The Feast of the Uninvited: Popular Religion, Liberation, Hybridity 9780494432112

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THE FEAST OF THE UNINVITED: POPULAR RELIGION, LIBERATION, HYBRIDITY BY

MARIO BELLEMARE

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology of the University of St. Michael's College and the Department of Theology of the Toronto School of Theology In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theology Awarded by University of St. Michael's College Toronto 2008 © MARIO BELLEMARE

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ABSTRACT THE FEAST OF THE UNINVITED: POPULAR RELIGION, LIBERATION, HYBRIDITY BY MARIO BELLEMARE

Doctor of Philosophy in Theology University of St. Michael's College, 2008

This thesis examines how some Latin American and Caribbean liberation theologians rooted their theologies in popular religion. My consideration of these theologians is framed through a liberationist and postcolonial perspective. This thesis will argue that the everyday religious and symbolic language of ordinary people-those rituals, pilgrimages, prayers, fiestas, and processions that have been studied under the term popular religion-has been central to the development of Latin American liberation theologies in the last thirty-five years. Popular religion has been an area of theological inquiry that has opened up new possibilities and trajectories for liberation theologies within the changing context of the region, especially as they relate to issues of religious and cultural pluralism. In chapter one, I explore what Luis Maldonado called the "unitive" and "conflictive" tensions that surfaced around the term popular religion, especially with respect to the work of the Argentinean Juan Carlos Scannone and in Peru in the mid1970s. In the second chapter, I examine Diego Irarrazaval's emphasis on fiesta in his theology, which he developed while studying popular religion in Peru in the 1980s, especially the everyday practices of Indigenous (Aymaran) peoples. In chapter three, I focus on the work of Cristian Parker, in order to explore the realm of religious syncretism in popular religion. Parker argues for what he calls an "otra logica" (an/other logic) that

iii is distinct from (but also takes from) modern Eurocentric rationality. In chapter four, I return to the theologies of Irarrazaval and Parker and critically evaluate their unique contributions in light of the current changes happening in Latin America and the Caribbean. To conclude, I consider Ivone Gebara's notion of "religious biodiversity" (1999), Irarrazaval's recent theological undertaking in the area of the "inter-cultural" (2004a), and other recent liberationist material, as important examples of the way liberationists are framing the religious and cultural pluralism of Latin America and the Caribbean. This thesis will show that liberationist perspectives on popular religion, in conjunction with the "new voices," have helped establish a critique of integrated or essentialist readings of popular religion that continue to be championed by the 'official' Roman Catholic church.

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DEDICATION

A tous ceux et celles qui "vivent dans le melange."

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my companera Tamara for her daily accompaniment, support, and passion for justice; Allan for his deep listening and friendship; the rest of the Volatile Works crew, Brad and Glenn, for their support and solidarity; Nice Music, especially Dan, for helping me to keep going; the Student Christian Movement (SCM) of Canada, especially Rick, Susannah, Joelle, and Sheilagh for being a place where I could develop a theology of friendship; the World Student Christian Federation, for being a place where I could participate in global justice programs; the Movimiento estudantil cristiano (MEC) of Mexico, especially Gabriela, Ruben, and Samuel, for their support; the SCM of the Philippines, for taking me into the mountains and initiating me to a "conflictive" perspective; the now defunct Instituto de Estudios Aymaras in Chucuito (Peru) for showing me that "conflictive" and "culture" were not distinct terms; the Instituto Bartolome de la Casas, in Lima, for their support; Diego for taking me in and giving me his time; Sarah for her fine and thoughtful editing; Mary for her work on the picture layout; Lee for his rigour and patience; Dino for his Sunday meals in Toronto; and my parents Carmelina and Andre for their unwavering support.

All photographs are the copyright of the author. Opening image by Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), "Gran fandango yfrancachela de todas las calaveras" belongs in the Public Domain. It can be located at: http://www.artchive.eom/artchive/P/posada/fandango.jpg.html (accessed May 20, 2008).

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THE FEAST OF THE UNINVITED

Gran fandango y francachela de todas las calaveras by Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: 'The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, "Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet." But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, "The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet." Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.' Matthew 22:1-10

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION POPULAR RELIGION: LIBERATION AND HYBRIDITY Postcolonial Latin America and the Caribbean Crossroads Theology: Liberationist and Postcolonial A Subaltern Approach to Popular Religion What is Popular Religion? The 'People' of Popular Religion The Feast of the Uninvited CHAPTER ONE IDENTITY AND LIBERATION: POPULAR RELIGION IN LATIN AMERICAN THEOLOGIES POPULAR RELIGION AND IDENTITY Whose Modernity? Pedro Monrande and Baroque Modernity Liberationist Hermeneutic: Two Major Trends? Scannone's Typologies for Popular Religion Scannone's Historical-Critical and Sapiential Typology

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POPULAR RELIGION AND LIBERATION

Culture and Conflict: The Peruvian Example Gutierrez, Dependency, and the CEBs The Question of Ideology Segundo and Religious Oppression CHAPTER Two AN INVITATION TO THE FEAST: DIEGO IRARRAZAVAL AND FIESTA

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CAMINAR CON EL CRISTO

Critiquing Religious Oppression Un pueblo caminando con el Cristo Morado! Irarrazaval's Typologies A Church Moving Forward FIESTA IN THE ANDES

Manchay Tiempo and Chayraq The Festive and "Real" Resistance The Festive and Fujishock The Anti-Pueblo and Desculturacion The Reign and Sanation CHAPTER THREE THE ARRIVAL OF THE UNINVITED: CRISTIAN PARKER AND OTRA LOGICA POPULAR RELIGION AND SYMBOLIC PROTEST

Beginnings and Liberationist Universals

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Parker's "Models" within the Symbolic Field of Popular Religion The Chilean Example and Symbolic Protest SYNCRETISM AND OTHER RATIONALITIES

Subaltern Syncretism Baptism and Resemantization The Popular Classes of Modernity

CHAPTER FOUR LIBERATION THEOLOGIES IN TIEMPOS MIXTOS: HYBRIDITY, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM

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LIBERATIONISTS AND HYBRIDITY

Liberation or Postcolonial Hermeneutics Liberationist Disparagement of Popular Religion? Lo Cotidiano and Feminism Indigenous Theologies: Eleazar Lopez Hernandez TOWARD A LIBERATIONIST-POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE Modernity and Latin American/Caribbean Identity Axial Shifts and Culture Irarrazaval, Liberation, and Inculturation Cristian Parker and Essentialism CONCLUSION RE-DRESSING APARECIDA: RELIGIOUS BIODIVERSITY, THE INTER-CULTURAL, AND ACCOMPANIMENT

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APPENDIX I

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Images: Procession of La Virgen del Carmen & Protest by Peruvian workers in the Plaza de Armas, Lima, Peru (2001) Photos by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare

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Popular religion will... -in the long run-make the Church a place where a Pentecostal plurality of tongues becomes the normal way ofpraising God. Such a plurality will not represent an isolationist autonomy, but reflect the variety of religious practices within the Church. The 'creative dynamism' ofpopular religion will serve "to incarnate the universal prayer of the Church in our culture in a greater and better way" (Puebla 465), provided we do not allow a liturgical apartheid to creep into the City of God, with a 'white' minority laying down the law for the wretched of the earth. Paulo Suess (Brazil, 1986)

But liberation theology in that first generation wanted to be more than the vanguard of genuine conversion in the Latin American context. It saw itself as a movement of the people as well. And it soon learned that in transforming the patterns of Christianity it could not ignore the longer-lived religion of the people. This has lead to a concentrated study on the whole phenomenon of how religion is lived and experienced by the great majority of the people of Latin America. Known most commonly as "popular religiosity" (religiosidad popular), the work of Latin American theologians and of sociologists has been immensely helpful to the world church in coming to a deeper understanding of what is probably one of the most prevalent forms of Christian experience. Robert J. Schreiter (USA, 1985)

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Images: Peruvian feast in expanding settlement in urban poor Lima, Peru (2001) Photos by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare

2 INTRODUCTION

POPULAR RELIGION: LIBERATION AND HYBRIDITY

Popular religion no longer needs to be dismissed as deviations brought on by psychological need or lack of proper evangelization. It can be seen as an authentic way of living out the message of the Gospel. To be sure, these ways are open to exaggeration and heterodoxy; but history shows that official forms of Christianity have not been immune from such charges either. Robert J. Schreiter (USA, 1999)

This thesis is about how some Latin American and Caribbean liberation theologians rooted their theologies in popular religion. My consideration of these theologians will be framed through a liberationist and postcolonial perspective. To write in scholarly terms about the popular is no easy task; it is an area that is fraught with elitist preconceptions and reductive perspectives. To write about popular religion from a Catholic theological perspective is also no easy task; it is an area that is either dismissed outright as irrelevant or approached with suspicion. But to write about popular religion using the methods carved-out by liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics in the present theological context is the most difficult task I face with this work. I say this not because I wish to present my work as going against the current, but because reductive perspectives on popular religion, liberation theologies, and postcolonial theories abound. On one hand, liberation theologies are perceived to have been "defeated" in Latin America and the Caribbean; hence, they are characterized as no longer valid by some commentators, as literally dead. Also, liberation theologies are often characterized as being "against" popular religion. How can a liberationist perspective on popular religion even exist, some critics argue, when liberationists have only berated this phenomenon?

On the other hand, notwithstanding the suspicion generated in some academic circles toward postcolonial theories, postcolonial hermeneutics are only starting to be developed in theology and thus remain largely unknown. To make matters worse, some recent postcolonial theologians have constructed their theologies in opposition to liberation theologies, calling them "rival" hermeneutics. How can liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics even be considered methodologically compatible? Against all of these claims, I will examine Latin American liberation theologians firmly rooted in a serious accompaniment of popular religion and highlight the way their theologies reflect a postcolonial hermeneutic even if not called by that name. I am reminded by Ivone Gebara that even if the "the word 'ecofeminism' is not part of the [Brazilian] people's vocabularies," it does not prevent her from using it in order to engage specific academic currents (1999a, 2). I will argue that this is the case with my use of postcolonial hermeneutics. In his prologue to Diego Irarrazaval's important 1978 study of Peruvian popular religion, entitled Religion delpobre y liberation en Chimbote, Gustavo Gutierrez opened with this sentence: "popular religion is a theme that is rich and complex" (1978,7)*.1 A theologian writing at a time of immense theological and political ferment, Gutierrez' statement spoke to the important place of popular religion for some liberation theologians as early as 1978. For Gutierrez, popular religion is "rich" because it belongs to the pueblo, or the people, and "complex" because, he argued, one could not carelessly bless everything that belongs to the pueblo. This kind of romanticizing could fall prey to what Gutierrez called "religious populism" (1978, 7)*. Gutierrez and other liberation I use the asterisk (*) at the end of quotes to signify my own translations from the Spanish. Many of the works used in my research have not been translated into English. If works already exist in translation, I use the published translations unless indicated by an asterisk.

