Coyote drums and jaguar altars: Ontologies of the living and the artificial among the K’iche’ Maya

For the current-day K’iche’ Maya of the Highland community of Momostenango, Guatemala, animals are conceived as having not human, but artificial souls: they are, in fact, objects that exist in the mountain dwellings of their gods. Conversely, artefacts like sacred altars are seen as being wild animals of the gods and ancestors, which can bring illness and death to people when not fed by ritual offerings. Based on this and other data that the author gathered during his recent ethnographic fieldwork among the K’iche’, in this article he explores the ontological paradoxes of living beings and artefacts among current-day Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples of the past to propose a version of perspectivism that incorporates the ideas of technology, asymmetry and material culture to the more horizontal and personhood-based model proposed for Amazon cultures by Viveiros de Castro in his article, ‘Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism’ (1998)

Mi Casa Linda

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Solving for Micro- and Macro- Scale Electrostatic Configurations Using the Robin Hood Algorithm

We present a novel technique by which highly-segmented electrostatic configurations can be solved. The Robin Hood method is a matrix-inversion algorithm optimized for solving high density boundary element method (BEM) problems. We illustrate the capabilities of this solver by studying two distinct geometry scales: (a) the electrostatic potential of a large volume beta-detector and (b) the field enhancement present at surface of electrode nano-structures. Geometries with elements numbering in the O(10^5) are easily modeled and solved without loss of accuracy. The technique has recently been expanded so as to include dielectrics and magnetic materials.Comment: 40 pages, 20 figure