Costumbre: A Critical Examination of a Term for Customary Indigenous Religious Practices in Mexico and Guatemala

This bilingual (English/Spanish) roundtable brings together scholars of religion to critically examine the category of “costumbre” as it is used in historical and contemporary context across Mesoamerica. Rooted in Spanish legal traditions, the term “costumbre” (lit. “custom”) has come to refer to the customary ritual practices, modes of social organization, and belief systems of Indigenous communities across the continent. Like other terms that are used in parallel with “religion” and its cognates, costumbre is a contested term that denotes something that is religion-like without explicitly being classed as “religious.” This critical investigation of how “costumbre”  has variously been discursively framed and deployed over the last 500 years aims to prompt scholars to rethink the question of how “religion” and “religions” are configured from the vantage point of Indigenous Americans’ efforts to resist and reconfigure the imposition of those categories from the colonial period through the present.