theologians at this time developed a critical analysis of the place of popular religion for the transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean. Hence, from the same prologue, Gutierrez wrote that "the perspective of the Theology of Liberation, gave a new impulse to the experiences and to the studies in this terrain [popular religion]" (1978, 7)*. Gutierrez continued, "[t]aking one's distance from the approach of conservative groups in society, or the elitist and intellectual view from the modernizing sectors, a discourse on faith that intends to start from the poor masses of Latin America, one cannot but encounter on one's journey the reality and theme of popular religion" (1978,7)*. The above sentence encapsulates the rich complexity that liberation hermeneutics faced in the 1970s, especially in their attempts to anchor theology in the history of the "poor masses," but also in attempts to navigate a critique of both "conservatives groups" (the church of Christendom) and liberal elites from the "modernizing sectors" (developmentalism), for whom popular religion was either a traditional force to be instrumentalized in the war against modernity, or a superstition that impeded the progress of modernity in the region. Hence, the analysis of popular religion for liberationists was fraught with competing and polarizing perspectives, especially in the attempt to understand the impact of modernity in the region. However, with the publication of Irarrazaval's book in 1978, and in conjunction with important research being undertaken at this time, some liberation theologians entered the worlds of popular religion only to surface with a broader and more pluralistic perspective on Latin American and Caribbean identities. This thesis will trace the trajectories of liberationists, such as Diego Irarrazaval and Cristian Parker, whose accompaniment of popular religion has helped to shift the

5 dialogic horizons of Latin American and Caribbean discourses from notions of a Catholic substrate to perspectives based on religious and cultural pluralism. While it remains somewhat invisible in the 'First World,' the work of Irarrazaval and Parker on popular religion has been absolutely crucial for the development of "liberation theology" since its advent as a theological movement in Latin American and the Caribbean. The work they undertook on popular religion in the 1970s and 1980s cross-fertilized with other voices (Indigenous voices, for example) and helped to open up new possibilities for the development of liberation theologies in the region. These new possibilities were being shaped by the "new voices" in theology, what some called the "irruptions" (Oduyoye 1983) within the irruption of the poor as subjects of history. The liberationist accompaniment of popular religion by Irarrazaval as early as the mid-1970s, and later Parker in the early to mid-1980s, revealed that the work of solidarity with the poor was not only framed through economic categories, but also engaged culture as a determining factor for engaging 'the people' on their own terms. The work of Irarrazaval and Parker on popular religion demonstrates an early liberationist trajectory that pushed the boundaries of essentialist notions of 'the people' and the poor, and also, what it means to be Catholic in a place shaped by religious syncretism and cultural hybridity. We can no longer talk about a "Theology of Liberation," as Gutierrez called it in 1978, but only of a family of liberation theologies, inspired and challenged by the specific historical location of the "new voices" (Indigenous, feminist, Afro-American, etc.) and the specificities of how theologies are being done in these communities. Among these specificities, Irarrazaval's theology of fiesta (the festive) and Parker's notion of the otra logica (an/other logic) are good examples of how liberation theologies were engaging

6 Indigenous peoples on their own terms, namely through their own meaning systems and popular religious practices. The method of this research on Latin American/Caribbean popular religion is deeply rooted in liberationist hermeneutics. As a Catholic theologian, my anchor point for popular religion does not only derive from the two official magisteria, namely the bishops (pastoral) and professional theologians (academic), but from what Aloysius Pieris has called the "third magisterium": the experience of the excluded and vulnerable. Writing from his Asian context, Pieris argued that [t]he poor (the destitute, the dispossessed, the displaced, and the discriminated) who form the bulk of Asian people, plus their specific brand of cosmic religiosity, constitute a school where many Christian activists reeducate themselves in the art of speaking the language of God's reign, that is, the language of liberation which God speaks through Jesus. Neither the academic and pastoral magisterium is conversant with this evangelical idiom (1996,156).

Pieris' work offers a perspective that advances a liberationist perspective arising out of the plural "cosmic" religions of subaltern peoples. Pieris' approach epitomizes what I will call below crossroads theology because of his methodological emphasis on the option for the poor within a context of religious pluralism. In a paper given at a 1981 EATWOT (Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians) conference in New Delhi, Pieris argued that a liberation theology deeply rooted in the Asian context must challenge the over-reliance on economic frameworks evidenced in some Latin American liberation theology. In the same paper, Pieris also argued that some Latin American liberation theology was "against" religion, especially popular religion, and that this constituted a kind of "crypto-colonialism" for Asian theologies (1988, 89-90). Since the publication of this paper, some scholars have tended to divide Latin American liberation theologians with their focus on economic issues from Asian liberationists with their focus on culture. As my research will argue, this arrangement obscured the important early

7 work being done by some theologians in Latin America and the Caribbean in the area of popular religion. I will argue that the approach of Irarrazaval and Parker on popular religion constitutes a perspective that highlighted culture(s), especially Indigenous cultures, as a central ingredient in the transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Postcolonial Latin America and the Caribbean There is a modern Haitian proverb that says: "when the anthropologist arrives [to study Vodou2], the gods depart." In this proverb one may perceive the traces of 500 years of colonial domination in a country that has experienced the complete extermination of its Indigenous peoples, centuries of brutal slave practices, the establishment of a plantation economy, dictatorships, and ecological plunder, under Spanish, French, and American military control. But the proverb also speaks to the history of Christian missions3 in a land where the hybrid local forms of worship, such as Vodou, were characterized as idolatry, and where "anti-superstition campaigns" by the Catholic church continued to suppress Vodou worship into the twentieth century. The great avant-garde filmmaker and Vodou scholar Maya Deren wrote a book about her experiences studying and filming Vodou practices, entitled Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, which was originally published in 1953. This book is my starting point for developing a postcolonial hermeneutic. This is not because the author attempts to define

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I veer away from the spelling "voodoo," because of the history of colonial abuse that has marked this great Caribbean religious tradition. I use the spelling of Vodou, which is, according to scholar Leslie G. Desmangles, "phonetically more correct, and... corresponds to the nomenclature used by Haitians themselves for their religion." The francophone form Vaudou, which is based on French orthography, is also widely used among scholars (1992, xii). 3

. . .

The first anthropologists, centuries before its founding as an academic discipline, were Catholic missionaries. In Canada, for example, the Jesuit missionaries provided the oldest ethnographic records of First Nation peoples.

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postcolonialism as such, but because she captures something of the postcolonial religious ethos years before postcolonial theories began to develop. Deren writes: [w]hat emerges from this research is the fact that the African culture in Haiti was saved by the Indian culture which, in the Petro cult, provided the Negroes with divinities sufficiently aggressive (as was not true of the divinities of the generally stabilized African kingdoms) to be the moral force behind the revolution. In a sense, the Indians took their revenge on the white man through the Negro (1970, 11).

Even if Deren's language may reflect the more conservative times in which she was writing this book (the time of McCarthy era conservatism in the U.S.), her attention to hybrid religious forms among subaltern peoples as the "moral force" behind the Haitian revolution that broke out in 1796 is important for a postcolonial perspective on Latin American and Caribbean religious history. Unlike perspectives that define the history of cultural and religious metissage (mestizqje) of Latin America and the Caribbean as a fixed and once-and-for-all mixing through kinship ties, Deren was more mindful of power asymmetries and deployed the notion of hybridity as an anti-colonial strategy of resistance. Haiti is the first "Black republic" to emerge form the underside of colonialism and its anti-colonial struggles are rooted in its hybrid religious identity. Hence, one of the central aspects of my postcolonial perspective is a deep suspicion of frameworks that assign fixed and essentialist readings to Latin American and Caribbean identities, especially as they relate to popular religion. One of the most sophisticated theological critiques of colonialism (or more precisely neo-colonialism) in Latin America/Caribbean in the twentieth century surfaced in the 1960s with the theologies of liberation, which was what Gustavo Gutierrez later called an "irruption, or breaking-in of the poor within the historical processes of Latin America and within the life of the Christian community that constantly wells up from it" (1981, 108). Early in the development of liberation theologies, many theologians

9 critiqued contemporary forms of colonialism through dependency (dependentista) frameworks, and thus perceived 'Third World'4 dependency on the 'First World' as the continuation of the colonial legacy that began with the conquest of 1492. But as Gutierrez argued in 1980, the "irruption" of the poor from the underside of history is linked to "the character of the people as believing Christians" (1981, 113). Some liberationists, like Gutierrez, tended to frame their perspective within an understanding of Latin America as a predominantly Catholic continent. This tended to veil the plural reality of Indigenous religious practices of the Tseltal, Zapoteca, Quechuan, Aymaran, and Guarani peoples among others, or the practices of the heirs of black slaves, such as Vodou, Santerfa, Candomble, and so many other cosmovisions that make-up the religious countenance of Latin American and the Caribbean. Moreover, conservative thinkers, including the Latin American bishops at the CELAM (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano) meeting in Puebla (Mexico: 1979), argued that the continent had a Catholic soul, or substratum. The bishops argued that in the time period between the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries was formed "the basis of Latin American culture," a time when the "real Catholic substrate [was] constructed" (CELAM 1979, 184). In a book written about twelve years after the Puebla CELAM meeting, and in conjunction with the 500th commemoration of the conquest, the Brazilian liberationist Leonardo Boff wrote that the "the celebrated 'radically Catholic substrate' of 'Latin American culture' is a consequence of the conquest of souls" (1991, 11). Boff was careful to use the terms "radically Catholic substrate" and "Latin American culture" 4

Following Vijay Prashad, it is useful to remember here that the "Third World was not a place. It was a project. During the seemingly interminable battles against colonialism, the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America dreamed of a new world. They longed for dignity above all else, but also the basic necessities of life (land, peace, and freedom)" (2007, xv). I continue to use the term 'Third World' out of a commitment for this Utopian project and the hope that a new world is still possible.

10 between quotes in order to emphasize their contested and contentious nature, but, more importantly, he highlighted the point that these notions are themselves a product of a colonial history. Boff asked the question: "can one speak of a Latin American culture?" His response is unambiguous, and I might add, particularly interesting from a postcolonial perspective: Latin American culture as a meaningful identity is a myth. The colonial and neocolonial invasion, which is still going on today, has reached to the heart of the forces that produce culture. Everywhere is division, the infiltration of the invader into the world of the invaded, the fundamental duality of native and foreign. Despite the process of domination, we can say that, in many resistance and liberation movements among Indians and blacks, as well as workers and intellectuals integrated into these movements, the germs of a Latin American culture, a future convergence of Indians, blacks, mestizos, and immigrant peoples, is underway in seminal form (1991,13).

