Ephemeral literacies: reflecting on the impermanence of maize reading divination By Araceli Rojas Martínez Gracida

https://www.academia.edu/144123891/Ephemeral_literacies_reflecting_on_the_impermanence_of_maize_reading_divination?email_work_card=title This article deals with literacies that are created as systems (of signs) that are not meant to be permanent or fixed registers of memory. Their purpose of creation is to discern their meanings, or in other words, to be read. They are conceived as vehicles for transmitting messages that are immediately and intentionally erased and discarded. This is the case for maize divination among the Ayöök people of Oaxaca, Mexico, where images are created by casting maize kernels onto a table, and whose arrangement allows for the reading of signs that enlighten the circumstances behind af ictions and illnesses. Among other cases, this example builds on literacies that seek impermanency in order to relate to and exist in this world. Araceli Rojas is an archaeologist. She currently studies Codex Laud, one of the seven Mesoamerican precolonial surviving books dedicated to the 260-day calendar, divination, and medicine, and is now kept in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. ...