Breath, Animacy, and Death

In Tewa cosmology, the dead are different kinds of entities that are conceptually distinct the living. No longer persons, corpses required special handling since they intra-act with the village’s materialized cosmology as vibrant objects. Rather than treating corpses as the remains of living individuals, de-centering the body explores the transformations and entanglements of corpses as xayeh. In this chapter, I first focus on issues of animacy and assemblages relative to the Tewa world. I then consider how corpses as xayeh were animated by the affordances of objects and spaces. Exploring the Puebloan concept of breath, I articulate how connections among bodies as xayeh, natural objects, and other beings were situated relative to the underworld. Decentering bodies also highlights how the vibrancy of these transformed entities blurs the distinction between the living and the dead.