This quote exemplifies a shifting direction that liberationist hermeneutics were beginning to map out in the early 1990s. This was a time that corresponded with decisive and radical changes in Latin America/Caribbean and the world. By calling attention to what he calls a "fundamental duality between native and foreign," Boff also reminds us that this history of domination is also bringing about a "future of convergence" among subaltern peoples. With this quote Boff demonstrated a specifically Latin American way of linking liberationist hermeneutics with postcolonial concerns. Boff's quote upholds a conflictive liberationist "option for the poor," while also recognizing the irreducible character of pluralism and hybridity. Hybridity, from the Latin hybrida, meaning the offspring of two different animals or plants, or something of heterogeneous composition, is employed here in order to highlight the often dismissed and devalued strategic syncretisms of marginalized peoples. I use the term hybridity to point to broader cultural processes at work in these globalized tiempos mixtos in Latin America/Caribbean of which religious syncretism is a central aspect. Moreover, I am not interested in engaging the highly abstract postcolonial theory of Homi Bhabha, who is an

11 important exponent of hybridity5. Instead, I will use the term hybridity in a dialogic manner in order to point to some trajectories liberationists have carved in their theological examinations of popular religion. The notion of hybridity that informs this thesis is closer to the definition developed by the Mexican cultural theorist, Nestor Garcia Canclini, as an (unfixed) strategy of entering and leaving modernity: "The whole crisis of modernity, traditions, and their historical combination leads to a postmodern problematic6 (not a phase) in the sense that the modern explodes and is mixed with what is not modern; it is affirmed and debated at the same time" (1995, 266). As I will show in chapter three, Canclini's definition is very analogous to what Parker called the "hemidernal" in his work on popular religion: "popular culture and religion are both antiand pro-modernistic" (1993, 115). The understanding of hybridity that interests me is not a space in-between zones of purity (hybridity vs. purity), but an understanding of hybridity all the way down. I fully agree with Boff's perspective on religious syncretism: "[p]ure Christianity does not exist, never has existed, never can exist" (1985, 92). While not as starkly pejorative as the notion of syncretism in 'official' theologies, hybridity has derogatory resonances within the Christian tradition; it is often understood as an affront to a 'pure' doctrine or gospel, or as an attack on the dignity of 'pure' or 'authentic' ancient cultures; it is also perceived as relativizing the boundaries of orthodoxy, and feared for assimilating differences. Following R.S Sugirtharajh, I understand hybrid processes to be "not about the dissolution of differences, but about the

See Bhabha, The Location of Culture: "[Hybridity] unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power... the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybriditization rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions..." (1994, 112). I avoid the use of the term postmodern throughout this thesis and agree with Parker that "popular culture is not properly postmodern (for that matter "postmodernism" is not a very clear term, and the debate over it is still confused), but neither is it a premodern counterculture" (1993, 115).

12 renegotiating the structure of power built on differences" (2002, 191). Leela Gandhi argues that a postcolonial focus on hybridity starts from the idea that "the political subject of decolonization is herself a new entity, engendered by the encounter between two conflicting systems of belief' (1998, 130). Referencing Stuart Hall, Gandhi further argues that "anti-colonial identities do not owe their origins to a pure and stable essence," but are "produced in response to contingencies of a traumatic and disruptive breach in history and culture" (1998, 130). This thesis will argue that those liberationists who accompanied the pueblo in their own religious expressions, with their fiestas, their syncretisms and otras logicas, were crucial in helping forge the changes that Boff's quote pointed to above. While Leonardo Boff's work is not the focal point of my research, his interrogation of syncretism in 1981, in his book Church: Charism and Power, helped to establish early on in the development of liberation theologies a questioning of the idea of a fixed Catholic Latin American culture. Before the "irruption" from the underside of history proposed by liberation theologians, theologies of Christendom blessed the history of colonial domination in Latin America and the Caribbean, which was also a history that dichotomously classified pure orthodoxy against the contaminated practices of Indigenous and enslaved populations. Hence, I rework the Haitian proverb within the context of my own research: "when the theologian arrives [to study popular religion], G*d7 departs." In other words, for professional observers from the 'official' church, popular religion has often been described as an area lacking G*d's saving presence. Yet for its practitioners on the 7

I write G*d with an asterisk to veer away from oppressive perspectives that assign exclusionary traits to the divine in the Christian tradition. This spelling is thus closer to those Biblical sources that posit G*d as a transcendent and ineffable presence made known through revelation (Exodus 3). In the Christian Testament, G*d is revealed in the person of Jesus who proclaimed a reign for the uninvited of the Roman empire through healings and commensal practices. Hence, the traits associated with G*d in my liberationist reading are linked to Jesus' practices of healing and repairing exclusions.

13 ground, the daily theology-making within popular religious practices encompasses a complex understanding of the divine that does not fit neatly into the categories of professional theologians. Within a colonial dynamic, popular religion has often been assigned the role of primitive 'other' to so-called 'normative' church teachings. Hence, for many theologians within the church of Christendom, the popular religious practices of the people are absent of G*d's saving grace and mired in idolatrous syncretism. This is also true in the modern period insofar as the legacy of colonial constructs continued to shape the discourses of theology. As I will show, from the mid-to-late seventies, some liberationists repudiated elite (mis)conceptions about popular religion, not only in its colonial guises (as idolatrous syncretism) but also in its modern liberal (as superstition) and radical guises (as alienation). The concern of this thesis will be to examine liberation theologies from Latin America and the Caribbean that attempted to take seriously the popular religious practices and symbolic language of subaltern peoples. This was happening at a time and in a place that was experiencing deep historical transformations with radical shifts in the boundaries of religious expression. As theologians grappled with the complex, uneven, and mixed processes of modernity in the region, those theologians acutely preoccupied with popular religion played an important role in transforming Latin American theology, especially the areas of pluralism, intercultural, and interreligious perspectives. One of the contributions of this thesis is to bring into dialogue the areas of postcolonial studies with liberation hermeneutics. I will argue that liberationist work on popular religion paved the way for an interest in religious and cultural pluralism which dispel essentialist notions of Latin America/Caribbean as a Catholic continent with a fixed substratum. Another

14 Brazilian theologian, Paolo Suess, prophetically noted as far back as 1986 that "[pjopular religion will... -in the long run-make the Church a place where a Pentecost plurality of tongues becomes the normal way of praising God" (1986, 126). This Pentecost perspective has always been present at the grassroots level and among subaltern peoples. Hence, the research I am developing is a modest attempt to recognize and promote this pluralism.

Crossroads Theology: Liberationist and Postcolonial I name the methodology that I am undertaking crossroads theology, which is inspired by the French term carrefour. The term carrefour is not simply a meeting place, or a place of intersection of two or more roads, as in its English usage. Its French meaning is more resonant with the notion of dialogic place or, more precisely, a place where opposed ideas meet and confront each other. Liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics have been constructed as rivals in recent scholarship, the former falling into the camp of modernity (as if modernity were only one thing), with its Utopias of universal liberation, and the latter in the camp of postmodernity (again in a monolithic way), with its suspicion of totalizing worldviews. My work is a kind of methodological carrefour where both liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics meet and confront each other, indirectly reflecting some recent voices in Latin American liberation theology that have developed a liberationist framework imbued with postcolonial concerns, especially as they relate to popular religion, even when not explicitly named as such. I locate this theological carrefour at the intersection of liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics, where the option for the poor/excluded, with its emphasis on

15 liberative praxis and historical context, can meet the postcolonial emphasis on pluralism and hybridity and its suspicion of totalizing Utopias. In this manner, the proposed carrefour does not lose sight of a critical evaluation of popular religion, nor fall prey to an understanding of hybridity that veils colonial asymmetries and presupposes an "eternal everyday" bereft of history. In other words, the liberationist critique of religious oppression reminds us that not all religious practices are liberating, while the postcolonial emphasis on the everyday and hybridity reminds us that the experience of liberation may assume plural forms and strategies. This theological carrefour prioritizes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of popular religion, engaging with the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, political economy, history, and cultural studies. This proposed methodology enables me to relate current liberationist developments to other emerging hermeneutical discussions and identify points of convergence with these new voices. Thus, this hybrid methodology seeks to cross-fertilize key liberationist insights (such as the option for the poor/excluded) with key notions in postcolonial theories (such as hybridity) in order to theologically navigate the complex world of popular religion and to create a dialogic bridge with other important hermeneutical voices, such as feminist, Afro-American, and Indigenous perspectives. As a person of mixed southern Italian and French-Canadian/Quebecois heritage, the labeling of my methodology as crossroads theology springs from my personal experience of transnational religious practice, in which resides a profound crossroads experience. I am the son of a southern Italian migrant mother and a Quebecois father, and I grew up with opposed perspectives on popular religion. On the Italian side, I experienced a wealth of symbolic traditions carried over from rural Calabria in the 1950s.

16 Some of these practices have been characterized by a history of "orientalist" (Said 1978) discourses. For example, the designation of southern Italy as "the Indies of Europe" by eighteenth century Jesuits came about because the often syncretic practices of southerners were perceived to be as "pagan" as the religions of America's Indigenous peoples. On my father's side, I grew up with a post-Quiet Revolution suspicion of popular religion, because of its appropriation by the elite clerical class in order to maintain Catholic hegemony in Quebec. Hence my interest in both postcolonial ("Indies of Europe") and liberationist (liberation from hegemony) hermeneutics came together in the cotidiano of my family home. Moreover, many years of faith-based activism in the Student Christian Movement (SCM), and the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) instilled in me a deep commitment to the work of social justice, the support of ecumenical diversity and religious pluralism, and a radical engagement in global solidarity through an option for the poor and excluded. However, I approach the world of Latin American and Caribbean popular religion as a 'First World' man with only a partial and limited understanding of rich tapestry of expression that exists at the grassroots level. Hence, this study is based primarily on texts by liberation theologians who have accompanied communities in their popular religious expressions in a few very specific places. I have included at the beginning of each chapter short "experiential moments" that point to the themes being discussed in the individual chapters, and that highlight my experiences with friends and colleagues who spent much time helping me to visit shrines, attend fiestas, photocopy books and articles in libraries, and who engaged in dialogue with me on the role of popular religion in their own specific contexts. In this respect, I am indebted to my

17 friends in the WSCF for welcoming me into their churches and homes and for reminding me that the work of theology is always about friendship and mutual dialogue. This study is not meant to be an exhaustive treatise on the theological developments of liberation theologies through their accompaniment of popular religion. The world of liberationist hermeneutics and the world of popular religion cannot be contained in a single study. This research is a modest endeavor in critically evaluating a few key moments at the intersection of liberation theologies and popular religion in Latin America and the Caribbean. Theological accompaniment is an important underlying theme in this thesis insofar as some liberationists have accompanied a pueblo who is moving forward through history —walking with Jesus and proclaiming the reign. As I will show in chapter two, Irarrazaval explained that when the religious processions stop and pause, every new movement forward is punctuated with the words: "let us move forward brothers (sic)!" (1992, 316)*. This research attempts to capture this forward movement in the work of some liberation theologians, not as an optimistic progress narrative, but as a movement of eschatological hope for a transformed world. I am not inventing a methodology in this thesis, but only labeling the methodological sources that inspire my work as an engaged Catholic theologian in solidarity with 'Third World' peoples struggling to navigate the very hostile world of neoliberal globalization and empire. Thus, the methodology that I will develop here will scan the crossroads of liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics, arguing that my examination of liberationist hermeneutics will profit from a cross-fertilization with elements of postcolonial theory, especially as I examine popular religion. As R.S. Sugirtharajah suggests, "[l]iberationist hermeneutics and postcolonialism share mutual

18 agendas and goals..." (2002, 122). But unlike Sugirtharajah, I will not posit postcolonialism as a rival to liberationist concerns; nor do I understand it as a new postmodern development that outshines an older modernist one (2002, 103). An important methodological question thus arises from my initial proposal. Why attempt to bring together liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics when Latin American liberationists themselves do not identify with postcolonial currents? While postcolonialism is not a term often used by Latin American liberation theologians (unlike Asian theologians), my reference to it as a theologian in solidarity with the aims of liberationist hermeneutics is to make a case for the ways in which liberationists engage postcolonial concerns without explicitly using the term. In her entry on postcolonialism in the Dictionary of Third World Theologies, Wong Wai Ching, former Chair of the WSCF and professor of religion at the University of Hong Kong, reminds us that "without using the term, Third World theologians have, since their inception engaged themselves in a postcolonial task when they challenge the Western construction of Christianity and reformulate contextual theologies that aim to free themselves from being a tool of the colonial masters" (2000, 169-170). For example, very early in the movement's history, Latin American liberationists often attempted to distinguish their own contextual theologies from the theologies of Europe, especially the political theologies from Germany. Yet, while they unmasked European 'universal' claims as colonial incursions, they often did this through a Western framework. I will argue in this thesis that the works of Diego Irarrazaval (Indigenous models) and Cristian Parker (syncretic models) constitute semi-ruptures with this reliance on Western models.

