Ritual Relationships with Copal Incense: Reinterpreting 21st Century U.S. Contexts through Indigenous Mesoamerican Ontologies

Copal, an aromatic tree resin, has long been harvested and offered as incense in Indigenous communities of Mesoamerica. In contemporary academic contexts copal and other non-human materials and entities are often conceived of through objectifying ontologies. However, metaphysical frameworks grounded in life forces such as teotl (Nahuatl) and ch’ulel (various Mayan languages) offer alternative insights to human relationships with other-than-human worlds. Copal can be traced temporally and spatially, across thousands of miles and millennia. Specifically, we can follow copal from Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica across the northern border of Mexico into contemporary rituals in Denver, Colorado where copal continues to burn in Danza ceremonies. Beyond these ritual spaces, copal also moves in neoliberal and new age contexts as a market commodity and is stored in museum collections as ‘artifact’. Centering Mesoamerican metaphysics offers a counternarrative to these versions of settler-colonial objectification. Ultimately, precolonial and decolonial kinship practices can inform reinterpretations and reimagining of copal in the processes of museum and market appropriation.