부산대학교 도서관

The fiesta system has long been seen as a focus of collective life in native Mesoamerican communities and has been identified as an important device for the circulation of material goods among community members. However, ethnographic reports have tended to focus on only one kind of exchange in the fiesta: the distributions of wealth that sponsors make to participants. Drawing on recent ethnographic work in the Mixteca Alta, this article shows that the fiesta is actually a nexus of three different kinds of exchange, involving the reciprocal exchange of wealth by pairs of fiesta participants and the pooling of wealth at a center, in addition to the distributions made by sponsors to participants. The article goes on to argue that fiesta participants actively use these exchanges to create complex social meanings in each fiesta celebrated. [Mixtec Indians, Mesoamerican ethnology, gift exchange, redistribution, community]