19 Postcolonial theory can help uncover and articulate this different trajectory within liberationist hermeneutics and further elucidate key issues at the heart of liberationist concerns for popular religion.

A Subaltern Approach to Popular Religion An important aspect of my crossroads method is a subaltern approach to religion, which I trace back to Antonio Gramsci. Following Otto Maduro's Religion and Social Conflicts (1982; Spanish: 1979), all religious phenomena operates in the midst of concrete social conflicts shaped by asymmetrical power relations arising out of specific historical circumstances. Thus, any approach that attempts to take seriously the religious practices of 'the people' must invariably begin with the history of conquest (1492) and its ensuing impact on the peoples' religious worldviews, symbol systems, and practices. Moreover, following Maduro's critical Marxist theory of religion, which seeks to reformulate the relationship between class conflict and religion, the religious terrain is understood here not solely as an "inert and passive product of such conflicts," but as a relatively autonomous agent in relation to, and an active force within, the dynamics of social conflict and the transformation of an unjust social order (1982,79). However, this study moves beyond the notions that asymmetrical power relations can be reduced to class conflict, and that the regulation of social life must be equated to modes of production. Indigenous and feminist theologies, as well as their related movements in Latin America, have demonstrated the dangers of such reductionisms, while not

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abandoning the importance of analyzing class conflict in the formation of social relations.8 Gramsci, who died in an Italian prison cell during Mussolini's fascist regime (1937), attempted to re-formulate the strategies of the subaltern classes in relation to the domination of the elite. Gramsci argued against Lenin that the winning of hegemonic consent, namely the winning of the hearts and minds of the people, was a pre-condition to the seizing of revolutionary power in Western capitalist democracies. Gramsci's work remains somewhat elusive and vague to the contemporary reader because of the conditions in which much of it was written. Gramsci wrote in a fascist prison with a deteriorating health and was forced to use coded language in order for his texts to pass prison censors. He died from complications related to pulmonary tuberculosis, high blood pressure, angina, and gout. Situating the context of Gramsci's writings alerts us to the debates which continue to rage on the actual meaning of some of his terminology (such as his definition of ideology in relation to his notion of hegemony). It is thus important to note that Gramsci's work has been appropriated with divergent readings by both orthodox Marxist-Leninists at one extreme on the left-wing spectrum and New Leftists on the other. Gramsci's work is extremely important in the development of cultural studies (especially in the U.K.), postcolonial criticism and subaltern theories. His works signal a watershed in the development of the awareness of subaltern subjectivity, and a non-

For feminist perspectives, see Mercy Amba Oduyoye, "Reflections from a Third World Woman's Perspective: Women's Experience and Liberation Theologies" (1983), and Ivone Gebara, "Women Doing Theology in Latin America" (1994; originally in 1988). For Indigenous perspectives, see Encuentro de la Teologia India, Sabiduria indigena, fuente de esperanza: Tercer encuentro latinoamerica.no (1997); Teologia India 11: Segundo encuentro latinoamericano (1994); Teologia India: Primer encuentro latinoamericana (1991).

21 reductionist approach to the often-dismissed sphere of religion in Marxist theory. Ileana Rodriguez insists that Gramsci's work "marks the moment of the slippage of culture and the 'history of the subaltern classes' into politics" (2001, 6). Moreover, Gramsci's work has been very influential in the study of religion in Italy, as well as in Latin America/Caribbean, because it critiqued orthodox Marxist perspectives that tend to reduce religion to a form of alienation, or that it serves but one function in society: namely, the maintenance and cohesion of the status quo. Because of his birth in Sardinia and his related interest with the 'southern question' (la questione meridionale), Gramsci was particularly sensitive to popular religion, to folklore, and to common sense philosophy. For Gramsci, the subaltern classes produced their own forms of religion, which are relatively autonomous in relation to the religious worldview of the elite. Gramsci distinguished between different levels of social formation with respect to religion and called on his Marxists peers to take seriously the ideological framework of the subaltern classes. In this sense, Gramsci's definition of ideology could be classified as 'positive' (or neutral), unlike the 'critical' definition given to the term by Marx. Writing about the "religion of the people" within a broader analysis of folklore, Gramsci argued that "[fjolklore must not be considered an eccentricity, an oddity or a picturesque element, but something which is very serious and to be taken seriously" (1985, 191). Thus, I critically draw on Gramsci as a starting point here in order to examine the subaltern experience of popular religion from a liberationist perspective. My appropriation will remain focused on the subaltern classes as conflictive and active agents of social change.

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While it is always in the interest of the dominant classes to direct the subaltern classes, both materially and through symbolic power (hegemony), there remains within the dynamics of the dominated classes an element of resistance. This work on subaltern religious practices will look at how some liberation theologians attempted to articulate this resistance. Most liberationists agreed with Maduro that in the religious terrain, "[fjaced with domination, the dominated always, somehow, offer resistance" (1982,75). A few also disagreed with the mainstream Marxist characterization that the often chaotic, disorganized, token, and often hidden forms of resistance, not to mention the symbolic levels of resistance so prominent in the subaltern classes, do not constitute effective forms of resistance to hegemonic incursions. What can be perceived as a lack of autonomy vis-a-vis hegemony on the public stage can reveal, in the words of James C. Scott, a "hidden transcript" of resistance and protest. As I will show in chapter two, the traditions of fiesta in the consciousness of the Latin American/Caribbean subaltern subject reveal a more complex phenomenon of struggle, resistance, and protest than perceived in the discourses of some earlier forms of Marxism. I highlight a critical subaltern approach here, because it tends to frame the resistance of the dominated usually in terms of how a dominant conception of world is reformulated by the dominated into a potential form of resistance or protest. Black theology in the U.S. has used this method with respect to the strategies devised by slaves through elements imparted to them in the religion of the slave-masters. James Cone has reflected on a subaltern perspective in his examination of the development of spirituals and blues within the context of slavery. In thinking about the otherworldly sense of resignation imparted to slaves by their slave-masters, Cone writes that "[t]here were doubtless some

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black slaves who literally waited on God, expecting on God to effect their liberation in response to their faithful passivity, but there is another side of the Black experience to be weighed" (1972, 36). The subaltern approach is concerned with this "other side" of cultural and symbolic production, which tends to be dismissed by orthodox Marxist analyses that understand these elements as alienating and solely determined by the material base. In the 1970s and 1980s, Black liberation theologians argued with Latin American liberation theologians that Marxist models tended to subsume the reality of race under class categories, thus underplaying the experience of racism (Cone 1981). Hence, I highlight a subaltern approach to popular religion with some hesitation and apprehension. Some Marxist models have deployed Eurocentric perspectives in their evaluation of the popular religion. Thus, this attempt at underlining a subaltern approach to popular religion eschews reductive Marxist perspectives on culture and on religion. In 1982, Cornel West asserted quite persuasively that, while Gramsci provides a valuable framework for understanding culture as an autonomous sphere, "the Gramscian stream is Leninist in spirit..." (1982, 137). West argued that "[tjherefore the Gramsciam stream leans toward a progressive or left-wing Marxism, but remains tied to regressive or rightwing Marxism owing to its avowed neo-Leninism. Gramscianism is to Marxism what neo-orthodoxy is to Christianity: an innovative revision of dogmas for dogmatic purposes" (1982, 137). But the appeal to Gramsci in this methodology is not to reinscribe an elitist, dogmatic, or what I will refer to as a vanguardist perspective, but to remain close to a critical Marxist trajectory that is respectful of popular culture and religion. This critical Marxist trajectory has its own critical voices and "irruptions within

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the irruption," and the work of Gramsci has helped to open the door for new possibilities to emerge, especially in the terrain of culture. In 1985, postcolonial theorist, Gayatri Spivak wrote her now famous article "Can the Subaltern Speak?" With this challenge Spivak interrogated the role of the scholar/academic in attempting to speak for, or on behalf of, subaltern peoples, especially women. Her "utterly unanswerable, half-serious, and half-parodic" challenge followed in the wake of the appearance of the Subaltern Studies group and circulated among postcolonial critics in texts, conferences, and conversations for almost a decade after its publication (Gandhi 1998, 2). In the early 1980s, the Subaltern studies group, a collective of intellectuals who sought to "revise the 'elitism' of colonialists and bourgeoisnationalists in the historiography of Indian nationalism," appeared on the academic scene among South-Asian scholars in Britain (Chaturvedi 2000, vii). The Subaltern Studies project questioned the elitist nature of nationalist historiography in India and attempted to allow the occluded voices of the voiceless speak for themselves and recount their own histories. Leela Gandhi writes, "subaltern studies defined itself as an attempt to allow the 'people' finally to speak within the jealous pages of elitist historiography and, in doing so, to speak for, or to sound the muted voices of, the truly oppressed" (1998, 2). This historiographic championing of the voiceless is not without precedent. E. P. Thompson's 1964 history of the British working-classes, The Making of the English Working Class, was an obvious pre-cursor and a profoundly influential text. But the Subaltern Studies group developed out of a postcolonial perspective that took notice first and foremost of the history of colonialism. According to Chaturvedi, "by the end of the 1980s, Subaltern Studies was the most dynamic sector within the emerging disciplines of

postcolonial theory and cultural studies..." (2000, vii). Moreover, in the early 1990s, a Latin American Subaltern Studies group was founded in the U.S. and published research on the notion of "subalternity" specific to the Latin American region. Rodriguez writes that the group was founded in the "wake of the Sandinistas' defeat in the 1990 elections in Nicaragua" by a "small group of friends and colleagues who despaired over world politics" (2001, 1). Rodriguez writes that the Latin American Subaltern Studies project attempted "to understand the limits of previous hermeneutics [elite and liberal] by challenging culture to think of itself from the point of view of its own negations" (2001, 9). In theology, the subaltern studies approach was discussed by Robert J. Schreiter in his important 1985 book, Constructing Local Theologies, in relation to his appreciative study of popular religion. Schreiter analysed both positive and negative evaluations of popular religion in his book, and described the subaltern approach as the positive face of the more negative Marxist perspective. On one hand, Schreiter argued that the Marxist perspective, and by this he means elite vanguard Marxist models, understands "popular religion as false consciousness imposed by the ruling class upon the proletariat" (1985, 132). On the other hand, Schreiter argued that the subaltern approach is "inspired by the reflections of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci," who "varied the classical Marxist approach to religion and proposed that the religion of the proletarian (or subaltern class, as he termed it) could not be understood entirely as having been imposed by the ruling class" (1985, 136). For Schreiter, the subaltern approach highlights an "important aspect of popular religion often overlooked, namely, that the symbolic world of popular religion can provide one of the few resources of identity over which an oppressed people can

