of Social Anthropology of Oceania (ASAO) meetings held in 2014 and 2015. Currently under review for publication in a collective volume on the social life of rivers in Oceania.
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In this paper I offer an historical outline of the early relationship of the Melanesian Mission (... more In this paper I offer an historical outline of the early relationship of the Melanesian Mission (Anglican) with the people of Torres Islands, North Vanuatu, with a view to identifying the patterns by which this particular islander-outlander engagement unfolded. I argue that the incorporation of the Mission was part of a longer process by which Torres people have historically extended their social and spiritual horizons -which I refer to as their relational cosmos- in order to create difference, organize it, and thereby reformulate key cultural values, i.e. Torres kastom. I approach the 'interplay between Anglican dogmatism and local spiritual agency' through an analytical frame that privileges local forms of agency in the study of Mission history, and holds comparative potential across a broader region with shared Anglican heritage, namely North-Central Vanuatu and the South-Central Solomons.
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In this paper I explore some of the different contexts in which the term mena (the local variant ... more In this paper I explore some of the different contexts in which the term mena (the local variant of the term mana) is employed and understood in the Torres Islands, a small island group in the north of the Vanuatu archipelago, and offer some ideas regarding the ways in which this particular ethnographic data can help to ‘retheorize’ mana in broader, contemporary perspective. I start by offering insights into the way in which mena appears to have a strong continuity with older, pre-European notions of the cosmos, some of which are especially important in understanding contemporary environmental knowledge. I then move on to how mena is employed by islanders in their intimate and complex relationship with cosmological concepts introducted by the missionaries and teachings of the Church of Melanesia (Anglican). Finally, I explore how the above meanings are seen to interact, in non-contradictory ways, with various spiritual forces associated with non-Christian frameworks. I argue that these multisemic usages do not seem to indicate the kind of commodification or substantivization observed in other Oceanic settings, and that far from being a 'Christianized' concept, local understandings of mena continue to carry broader, sophisticated ideas about the spiritual and physical spaces of Torres Islands' life.
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¿cómo entender el pasado compartido de las sociedades propias del Oceáno Pacífico y aquellas (eur... more ¿cómo entender el pasado compartido de las sociedades propias del Oceáno Pacífico y aquellas (euroamericanas) que intruyeron en los espacios oceánicos desde el siglo XVI desde puntos de vista que coloquen en su justa dimensión tanto a los europeos como a los isleños? ¿Cómo aproximarse a perspectivas en donde los isleños no resulten meros agentes pasivos para la ‘narrativa maestra’ de la historia euroamericana de descubrimiento del Pacífico? Para poder responder a estas preguntas esta ponencia ofrece maneras de reflexionar críticamente sobre las dimensiones geográficas, históricas y humanas del Océano Pacífico, y a partir de estas referentes propone otras maneras de historiar y representar los espacios y los tiempos oceánicos, para pasar luego a los conceptos y usos del pasado de sus habitantes actuales, con especial referencia a las primeras intrusiones ibéricas en las islas de Melanesia insular.
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"Summary
The aim of this meeting is to discuss local environmental knowledge in relation to poli... more "Summary
The aim of this meeting is to discuss local environmental knowledge in relation to policies and scientific perspectives on climate change. The purpose is for Pacific Islanders to talk about and represent their local knowledges, values and environmental practices in ways that effectively speak to national and international policy makers and climate scientists. We have chosen traditional calendars as our guiding theme because they offer a useful, organized set of systems for approaching indigenous environmental knowledges.
By placing traditional calendars at the centre of this conversation we hope to offer a space for community researchers and representatives from across the Pacific to compare and present their local knowledges in ways that can be understood and incorporated into climate studies and policy without losing their sense of origin, ownership and cultural value. This translation between local knowledge, science and policy poses big challenges, because traditional knowledge is never separate from moral and social values, nor the places where they are rooted, while the production of scientific knowledge about the environment is usually about creating abstract data that are kept separate from local and cultural considerations.
The solution that we want to explore seeks to encourage participants to think about how the environmental practices of their community fit within larger configurations across neighbouring islands in order to produce shared models of knowledge across Pacific communities with similar environments and challenges. For example, the representatives from Melanesia can relate their local experiences of the environment to broader monsoon seasons, strong cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis, which are characteristic of the Western Pacific; by contrast, the Central Pacific, Eastern Polynesia, Micronesia, and Aotearoa will each share different sorts of cycles and challenges, as well as certain shared cultural values.
