Anthropology of
Agave and Mezcal

6-Week Online Course
November 19, 2026

Agave and mezcal as living biocultural worlds — where land, bodies, knowledge, and power meet.

About the workshop

Through the studies of food anthropology we will reflect on the relationship between different social groups within Mexico and the global world as they concern maguey-mezcal.

We’ll try to understand how agave management and mezcal uses are articulated through the interaction of the social construction of narratives and meaning, the human body, institutions, politics, economics, and ecologies.

MEZCAL, AS FOOD, is at the center of key issues of our time such as social inequalities, land use change, migration, health, urbanization, rural ways of life and traditional knowledge.

The pedagogy of Expresiones

This is a pedagogical project that tries to weave learnings with people’s everyday lives.

It is not only a theoretical and practical workshop, but we will re-understand how theory and practice are two words to talk about the same thing. This is what we call Action Thinking (AP).

In addition, it is very important that the whole curriculum has a meaningful meaning in the students' lives and within their own sense of who we are. For this reason we have a learning pillar that we call Self-Awareness (SA).

The workshop is threaded through seminar-like sessions where the facilitator exposes ideas, academic reflections, and encourages individual curiosity to open dialogues with the participants.

Some of the activities that you can find in the workshop are:

  • Exposure Seminars

  • Meditation

  • Writing and dialogues for reflection

  • Didactic exercises to learn about ethnography

  • learning-by-doing exercises

Who is it for?

Cooks, students, researchers, mothers and fathers, promoters, administrators, social workers, agriculturists, traders etc.

This workshop is aimed at anyone who works with food and seeks to generate diverse, critical and shared perspectives to better understand food systems, agave and mezcal.

Image of a zoom meeting workshop

This is how the meetings look like.

What you’ll learn

  1. Recognize maguey and mezcal as a living and cultural systems.

  2. Analyze the relationships between territory, knowledge, and production.

  3. Reflect on ethnography, memory, and biocultural identity.

  4. Design strategies to connect with your own territory through collective action.

    • Brief history of anthropology

    • About ethnography

    • Principles of anthropology

    • Anthropology or Intercultural studies

    • Food studies

    • Understanding agave and mezcal throuhg a cultural perspective

  • DescriptioCosmovision, and creation of meanings

    • Psychosociology of food

    • Cases of study

    • Transmission of knowledge

    • Cultural reproduction and resistancen text goes here

    • About the human body, the senses and taste

    • Historic taste

    • Construction of flavor and identity

    • Case studies

    • Agave biodiversity

    • TEK: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and the Agave

    • Local classifications of agave

    • Industrialization and capitalism concerning agave and mezcal

    • TEK and restoratio

    • Traditional societies and agave peasants

    • Gender in mezcal

    • Geographical indications

    • Market systems and logistics

    • Intercultural practices for dialogue

    • Translocal solidarities

    • Representing with dignity

    • La memoria biocultural, Víctor Toledo y Narciso Barrera

    • Towards a Psychosociology of Food, Roland Barthes

    • Comida, cultura y modernidad en México. Perspectivas antropológicas e históricas, Catherine Good y Laura Elena Corona

    • El maguey y el pulque en los códices mexicanos, Oswaldo Goncalves de Lima

    • Etnoecología ixcateca, Selene Rangel

    • Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu

    • Hacia una reflexión decolonial de la alimentación en el occidente de México, Yanga Villagómez, Claudio Rocío Magaña

    • Cuerpo, cosmos y medio ambiente de Pierre Beaucage

    • Taste of place, Amy Trubek

    • La filosofía Náhuatl estudiada desde sus fuentes de León Portilla

    • Indigenous Storywork: educating the heart, mind, body and spirit, Jo-Ann Archibald

    • El retorno a la naturaleza: apuntes sobre cosmovisión Amazónica desde los Quechua, Grimaldo Rengifo Vázquez

    • Land as Pedagogy de Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

    • En tiempos de muerte: cuerpos, pedagogías resistencias de Lorena Cabna

Syllabus

Image of a zoom meeting workshop

FORMAT AND AVAILABILITY

DURATION: 6 sessions. Adaptable to each space or group.

FORMAT: Online sessions via Google Meets. Every session will be recorded for future and anachronic review.

LANGUAGE: Spanish and English

AVAILABILITY: There are currently no dates available, but you can request it for your space or group.

COST: 160 USD per person. No information available currently. Ask about payments options. Ask about scholarships. Send an email so we can adapt to your situation. We will be happy to reach an agreement.

“Born from a field-based ethnographic project in southern Mexico, this workshop applies a critical and reciprocal anthropology to develop a transformative learning community.”

Would you like to bring this workshop to your space or group?

Write to us to arrange an edition tailored to your needs.