26 exercise some control of their lives" (1985, 137). This is the approach that is most clearly reflected in the work of Irarrazaval and Parker and is the starting point for my examination of their works. One cannot highlight a subaltern approach to popular religion, however, and occlude its relationship to postcolonial theory. Postcolonialism is a critical theory within the family of theories of emancipation; it does not indicate that we are in a historical moment that has progressed beyond colonialism. Colonialism does not end with the end of an occupation; the Americas are still deeply entrenched in colonial relations.9 Postcolonial theory attempts to understand the everyday processes of the (post)colonial subject, especially as s/he tends to subvert and resist rather than invert the Manichean oppositions of the colonial world. But as R.S. Sugirtharajah asserts, postcolonialism is a style of enquiry that challenges dominant forms of knowledge; it encompasses a "variety of concerns, oppositional stances, and even contradictory positions" (2002, 11). There is no one postcolonial theory to which I adhere, but a trajectory of thinking that puts first the plural everyday symbolic worlds of subaltern peoples as a survival strategy in the midst of (neo)colonial relations of power. I follow a postcolonial perspective here, not an abstract postcolonial theory, a perspective that is focused on the multiple systems of bricolage of subaltern peoples as a means of negotiating these "mixed times." Gandhi defines colonialism "as the process whereby the 'West' attempts systematically to cancel or negate the cultural difference and value of the 'non-West.'" (1998, 16). Hence, I advance a postcolonial perspective that highlights pluralism and difference as a strategy 9

Sugirtharajah writes that "... several critics contend and recognize that, when it is used with a hyphen, 'postcolonial,' the term is seen as indicating the historical period aftermath of colonialism, and without the hyphen, 'postcolonial,' as signifying a reactive resistance discourse..." (2002,13). For a good critique of the 'post-colonial' historical moment from an Indigenous perspective, see Jace Weaver, ""From I-Hermeneutics to We-Hermeneutics: Native Americans and the Post-Colonial" (1998).

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of contestation against colonial claims that seek to impose fixed and stable identities. And finally, I advance a postcolonial perspective that underscores the agency of subaltern peoples as creators of their own cultures. I again return to the work of Schreiter who, in his 1997 book The New Catholicity, argued against essentialist readings of culture, especially the integrated concept of culture put forward in the papal encyclicals of John Paul II and elsewhere, and argued for a postcolonial reading that understands culture as something to be constructed. Schreiter wrote that in postcolonial theory culture is not understood in terms of ideas and objects, but principally as a ground of contest of relations. Notions of power tend to disappear behind the curtain in integrated concepts of culture, but in globalized concepts power is foregrounded. Culture is something to be constructed rather than discovered, and it is constructed on the stage of struggle amid the asymmetries of power. It is mapped out on the axes of sameness and difference, comparability and incommensurability, cohesion, and dispersion, collaboration and resistance. Diversity is prized, but difference is valued even more highly. Culture, especially from the perspective of minority groups and the colonized, disrupts the homogenous narratives of the powerful. This is accomplished through disrupting the smooth relationship between meaning and reference, shattering the mirror of representation to show that things are really not what they seem to be. Culture in this sense strives to establish a "third space" between the self and other, beyond the colonizer and colonized. Identity too is a concern in globalized concepts of culture, but identity is always viewed as fragmentary or multiple, constructed and imagined (1997, 54).

Schreiter's view is the postcolonial perspective fermenting among liberationists for whom popular religion has been central. Popular religion has always been intimately tied up to the question of culture in Latin American theology. Some identified popular religion with essentialist or integrated notions of culture, but the theologians I will examine have developed a notion of culture that corresponds with the postcolonial emphasis on the everyday production of cultural processes within the context of power asymmetries.

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What is Popular Religion? Even if the term 'popular religion' seems to denote a monolithic religious experience, it should never be understood as a singular unitary experience. Any attempt at a single over-arching self-enclosed definition will ultimately fall prey to reductionism. I will not propose a definition of popular religion in this work, only fragments for a description of its reality in Latin America and the Caribbean through the work of liberation theologians and liberationist-inspired theologians. In fact, the research for this thesis can be seen as an attempt to address some expressions of popular religion through the many-faceted lenses of liberation theologies. While the term tends to convey singularity, popular religion constitutes a multiplicity of practices and a complex tapestry of religious beliefs. Popular religion is a phenomenon that is messy, contradictory, paradoxical, and highly contested among theologians, scholars of religion, anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural and political theorists. In the early 1980s, Irarrazaval argued that "popular religion does not exist. There only exists, and one can only study, the religious practices of concrete subjects in specific social conditions" (1980, 12)*. In other words, abstract definitions that are divorced from history will always fall short of the powerful complexity, the plural realities, and the symbolic density that is constitutive of popular religion. Cristian Parker argued against defining popular religion as a conceptual abstraction that blurs very "real differences that make up the texture of concrete religions and cultures" (1996, 88). However, he also believes that "the plurality is not absolute or chaotic," arguing that "there exists certain identifiable common traits" (1996, 88). Among these common traits, Parker mentioned "oral tradition, ancestral roots (native

29 American, African, and Iberian, among the majority of Latin America), class styles, historical memory, and finally, popular creativity" (1996, 88). For some theologians, popular religion is simply a life-giving space that is creative, and festive; it is an intersecting space, a public/private crossroads, where diversity and difference are signs of G*d's coming reign. As mentioned earlier, for the Brazilian theologian Paulo Suess, "popular religion... will-in the long run-make the Church a space where the Pentecostal plurality of tongues becomes the normal way of praising God" (1986, 126). Hence, for Suess, popular religious practices are expressions of the pluralism that already exists in the grassroots of the church, which are concrete signs of G*d's reign in a world that seeks to homogenize difference in the margins. I will continue to use the term 'popular religion' with an attentiveness to how, as Irarrazaval claimed, the term can abstract from reality, but also following Parker, with an emphasis on how the term encompasses identifiable traits and perspectives. Irarrazaval begins his entry on popular religion in the Dictionary of Third World Theologies in this way: "[w]ithin the great meaning systems and the mosaic of religious traditions are semiindependent forms of popular religion" (2000d, 167). While Irarrazaval calls attention to the pluralism of the world's meaning systems and religious traditions, he also reminds us that "popular religion" (in all its forms) is an important phenomenon within all of the them. Situating this research within a postcolonial perspective, I understand part of my work as challenging essentialisms that have plagued some discussions about popular religion, such as the notion that popular religion with its history of mestizqje forms the core of 'Latin American identity.' As with the term syncretism, this work will not avoid utilizing the contested and controversial term popular religion, which has acquired

30 pejorative meanings in some elitist-minded circles. In doing so, I want to challenge the assumptions on which these meanings are based. I perceive my own research on liberationist perspectives on popular religion as part of a process that is attempting to recover the term from decades of institutional misuse and belittlement. As Schreiter wrote, [t]he late twentieth century has witnessed a resurgence of theological interest in popular religious forms of expression. For long time popular religion was by and large denigrated by theologians as a way of expressing faith that needed to be overcome sooner or later by a more sophisticated understanding of the gospel. Devotions, processions, pious associations, and places of pilgrimage seemed to many religious leaders to be realities that would pass away with liturgical renewal and a more Word-centered spirituality (1985,122).

Still on the margins of theological discourses, the distinctiveness of popular religion is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. Popular religion can be described in many ways: the practitioners of popular religion characterize the divine in providential ways, but also in ways that are immanent and close to the everyday; popular religion is characterized by a predominantly lay emphasis and is rooted in oral cultures that prioritize performance/drama; popular religion has developed as a "little tradition" alongside and in relation to the "great traditions"; popular religious expressions are located at the crossroads of home and public square as the locus of their immense creativity; popular religion is also frequently distinguished by women-centered participation and leadership and centered on the realities of lo cotidiano, the mundane and ordinary; popular religion is a system of values firmly anchored in symbols and focused on this-worldly rituals and processions that favour a spirituality of the tangible and bodily; popular religious practices emphasize visual images of the sacred and the divine, and are often very affective and rooted in the everyday milagro (miracle); popular religious practices have shown a potential for protest and contestation, are tightly related

31 to fiesta and carnival and nurture a vision of the reign of G*d structured by healing practices (sanation!curancion); finally, the religion of the people tends to be characterized by cultural hybridity and religious syncretism. I avoid using the term 'popular religiosity' to describe popular religion, because it reflects an elitist theological tradition that defines the religion of the people as either a quaint folkloric practice on the verge of extinction, or as a superstitious/magical deviation from 'official' Catholicism. The French equivalent, religiosite,10 derives from nineteenth century Catholic theology where it designated the emotional excess of some practices (in an obviously gendered fashion) considered to be in opposition to the 'true' faith. Hence, the term 'popular religiosity' has a ring of belittlement to it that is rooted in a history of elite classification systems. Also, I avoid the term 'popular Catholicism' for it domesticates and white washes the syncretic and plural realities of these practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the one hand, naming the practices 'popular Catholicism' renders the more explosive aspects of popular religion more acceptable, or more tolerable. On the other hand, the use of term 'popular Catholicism' is similar to the understanding of 'popular religiosity' above. The popular placed in front of Catholicism shifts the definition of Catholicism from the orthodoxy of its hierarchy to deficient unorthodox or second-class elements. Notwithstanding essentialist theories that define popular religion as the essence of Latin American Catholic identity (i.e., the Latin American Catholic substrate), popular religion is not only about Catholicism; it The French dictionary, Le lexis (1988), still defines religiosite as: "Attitude religieuse fondee sur la sensibilite, au detriment de lafoi veritable" [religious attitude based on affect or emotion, which is detrimental to true faith]. Orlando Espin also notes that he "avoids the use of the term 'religiosity,' often applied to this symbolic system, because of the implied ideological (and dismissive) judgment on the people's religion" (1997, 105). More recently, Latin American liberationists, such as Irarrazaval, tend to use the term "religion popular" rather than the term "religiosidadpopular," which was predominant in the 1970s and 1980s. See Irarrazaval, "Religion popular" (1990). On the other hand, Irarrazaval is also careful to note that when the term popular religion used within some "ecclesial circles... the term indicates the religious condition of humanity (as preparation for the Gospel)" (1999a, 282)*.