Producing regional models through the joining of local experiences can facilitate locally-grounded and collective representations of Islander knowledge - a sort of clustering that carries more weight than single case studies. This may allow indigenous knowledges to be presented to policy makers and scientists on Pacific Islanders' terms, which means not losing sight of the networks of people, places and forms of understanding that underpin these assemblages. It takes us away from "intellectual property" discussions that assume that knowledge is alienable. It is a way of bringing together different worldviews on an equal basis, rather than separating them."
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This paper offers a preliminary analysis of processes by which Espiritu Santo, the largest island... more This paper offers a preliminary analysis of processes by which Espiritu Santo, the largest island in Vanuatu, has recently been cast as a site of unique biodiversity and environmental significance. It focuses on the engagements, over the past two decades, of conservationists and naturalists with local people in order to track emerging experiences of the physical world and the production of territorial identity. The focal point for my ethnographic research is the settlement of Matantas, a key nexus for the rapidly shifting networks of kin and exchange that have historically characterized Big Bay, the largest component region of North Santo which makes up the extended fieldsite of this analysis. Matantas is also significant because it is the site where (XVIth century) Europeans first landed in Vanuatu, and for many local people it possesses a privileged -if contested- association with the initial introduction of Christianity into the archipelago as a whole. Thus, Big Bay presents a layered socioscape in which the contested spiritual past and the environmental present come together in unique, and often troubled, configurations. In analytical terms, I want to take the contemporary ‘naturalist history’ of Santo as a foil for an exploration into how exogenous environmental concerns interact with forms of movement, environment and personhood proper to this particular North Vanuatu context (I have hitherto focused on the Torres and, to a lesser extent, the Banks Islands, which lie to the north of Santo).
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Book chapters by Carlos Mondragon
El cristianismo en el mundo. Diversidades religiosas en Asia, Oceanía, y las Américas, 2023
Este es el texto de un capítulo para un volumen colectivo en el que explico la evolución de los s... more Este es el texto de un capítulo para un volumen colectivo en el que explico la evolución de los significados del término mene (mana en contexto Oceánico más amplio) en la sociedad de las Islas Torres, en el norte del archipiélago de Vanuatu, en el Pacífico occidental. En especial exploro la manera en que el concepto de mana se entrelaza con conceptos de poder sobrenatural, de eficacia, y de generatividad, así como con la traducción de la idea del Dios cristiano en el proceso de cristianización de las islas a lo largo del siglo veinte.
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Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections, 2021
This chapter addresses the intellectual and biographical antecedents that informed Miguel Covarru... more This chapter addresses the intellectual and biographical antecedents that informed Miguel Covarrubias's creation of a South Seas collection for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico (now the Museo de las Culturas). It also offers insights about the eventual fate of the collection, including mine and Oscar Aguirre's curatorial concept for the short-lived Pacific Hall of the MNC in 2010.
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Mostrar y ocultar.
El tema de este texto es la naturaleza especular del cosmos en las Islas Torres, al norte de Vanu... more El tema de este texto es la naturaleza especular del cosmos en las Islas Torres, al norte de Vanuatu, un archipiélago melanesio del Pacífico occidental. El punto de partida para este artículo es la paradoja de que al mismo tiempo en que la incertidumbre es parte inseparable de formas austronesias de organización y acción social, estos mismos sistemas están fundamentados en ideales de arraigo sociocósmico que no admiten la idea de que persona y tierra sean inestables. Con base en esta paradoja exploro materiales etnográficos en relación con la manera en que se contrastan y organizan los mundos de los vivos y de los muertos en Islas Torres. Específicamente, planteo que la inestabilidad sociocósmica asociada con la naturaleza entrelazada de los mundos de vivos y muertos se fundamenta en la existencia de un universo especular, en donde el mundo de los vivos constituye la 'sombra' del mundo verdadero, que es el de los espíritus. La interrelación entre ambos mundos ofrece un mecanismo para reiterar las condiciones de verdad mediante las cuales se organizan y reconocen las realidades de los vivos en este rincón de Oceanía.
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Indigenous Knowledge for Climate Change Assessment and Adaptation, 2018
This chapter offers an overview of environmental knowledge practices in the Torres Islands, a sma... more This chapter offers an overview of environmental knowledge practices in the Torres Islands, a small islands’ community in the north of Vanuatu, with a view to informing current debates on adaptation in the Pacific Islands. I focus on human-environmental relations in the Torres through the lens of seasonal practices, with special attention to islanders' experiences of mid and long term environmental fluctuations - including predominant winds, changing rainfall patterns, ENSO periodicity and frequent changes to coastal sea levels as a result of seismic shifts. I organize these themes through the framework of food production, namely agroforestry and nearshore tenure, because they represent the most important forms of stewardship over forest and marine resources in the Torres. The purpose of this text is to highlight how key cultural acts and values coexist in complex relations with environmental variability by foregrounding the adaptive capacity of Torres islanders to their anthropogenic land and seascapes. I thereby problematise the notion that islander epistemologies and contexts can be readily translated and integrated into climate adaptation strategies, and suggest ways in which the concern with locally-sensitive policy design may be further refined.
