ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts the focus from the nonhuman environment to humanity, the other half of the relationship of structural coupling, and therefore dialogues laterally with Chapter 2. It centres on Wildernain Villegas’ Yáax K’áak’ / Fuego Primigenio [Primordial Fire], a retelling of the Popol Vuh which narrates the evolution of humanity. The chapter begins by arguing that the Popol Vuh is a peripatetic text, not reducible to any single version. By reconstituting the myth in the context of the Yucatan Peninsula, Primordial Fire foregrounds the ontogenic coupling between the Peninsula and humanity (habitat and inhabitant) which, at various stages in the poem, emerge and dissolve together. Drawing on Ricoeur’s notion of “emplotment”, the chapter reveals how the poem depicts the stages of human development as increased semiotic openness towards the nonhuman world. By foregrounding humanity’s ability to decentre itself as a result of the semiotic freedom of culture, Villegas enacts a vision of human exceptionalism that is the opposite of human essentialism.