32

encompasses much more than the "great traditions" of Catholicism have been able to control or even understand. However, while "the great traditions" of Catholicism cannot contain popular religion, they have been, and continue to be, important in the historical development of popular religion in Latin America and the Caribbean, not to mention in the development of 'official' Catholicism in the region as well. From a liberationist perspective, the study of popular religion brings one into contact with the survivors of conquest, colonial evangelization, religious vandalism, the so-called "extirpation of idols," cultural genocide, and the vanquishment of Indigenous divinities. In writing about sixteenth century Mexico, the French historian Serge Gruzinski wrote that "[b]y breaking idols and demolishing pyramids, the invaders demonstrated the total impotence of the old gods. Even if such acts did not suffice to prove the gods' total nonexistence, the shock was serious" (2002,46). Gustavo Gutierrez also reminded us that the "Quechuan people of my country considered the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century to be a cataclysm... They had a Quechua word for this great reversal. It was a pachacuti" (1981, 112). Popular religion, according to Orlando Espfn's definition, is a religious system built on an experience of vanquishment: "the birth of this continent's modern history, as we have come to know it, took place under the signs of conquest and defeat for the vast majority..." (1997, 36). What is at stake here are religious systems constructed by a people profoundly wounded by what Aloysius Pieris called the "colonial Christ" of Christendom (1988, 59). However, while popular religion still bears the marks of the traumatic conquest and of slavery, it also bears, in its many manifestations, prophetic signs of "rebellious hope" against the many attempts by the 'official' church to equate the ecclesiastically "orthodox" with the hegemonic (Espm

33

1997,102-104). In other words, while some popular religious practices are marked by vanquishment, some are also systems of survival and resistance, radical re-interpretations of the Christian G*d brought to the Americas by the conquistadores. From a postcolonial perspective, which is a critical theory of resistance drawing attention to the importance of minority and subjugated voices, one cannot but notice how some aspects of the 'Catholic' content in popular religion have been often re-shaped by 'other' religious and cultural systems that have themselves been shaped by the experience of vanquishment. A postcolonial perspective on popular religion does not examine these practices with the intent of rooting-out the impure, corrupt, or unorthodox, but attempts to understand them as a resistance discourses of the colonized who critically interrogate dominant knowledge systems. The study of popular religion on its own terms is central for understanding the contemporary role of religion in Latin America and the Caribbean which, under the impact of globalization(s), is experiencing important developments. Moreover, interreligious collaboration has become a central area for the work of social justice in the midst of religious diversity, and in Latin American and the Caribbean the face of religious diversity can be witnessed in the popular religious practices of the people. This is not merely a Catholic reality; it encompasses many traditions (such as Vodou, Santeria, Candomble, Pentecostalism, the religious systems of Indigenous peoples, etc.) as contact points. The repeated assertions by bishops and theologians that Latin America is a Catholic continent (the idea of the Catholic substrate) is a misconception that negates the religious pluralism of Latin America and ignores its history of conquest. Leonardo Boff wrote that

34 [e]ven the celebrated 'radically Catholic substrate' of 'Latin American culture' is a consequence of the conquest of souls. It represents the Iberian Catholic model, and not the fruit of an encounter of the gospel and our cultures in an atmosphere of dialogue and cross-fertilization. What has predominated has been the conquest of bodies by the colonial invasion, the conquest of souls by the mission, and the conquest of consciences by the imposition of the morality of Iberian Catholicism (1991, 11).

Boff critiqued the notion of a Catholic substrate as it obscures the violence of conquest, and he also argued that there exists "another kind of inculturation of the Christian faith [in Latin America], the one produced by popular Catholicism" (1991, 18). Moreover, he argued that "popular Catholicism has been a factor of resistance, and today for the most part, [it] constitutes a powerful force in the political liberation of our people" (1991, 19). While Boff may have offered a positive evaluation of popular religion, I fear that using the term "popular Catholicism" will re-inscribe the problematic notion that popular religion is only authentic because of its Catholic identity or essence. Boff was concerned with demonstrating that a liberative dimension is present in popular religion. However, the imposing 'Catholic' framework through which Boff engaged popular religion can be used to re-inscribe the essentializing discourses of the Catholic substrate and veil the plural religious tapestries of Latin America and the Caribbean.11 Finally, I also avoid using the term 'popular piety' as it can render the experience of popular religion into an individualistic and private experience of spiritual piety, or into a subjective and internal religious practice divorced from the messiness of history. The use of the word piety domesticates popular religion by upholding one of its traits as central to the detriment of others. Popular religion is more than pious devotions, even if this is a primary activity for many practitioners. One of the most incisive descriptions of Boff s very early attempt at a positive evaluation of syncretism in Church: Charism & Power (chapter 7) is quite revealing of this essentializing perspective. R.S. Sugirtharajah argues that "Leonardo Boff, who pleaded for syncretism, maintained an offensive position toward Afro-Brazilian religious practice" (2002, 116). But this critique is ahistorical because it does not place Boff s work in its proper historical context. Instead, we should look at Boff s work as an early attempt to develop a highly controversial term within Catholic circles at a time when issues of religious syncretism and cultural hybridity where only beginning to be addressed by Latin American/Caribbean theologians.

35 popular religion that I have yet to come across comes from Irarrazaval: popular religion is a "religion del pan de cada dia"12 (1992, 305). In the mid-1970s, Irarrazaval conducted interviews with practitioners about their attachment to the image of El Senor de los Milagros, which is said to have been painted by a Black slave in 1651 on the outskirts of Lima. This short quote from IrarrazavaPs work is from an interviewed lay person about this devotion: "I am certain that He helps me to honor my commitments. I am happy in all things. Having bread depends on Him, and He gives us manna. He helps us to live" (1992, 306)*. The concrete everyday needs of life, bread, housing, employment, and health are the core preoccupations of vulnerable peoples, and this is reflected in their religious systems. Sri Lankan liberationist Aloysius Pieris reminds us that the spirituality of the excluded is not, as some have complained, simply materialistic desire for escape. He writes, [t]he poor have a distinctly this-worldly spirituality. They cry to heaven for their daily needs. To those of us who have all our material needs met, they may appear materialistic. For their life's basic needs - something to live on (food), something to live by (work), something to live in (shelter), something to live for (decent human setting) - color their prayer life and spirituality (1996,156).

In other words, popular religion is everyday manna in the wilderness of today's Latin American and Caribbean context. Manna is a gift from G*d that cannot be hoarded; it is G*d's daily sustenance for a whole community, which can be discerned in everyday acts of solidarity, friendship, laughter, celebration, and struggle, which are important aspects of lay theologies rooted in popular religious practices.

A religion of the bread of the everyday."

36 The 'People' of Popular Religion Most liberationists define popular religion as a religion of the people. But the word 'people' (Spanish: pueblo; French: peuple; Italian: popolo) from which popular is derived, is fraught with competing and radically divergent meanings. As I will show later, the usage of popular in Latin America and the Caribbean is much broader than its more colloquial usage in the West meaning 'commonly liked.' Cristian Parker described the distinction between the pueblo and the masses within the context of the 'Third World.' He wrote that in modern societies, especially Western or industrial societies, the term popular is often associated with what is massive, with a density that is quantitative and undifferentiated. In contrast, in underdeveloped societies, masses usually refers to the anonymous multitude of the lower classes; it then reflects a contemptuous perspective in which aristocracy - that is, the elite and enlightened - disguise their fear of a possible rebellion of the masses that might jeopardize the taste, refinement, and culture of the good life (1991,41-42).

For liberation theologians, the adjective popular refers to the socio-historical fact that the religious symbols, feasts, narratives, and practices are of the people, namely the excluded and marginalized who are making history. Like Parker, most liberationists13 use the term pueblo as a critique of the term masses, which is perceived as a vanguardist14 term—from a specific kind of Leninist Marxism—that lumps the poor and excluded as an anonymous multitude with no voice or subjectivity. Suess wrote that "[pjopular religion is, normally, the religious expression of the poor, lay people who live on the margins of the dominant imported culture" (1986, 124). Yet most Catholics in Latin America identify with the feasts, processions, and other popular devotions much more than with the so-called

As I will show in the second chapter, Juan Luis Segundo was a liberationist who did not share this view. He argued that "the masses" and "popular" meant the same thing and that it was a kind of "verbal terrorism" to try to make a distinction (1976, 192). Segundo argued that to make a distinction was to romanticize 'the people.' Of course, "the masses" was also generally used as a negative term outside of Marxist circles. I use the term vanguardist as a broad category that includes all types of Marxism, including some indebted to Gramsci's notion of the "organic intellectual," that advance a heavy-handed and narrow perspective of the place of revolutionary intellectuals in shaping the consciousness of the so-called alienated masses.

37

'official' forms of Catholicism. Irarrazaval writes that "[i]n the expression 'I'm Catholic,' many [Latin American] people implicitly mean that they take part in the feast days of the people" (2000a, 109). In the English language, one can replace the word popular with common: Marian devotions are commonly practiced by a majority of common people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Hence, while popular can be understood to be two-sided here, for liberationists it refers more specifically to class location. The veneration of the dark-skinned Our Lady of Guadalupe is a good example of an important popular devotion, rooted in a primary aspect of the national identity of the 'Mexican people.' There is also Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil, for example, who turned black in the waters of the Paraiba river, but reflects for some the 'essence' of Brazilian Catholicism and whose feast day is celebrated as Brazil's national holiday. More recently, however, Aparecida was symbolically "re-dressed" for a fleeting moment in a public Catholic/Candomble ritual where she became a symbol of Afro-Brazilian slave rebellion (see conclusion). This public "re-dressing" transformed the devotion into a marker of race and class conflict that contests essentialist definitions of what constitutes nationhood and religion. This conflictive understanding of the popular is also present in the devotion to Guadalupe, who is especially venerated by Indigenous peoples because Mary is said to have first appeared to a poor Nahuatl-speaking man named Juan Diego. Today, Our Lady of Guadalupe is known as the protector of the Americas, a symbol of the Mexican nation-state, and a protector of Indigenous peoples. Aparecida is the patroness of Brazil, and more recently she has also become the protector of Black peoples. Hence, the popular aspects of these devotions are multiple. They can refer to a

38

particular version of the national unity (the people as nation), as a marker of class and race conflict (people as bearers of struggle), or both. Raymond Williams traced the origins of the word popular to a legal and political definition of the Latin popular is, meaning belonging to the people (1976, 236). The term 'the people,' as we know it today, is a modern construction that is directly linked to the invention of the nation-state. When 'the people' refers to the national-popular, as it was during the French revolution, the nation and the people who represent it are ultimately linked. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write that" [although 'the people' is posed as the originary basis of the nation, the modern conception of the people is in fact a product of the nation-state, and survives only within its specific ideological context" (2000, 102). The notion of the nation-state in Europe was central to development of center-peripheral dynamics within the world-system through the racial mechanisms that Anibal Quijano calls the "coloniality of power" (2000). The construction of the national identity of European peoples was often deployed in opposition to the Indigenous, or racialized 'other.' Subsequently, the subaltern movements of the 'Third World' also sought to deploy the nation-state as a tool of self-determination in anti-colonial struggles. In Latin America/Caribbean, an important aspect of the national-popular has been populism. Jorge Larrain writes that "[p]opulism in Latin America was thus a specific kind of political phenomenon that cannot be confused with similar processes elsewhere" (2000, 102). A distinctly Latin American nationalist political project that emerged in the 1930s, in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, Larrain argues that populism emerged at a time of massive social and political dislocation and was connected to urban multiclass political alliances and political movements presided over by charismatic leaders and seeking to incorporate the middle classes in a political system by organizing the working classes as a support base (2000, 102).