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Books by Carlos Mondragon
Edited volumes by Carlos Mondragon
Papers by Carlos Mondragon
The aim of this meeting is to discuss local environmental knowledge in relation to policies and scientific perspectives on climate change. The purpose is for Pacific Islanders to talk about and represent their local knowledges, values and environmental practices in ways that effectively speak to national and international policy makers and climate scientists. We have chosen traditional calendars as our guiding theme because they offer a useful, organized set of systems for approaching indigenous environmental knowledges.
By placing traditional calendars at the centre of this conversation we hope to offer a space for community researchers and representatives from across the Pacific to compare and present their local knowledges in ways that can be understood and incorporated into climate studies and policy without losing their sense of origin, ownership and cultural value. This translation between local knowledge, science and policy poses big challenges, because traditional knowledge is never separate from moral and social values, nor the places where they are rooted, while the production of scientific knowledge about the environment is usually about creating abstract data that are kept separate from local and cultural considerations.
The solution that we want to explore seeks to encourage participants to think about how the environmental practices of their community fit within larger configurations across neighbouring islands in order to produce shared models of knowledge across Pacific communities with similar environments and challenges. For example, the representatives from Melanesia can relate their local experiences of the environment to broader monsoon seasons, strong cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis, which are characteristic of the Western Pacific; by contrast, the Central Pacific, Eastern Polynesia, Micronesia, and Aotearoa will each share different sorts of cycles and challenges, as well as certain shared cultural values.
Producing regional models through the joining of local experiences can facilitate locally-grounded and collective representations of Islander knowledge - a sort of clustering that carries more weight than single case studies. This may allow indigenous knowledges to be presented to policy makers and scientists on Pacific Islanders' terms, which means not losing sight of the networks of people, places and forms of understanding that underpin these assemblages. It takes us away from "intellectual property" discussions that assume that knowledge is alienable. It is a way of bringing together different worldviews on an equal basis, rather than separating them."
Book chapters by Carlos Mondragon
The aim of this meeting is to discuss local environmental knowledge in relation to policies and scientific perspectives on climate change. The purpose is for Pacific Islanders to talk about and represent their local knowledges, values and environmental practices in ways that effectively speak to national and international policy makers and climate scientists. We have chosen traditional calendars as our guiding theme because they offer a useful, organized set of systems for approaching indigenous environmental knowledges.
By placing traditional calendars at the centre of this conversation we hope to offer a space for community researchers and representatives from across the Pacific to compare and present their local knowledges in ways that can be understood and incorporated into climate studies and policy without losing their sense of origin, ownership and cultural value. This translation between local knowledge, science and policy poses big challenges, because traditional knowledge is never separate from moral and social values, nor the places where they are rooted, while the production of scientific knowledge about the environment is usually about creating abstract data that are kept separate from local and cultural considerations.
The solution that we want to explore seeks to encourage participants to think about how the environmental practices of their community fit within larger configurations across neighbouring islands in order to produce shared models of knowledge across Pacific communities with similar environments and challenges. For example, the representatives from Melanesia can relate their local experiences of the environment to broader monsoon seasons, strong cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis, which are characteristic of the Western Pacific; by contrast, the Central Pacific, Eastern Polynesia, Micronesia, and Aotearoa will each share different sorts of cycles and challenges, as well as certain shared cultural values.
Producing regional models through the joining of local experiences can facilitate locally-grounded and collective representations of Islander knowledge - a sort of clustering that carries more weight than single case studies. This may allow indigenous knowledges to be presented to policy makers and scientists on Pacific Islanders' terms, which means not losing sight of the networks of people, places and forms of understanding that underpin these assemblages. It takes us away from "intellectual property" discussions that assume that knowledge is alienable. It is a way of bringing together different worldviews on an equal basis, rather than separating them."
whose sudden, disquieting appearance evokes powerful forms of existential recognition from the living. Importantly, these forms of recognition centre on the awesome materiality of the spirits, whose visible presence allows one to see -to regard- their 'true' being. This understanding of existential truth springs from the idea that the spirit world is the foundation of reality, i.e. the real world, of which our world, the world of the living, is only a shadow. These expressions of respect are about identifying ultimate sources power and authority as they are made visible. They are analogous to the evocation of respect that is demanded of powerful persons and places -often through
iconic images. I thereby argue that these acts of concealment and revelation are related to the broader dynamics of cosmological dualism which provoke the ongoing iteration of ideals of order and authority across North-Central Vanuatu.""