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The Mountain Who Stumbled, and the Lake Who Eats Girls

  • 03/06/2025
  • 19:00-20:30
  • online talk
photo of a man standing on a mountain at night, lighting a cigar, with a pile of new candles at his feet,

Eric Hoenes del Pinal

The Mountain Who Stumbled, the Lake Who Eats Girls, and The Beast Who Guards the Plantation: Some Notes on the Other-than-Human Beings who Inhabit Guatemala’s Verapaz

A Folklore Society Online Talk

by Eric Hoenes del Pinal (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

Tuesday 3 June 2025, 19:00 BST

This talk will focus on stories about three other-than-human beings who share the landscape with Q’eqchi’-Maya people in contemporary Guatemala.

Guatemala’s Q’eqchi’-Maya people understand the world to be inhabited by a broad range of other-than-human beings whose lives and fates are variously interconnected to the natural and social geography of the country. This talk will examine stories collected in 2024 about three such beings—the powerful mountain spirits who govern the land, bodies of water who occasionally feed on human flesh to sustain themselves, and a monstrous half-human, half-beast who guards plantation property. The figures in these stories illustrate something about how Q’eqchi’-Maya culture imagines the relationship between humanity, nature, and the spirit world, and the specific stories about them that people tell, I will argue, help us better understand their culture’s key ethical and moral values.

Eric Hoenes del Pinal (B.A. Boston University, 1997; PhD. University of California, San Diego, 2008) is associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Trained in both cultural and linguistic anthropology, his research focuses on the role of religion in processes of social change among Q’eqchi’-Maya people in Guatemala. Dr. Hoenes del Pinal’s book Guarded by Two Jaguars: A Catholic Parish Divided by Language and Faith (University of Arizona Press, 2022) was recognized with an honorable mention for the Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion in 2023. He is also the co-editor (with Kristin Norget and Marc Roscoe Loustau) of Mediating Catholicism: Religion and Media in Global Catholic Imaginaries (Bloomsbury 2022), and his work has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, Contemporary Religion, Language Policy, Fieldwork in Religion, Anthropology and Humanism, and the Journal of Global Catholicism.

Ticketrs £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code–log in to https://folklore-society.com/members-only to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-mountain-who-stumbled-and-the-lake-who-eats-girls-tickets-1237801380249?

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Photo: Eric Hoenes del Pinal