39 In the new republics of the nineteenth century, the criollo elite tended to withdraw into their haciendas and left the political organizing to soldiers (or ex-soldiers) who often toppled governments and took power by force. These men were the new caudillos (leaders) of the era and they attracted bands of followers. Larrain traces the charismatic leader of populist regimes to this history. But populism is a distinctly twentieth century phenomenon that forged new political constituencies, identities, projects, and coalitions, and emerged out the turmoil of very important global economic, cultural, and political changes, such as the Great Crash of 1929. Eric Hobsbawm argued that in Brazil "the Slump ended the oligarchic 'old Republic' of 1889-1930 and brought to power Getulio Vargas, best described as a nationalist-populist" (1994, 106). For its critics, however, populist regimes tended to promise much to the working poor, such as new jobs, schools, and other kinds of welfare state legislation, but instead manipulated the popular classes though charismatic leaders, often through nationalist and anti-imperial rhetoric, in order to secure interests that were not too far removed from the military.15 Similar to European fascism, populist regimes tended to be hostile to existing liberal political institutions and tended to re-configure the 'nation' to include 'the people' as an essential part of its identity.16 In looking at the 1960s and 70s, populism in Latin America and the Caribbean is central for understanding liberationist concerns in defining 'the people' in ways that

While exceptional, some forms of populism continue today in Latin America and the Caribbean, as was made clear by the immense popularity among the subaltern classes for the Peruvian populist Ollanta Humala. Humala finished in second place after the neoliberal Alan Garcia in the 2006 elections. During the election campaign, Humala, an exmilitary officer under the Alberto Fujimori regime, utilized an anti-imperial discourse (and even got backing from the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez) to garner support from the working classes who have been hit hard by the ravages of neoliberalism in the region. However, he refused to be called a socialist and insisted on being called a "nationalist." Great differences also separate populism from European fascism. Eric Hobsbawm has noted that "European fascist regimes destroyed labour movements, the Latin American leaders they inspired created them. Whatever the intellectual filiation, historically, we cannot speak of the same kind of movement" (1994, 135).

40 challenge popular-national discourses. As already mentioned, this is why Gutierrez, in his introduction to Irarrazaval's early study on popular religion, worried about "religious populism," which promotes "social passivity and tranquility," and reminded his readers that popular religion has "an immense liberative potential" to promote historical change (1978,7, 8)*. Liberation theologies evolved within an anti-imperial dependentista trajectory (with its internal class dependence), which sought to free the subaltern nationstate from its dependent position vis-a-vis the center. In other words, the nation was understood through the notion of 'the people' as a marker of class conflict, who struggled to transform the nation-state into an anti-imperial agent within center-periphery dynamics. For most liberationists, the true representatives of the nation-state were indeed 'the people,' those who sought to change history through conflict with hegemonic interests, both internally and externally. Jon Sobrino, who did not engage the social sciences as forcefully as many other liberationists, expressed this position when he wrote that the "poor are a dialectical reality; there are poor because there are rich, and vice versa. The poor are a political reality; in their very reality, they have at least a potential for conflict and the transformation of society" (1996, 55). The Mexican revolution (1910-17) is a good example of how the concept of 'the people' came to be linked to both revolutionary and nationalist convictions. Later, this history tended to be appropriated by dominant interests toward a unifying understanding of the term. In other words, in places like Brazil and Argentina, 'the people' came to stand in for that which unites a culture, a nation, or a community, a common history, or a collective subject. In the late 1960s to early 1970s, when the first liberationists were developing a new way of doing theology for Latin America, some of the early writers,

41 like many progressive and left wing Latin Americans more generally, looked to the Cuban revolution as a possible road map for the future. Ramon Grosfoguel argues that "the Cuban Revolution transformed the political imaginary of many Latin Americans" (2000, 357). As Grosfoguel reminds us, following the tenets of Marxist orthodoxy, most Latin American Communist parties at that time had been arguing that the feudal character of many Latin American countries first required a capitalist revolution. Thus, they "supported the populist regimes such as that of Getulio Dornelles Vargas in Brazil and dictators like Fulgencio Batista and Anastasio Somoza. Castro ignored the orthodox Communist dogmas" (2000, 357). Arguing against the Marxist orthodoxy, many new leftist movements maintained that priority should not be given to supporting the capitalist bourgeoisie, but some proposed "to start immediately armed struggles for the socialist revolution. Guerilla movements proliferated all over the region, attempting to repeat the Cuban experience" (Grosfoguel 2000, 357). This experience prompted to the foreground a definition of 'the people' that was much closer to Marxist and dependentista theories: 'the people' as bearers of class antagonism and conflict and hope for the future. The conflictive definition of 'the people' became prominent in the documents of the second CELAM bishops conference at Medellfn, Colombia (1968), and was adopted by many liberationists (Maldonado 1993, 1185). For example, in the early 1990s Clodovis Boff argued that a liberationist methodology continues to recognize the "conflictive character" of poverty and that "the poor emerge as a 'subject' or agent of the corrective" to a system of oppression (1996, 12). In the same period, Jon Sobrino also continued to define his liberationist christology as conflictive: "Following Jesus essentially involves conflict because it means

42

reproducing a way of acting in favour of one group of people [the poor] and against another" (1993, 13). If at Medellfn the bishops spoke of 'the people' to mean the poor sectors, such as "the rural peasants and marginalized urban workers," the Argentinean bishops responded with a completely different notion of 'the people' the following year: "it was not a question of sector, subgroup, fraction, or social class, but the totality of Argentineans" (Maldonado 1993, 1185)*. This unifying perspective tends to understand the 'people' as healing and reconciling conflicts. Some liberation theologians argued that the unifying perspective simply blessed an oppressive status quo by presuming a false reconciliation and harmony. In the area of christology, unifying perspectives favoured the more traditional version of "Christ as Reconciler" over the "Christ as Liberator." As Sobrino argued, the "practical consequences of this have been to produce an image of Christ [as Reconciler] devoid of the real conflict of history and Jesus' stand on it, which has encouraged quietist or ultra-pacifist ideologies and support for anything going by the name of 'law and order'" (1993,16). While the terms conflictive and unifying may express an overly dichotomous framework for the tendencies I am introducing here, they nonetheless express very important poles of a debate in how popular religion was being defined in those times. And as we shall see in the next chapter, the borders between conflictive and unifying are more porous and complicated to determine than the easy dichotomies that we ascribe them to. When one tries to understand who is the subject of the 'popular' in popular religion, the Latin American traditions offer different lines of interpretation, but the two most prominent poles are the unifying and conflictive perspectives. Maldonado argued

43

that when pueblo is accompanied by an adjective, such as in el pueblo Argentino, it tends to refer to the more unifying, or in his words, "globalizing" perspective (1993, 1189)*. In this case, the term "refers to the commonality of language, tradition, land, etc." (1993, 1189)*. But when the term is used without an adjective, it tends to refer more to "the socio-cultural particularities of a working or peasant class, situated in a position of inferiority, oppression, and marginalization" (1993,1189)*. A famous Latin American solidarity chant bears witness to the conflictive perspective and its wish for a unified subaltern class: \elpueblo unido, jamas sera vencidol Maldonado argued that Latin American liberation theologies are particularly important with respect to the "discovery" of popular religion for theology in the twentieth century. He wrote that "one cannot be but grateful to the initiators of liberation theology, and in general to the Latin American church, for having 'discovered' this theme and for putting it at the center of its theological and pastoral reflection" (1993, 1184)*. But this important "discovery," as Maldonado described it, is also closely linked to the broader historical changes that occurred at the Vatican II council and the ripple effect these changes produced at the CELAM meeting in Medellfn (1968).17 An important encyclical published in 1975 by Paul VI, Evangelii Nutiandi, which was viewed at the time by some progressive theologians of the Catholic church as countering the "iconoclastic mood after Vatican II," put much stress on the concepts of culture and "popular religiosity" (Candelaria 1990,43). Hence, the encyclical's emphasis on the

17

Maldonado understood early on the importance of popular religion for liberation theologies and for the Latin American church more broadly. In a earlier version of the article from which I am quoting above, originally translated into English as "Popular Religion: Its Dimensions, Levels, and Types" in a Concilium issue entitled Popular Religion (Greinacher and Mette 1986), Maldonado wrote that the "interest on popular religion, within both the Catholic Church in general and pastoral theology in particular, was aroused by the meeting in Medellin in 1968..." (1986,3). I am using the Spanish version printed in Conceptos fundametales del cristianismo (Floristan and Tamayo 1993), because it is more complete than the English version.

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evangelization of culture and its apparent "re-discovery" of the often disparaged reality of "popular piety" (EN, 48) resonated very strongly in the ears of more conservative bishops in Latin America who sought to harness liberation theologies, its base communities, and the bishops that supported them. This issue became a flashpoint at the Puebla CELAM meetings of 1979. For some liberationists, the heart of the issue was how unitive definitions of 'the people' highlighted or obscured asymmetrical power relations. Writing in the shadow of Puebla in 1981, Leonardo Boff expressed the conflictive position very well: The term "people" is not taken in the sense of nation, lumping everyone together indiscriminately and thus hiding internal differences, but rather in the sense of people/lower class, defined as those who are excluded from participation in society and reduced to the mass, a thing instead of persons. "People" is an analytical term and also an axiological category. Analytically it defines a group in opposition to another, while axiologically it proposes a value to be lived by all persons. In other words, all are called to be people and not just a subordinate class. Human beings achieve this in the measure to which, through the mediation of communities, they cease to be a mass, develop a self-consciousness, lay out a historical plan for justice and participation for all (and not only for themselves), and teach practices that lead to the prompt realization of this Utopia (1985, 117).

Boff was responding to a polemic that was carved out around the role of 'the people' in transforming a hierarchical church and a dependent continent. However, Boff's words were not only focused on the antagonisms that divide two different definitions of 'the people'; he was also addressing a central theme that animates these differences, namely, the idea that 'the people' are called to be subjects of history, or theologically (subjects of being church), not simply a subordinate class. Because popular religion was deemed important for being from 'the people' as subjects of their own meaning-system production, liberationists struggled with how this religious phenomenon could be harnessed to become a project of political and religious transformation. For some, like Gutierrez and Boff, popular religion had an immense potential for liberation, which was a way forward with 'the people' on their march

45 towards a new history. The methodological tensions that developed in the study of popular religion in Latin America and the Caribbean are linked to the unitive and conflictive perspectives discussed above, both of which have divergent perspectives on the importance of power asymmetries in history. As I will show in the first chapter, these methodological distinctions highlight differing accents and priorities and should never be taken as diametrically opposed.

The Feast of the Uninvited In the first chapter, I will examine what Maldonado called the unitive and conflictive tensions that surfaced around the term popular religion, especially with respect to the development of liberation theologies. On the unitive side, I will examine essentialist perspectives from both the political right and left, which argue that Latin American popular religion carries within its soul an essence, an identity, which resists the incursions of modernity. Examples from the work of conservative Chilean Catholic theologian Pedro Morande and Juan Carlos Scannone, a progressive Jesuit from Argentina, will be used to explore this perspective. Moreover, I will examine conflictive perspectives that engaged with popular religion in the 1970s and early 1980s with a more Marxist resonance. Among these writings, I will look at the influence of Gustavo Gutierrez on the early research undertaken in Peru. I will argue that, while both positive and negative evaluations of popular religion existed within the so-called conflictive camp, the key feature of this engagement was the intuition that there is an often hidden seed of protest within these practices that could be nurtured into a liberative practice.

