ABSTRACT
This essay is based on ethnographic research on the ceremonial music and dance performed by the Yoreme (Mayo-Yoreme), an indigenous community dwelling in semiarid northwestern Mexico. In ritual performance, the deer singers, the musicians, and the pascola dancers merge with the world around them: they transform into the animals with whom they co-inhabit the enchanted world (juiya annia). Deer songs and birdcalls played on a simple cane flute emerge from a consensual view of what makes up Yoreme sacred reality. Music making and dancing is based on skills, sensitivities, and orientations that have developed through experiencing life with the movements, sounds, and gestures of animals. This sentient ecology brings humans into communicative relationships with the ecological world and extends the concept of personhood to animals, and ultimately to all ecological life.
The Yoreme, like indigenous populations elsewhere in the world, feel the cultural impact of globalization, which not only has transformed their living space but has also affected the spiritual life that constitutes their communal identity. Yet in spite of the intensification of global interconnectedness, the links between cultural experience and local surroundings are still strong. Yoreme continue to self-consciously defend their traditional beliefs, values, and cultural practices, which contribute to our understanding of musical and sonic issues related to ecology and the natural environment from a non-Western perspective.
