Abstract : My thesis examines the category of “sacred places” (lugares sagrados, loq'laj na'ajej) as mobilized, constructed and reconstructed in the Q'eqchi' discourses of southeast Petén (Guatemala), a region heavily impacted by the consequences of the war that ravaged the country (1960-1996). In Guatemala, sacred places emerged as a political category in the 20th century, at the same time as the notions of heritage and cultural inheritance. They are spaces in which complex relationships to identity, to conceptions of landscape, to the past and to ancestors are articulated. The sixteen months of my ethnography in a village context show that the category of q'eqchi' sacred places refers to a multiplicity of landscape elements, and are not necessarily the subject of heritage issues or indigenous political claims. The definition of a sacred place as a prominent portion of space associated with Mayan ancestors is part of the historically situated paradigm of “Mayanization”, which has given rise to new forms of attachment to these spaces and a political reconfiguration of associated ritual practices, in line with new conceptions of the sacred. Using an approach inspired by the anthropology of landscape and rooted in linguistic and pragmatic anthropology, I intend to show that: (1) the q'eqchi' category of sacred places is defined first and foremost by the multiplicity of its referents, in other words, it is not a category for describing topography but above all a political one; (2) in a fundamentally indexical logic, the analysis of q'eqchi' discourses shows how the category q'eqchi' of sacred places takes on its semantic value in the course of enunciation: in other words, the primary function of this category is pragmatic, it is useful for interaction. It is only secondarily that the q'eqchi' category of sacred places contributes to a mental mapping of the landscape, which is described by other means. Sacred places do not appear as elements independent of topography, but instead enable reference to landscape in order, for example, to generate common ground in communication or invoke a certain conception of identity by implying specific kinds of discourse. We'll see how this new category fits into a neo-indigenist ideology, eliciting particular epistemic positions and new, more stereotyped forms of discourse.