46 Chapter two will focus on the work of Chilean theologian Diego Irarrazaval, who was invited by Gutierrez to work with him in Peru in the mid-1970s. Irarrazaval is a good example of a liberationist who has spent most of his scholarly life studying popular religion (since the mid-1970s), and whose work still remains relatively unknown (and untranslated) in the 'First World.' In this chapter, I will examine Irarrazaval's emphasis on fiesta in his theology, which he developed while studying popular religion in Peru in the 1980s, especially in the practices of Indigenous (Aymaran) peoples. Irarrazaval argued for a theology that locates itself in the wisdom, faith, ethics, and symbol systems of subaltern peoples. For him, this constitutes "an other way of doing theology, distinct and complementary to the conceptual Christian imaginary of elites" (1999a, 91)*. This approach represents a significant new direction in Latin American theologies of liberation. In chapter three, I will focus on the work of another Chilean theologian, Cristian Parker, in order to explore the realm of religious syncretism in popular religion. Parker argued that through popular religious practices many Latin Americans, who face a hostile world of unemployment and discrimination in the large megacities, cobble together what he called an "otra logica" (an/other logic) that is distinct from (but also takes from) modern Eurocentric rationality. He argued that syncretism is a method of survival that cobbled together elements from different traditions (bricolage) in response to the shock of conquest. Parker 'discovered' in Latin American popular religion, an/other rationality that blurs the strict categories of modern Eurocentric rationality. This other rationality is hybrid: both 'modern' and 'pre-modern' at once.

47 In chapter four, I will consider the emerging contributions of liberationist hermeneutics within the shifting terrain of contemporary Latin America—with its burgeoning megacities, the growth of Pentecostalism, worsening exclusions engendered by neoliberalism, growing religious pluralism, the emergence of the "new (and 'newer') voices" in theology. I will link Irarrazaval's theology of fiesta to Latina and feminist understandings of the notion of lo cotidiano (the everyday), which prioritizes the everyday as a place where the structural realities of gender, class, and race operate. I will also link Parker's research into syncretism to the evolving Indigenous theology of Eleazar Lopez Hernandez, which retraces the roots of Indigenous theologies to pre-Christian, or pre-Colombian traditions. While this theology is still relatively new at a scholarly level, there is a wealth of lay-centered practices at the grassroots level that resonate with Parker's syncretic rationality. In chapter four I will also return to the theologies of Irarrazaval and Parker to critically evaluate their unique contributions in light of the current changes happening in Latin America and the Caribbean. I will highlight Irarrazaval's important contributions to a lay-centered theology nourished by the everyday symbolic production and practices of popular religion, but critique his lack of attention to hybridity in his theology up until the early 2000s due to an over-reliance on an inculturation framework. Furthermore, I will evaluate Parker's contributions in mapping-out the hybrid "other" rationality of popular religion for Latin American religious identity, but critique its essentialist tendencies. Although Parker tries at length to avoid the kind of essentialisms he critiques in Scannone's work, he himself re-inscribes these by affirming a crypto-Catholic substrate notion in his understanding of the role of popular religion in Latin America.

48

To conclude, I will examine Ivone Gebara's notion of "religious biodiversity" (1999), which brings to the theological carrefour an ecofeminist perspective that remains undeveloped in the works of both Irarrazaval and Parker, one that is informed by her experience working with vulnerable women in Sao Paulo, one of the fastest growing urban megacities in Latin America. I will also examine Irarrazaval's recent theological interest in the area of the "inter-cultural" (2004a) as an important shift from the inculturation approach, which dominated his work in the 1990s. For Irarrazaval, the intercultural is a way to reflect on the pluralism of Latin America and the Caribbean, which can be seen in the popular religious practices of subaltern peoples, especially practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions. The feast of the uninvited in Latin America is a feast that highlights difference and pluralism as central aspects of what constitutes Latin American culture. It is also a feast that starts from the experience of exclusion, a feast that challenges a culture to understand itself from the point of view of its own negations.

49

Image: Cristo de la Paciencia from Chiclayo, in northern Peru, and crosses from an urban poor area of Lima, Chucuito, and Cuzco in the Peruvian Andes (2001) Photos by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare

50 CHAPTER ONE

IDENTITY & LIBERATION: POPULAR RELIGION IN LATIN AMERICAN THEOLOGIES

Popular religion is centuries-old and modern, it is faithful and revolutionary... Only Latin American popular religion can create such a synthesis. It emerged among indigenous people defeated by the Spanish and Portuguese. It flowered among slaves and the oppressed. It is alive in the areas on the edges of the cities, in impoverished rural areas and in the destitution of an exploited people, dominated and oppressed. But, trusting in God, believing in his providence, the people wait like the 'Christ ofpatience' (seated, with the crown of thorns, head in hand, his elbow supported on his knee) for crucifixion - but also for liberation. Enrique Dussel (Argentina, 1986)

In this chapter I will highlight the tensions that developed around popular religion in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in attempting to define 'the people,' along the lines proposed by Luis Maldonado: namely, the unitive and conflictive perspectives. I will examine the unitive theology of Pedro Morande as an example of the dominant conservative perspective that attempted to deploy an essentialist definition of popular religion against the claims of some liberationists. I will also examine the important work of Juan Carlos Scannone, a liminal theologian who defended a unitive perspective while rooting it in a liberationist "option for the poor." Furthermore, I will look at conflictive liberationist perspectives that developed a nuanced understanding of the role of popular religion, as in Peruvian context of the 1970s, and the perspectives of other liberationists such as Juan Luis Segundo, whose critique of religious oppression tended to be couched within a more vanguardist framework. Ultimately, this chapter will show that while narrow stances tended to polarize debates around the role of popular religion in a changing Latin American and Caribbean context, the distinctions

51 were quite porous and the positions more nuanced than what Maldonado proposed as a division between unitive and conflictive perspectives.

I begin this chapter with a Peruvian image of the suffering Christ, the Christ in captivity, the Christ of the passion, because this moment in the Christian story stands out as a central and privileged place within the popular religious practices of Latin America and the Caribbean. But this image from the Christian passion has also been a place of theological unease for liberation theologians, who, in an attempt to forge a new contextual theology that emerges out of the "underside of history," out of a history of conquest and the contemporary experience of Latin American dependency, struggled to negotiate a place for this phenomenon within their hermeneutics. I use the word unease in the same way that all questions of suffering and dehumanization from a liberationist perspective, all questions of theodicy that prioritize the experiences of the vulnerable, cause theological unease. This specific theological unease is very biblical; it runs deep in the traditions of the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Book of Job, as well as in the writings of the Christian canon, such as in Jesus' desperate cry from the cross: "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthaniV which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk 15: 34). This cry by Jesus from the Roman imperial cross is echoed everyday in the experiences of exclusion and vulnerability in today's Latin American and Caribbean region, and in all places where people's lives are marked by the ravages of empire, colonialism, sexism, xenophobia, class inequality, gay/lesbian/bi/transsexual hatred, and other forms of systemic violence.

As Enrique Dussel attested above, the image of the suffering Christ in popular religious practices has a long history; it emerged out of context of colonial defeat and vanquishment. Yet Dussel's quote also explicitly reveals the paradox of captivity/liberation, a paradox that is at the core of this implicit theological unease. Dussel's emphasis on a people that "wait" (for a providential G*d )l like the "patient Christ" can signal the potential instrumentalization of popular religion for passive submission to oppression and dehumanization. During a visit to a liberationist-inspired base community in Chiclayo, in northern Peru, I was shown a statue of the Cristo de la paciencia that had been returned to its place of honour in a church sanctuary by the new conservative Opus Dei clergy. The statue had been removed by the previous priest for promoting "passivity" in the community. The pastoral workers who acted as our hosts agreed with the previous priest and argued that the image of a defeated and suffering Christ was being used to bless the current context of poverty and dehumanization—not to mention centuries of Spanish colonization. A friend in Mexico insisted that the addition of a fifteenth station of the resurrection to the traditional Catholic Via Crucis (the Stations of the Cross) by a liberationist priest in a small town near Cuernavaca was a good antidote for marginalized people who tend to get fixated on the passion.2 There is a very real unease among liberationists and other people concerned with structural oppression that colonial Catholic perspectives can be (re)appropriated to promote abstract theologies divorced from the very concrete issues facing vulnerable and marginalized communities.

In the Spanish version, we find: "en la miseria de un pueblo explotado, dominado, oprimado... pero creyente, providencialista y que, come el 'Crista de la Paciencia' (sentado, con corona de espinas y reclinando su cabeza sobre su brazo apoyado en su rodilla, ensangrentado y sufriente), espera la crucifixion... pero tambien la liberation" (Dussel 1992,45). This was not a dominant liberationist perspective. A liberationist-inspired book called Via Crucis: Lapasion de Cristo en America (Elizondo 1993), with meditations by Gustavo Gutierrez, Samuel Ruiz, Elsa Tamez, Jon Sobrino, Enrique Dussel, Pablo Richard, and others does not add a fifteenth station.

53 A recent example of a colonial Catholic perspective can be witnessed in Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ (2004), where Jesus' passion is depicted as a sacrificial endurance test rather than an imperial execution. This depiction re-inscribes passivity and submission as virtues in the context of Roman imperial rule.3 The film is not a biblical account of Jesus' passion. In fact, it is deeply indebted to the nineteenth century work of a German nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich (d.1824), entitled "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ." Emmerich was bed-ridden and in constant pain in the later part of her life. Hence, the film's emphasis on Jesus' individual suffering comes out of her experience with pain. It is from her work that some of the film's theological inspiration is drawn. Gibson's film is a specific version of the story of the passion. The Jesus depicted is not the anti-imperial Jesus of the liberationists, who was crucified as a threat to reign of the Romans (as a "King of the Jews") for preaching and living out a counter-reign, but the Jesus constructed within a nineteenth century fetishization of colonial Christendom through a theology of expiatory satisfaction. Here, Jesus' voluntary suffering makes satisfaction to G*d, whose honor has been violated by human sin. This is one version of the passion, yet one that resonates with colonial history, and the one echoed today in 'official' church teachings. For conservatives, the liberationist version of Jesus is perceived as a threat to tradition and church history, while for liberationists, the 'conservative' Jesus is perceived as blessing a status quo that is marked by asymmetrical power relations, dehumanization, and oppression. Liberationists have often argued that in the history of Christendom the church has often abused the cross in order to uphold the interests of those who cause suffering and 3

See my review (DeGiglio-Bellemare) of the Passion of the Christ in the Journal of Religion and Film 8/1: http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Vol8Nol/Reviews/Passion.htm (accessed September 10, 2006).

oppression, especially in the midst of colonial conquest. The colonial history of the Americas is stained with the blood of what Dussel called "an exploited people, dominated and oppressed" (1986, 93). This is the history of America's Indigenous peoples who were used as disposable free labourers, and of Black slaves who were stolen from African lands to replace the dying Indigenous work-force, and, in some places, mestizos for being contaminated with impure blood, and women, especially women of colour, forced into concubinage with White men and later left to rear children their own. In this context of colonial oppression, the cross of Christendom was often used to encourage the crushed of history to patiently endure their suffering as Jesus did, with a promise of heavenly life beyond history. It is because of this dehumanizing history that the liberationist critique of religious oppression is vitally important in uncovering the nefarious effects of colonization in Latin America and the Caribbean. As with the biblical character of Job, who is sent "chaos monsters" (Leviathan and Behemoth) by G*d in response to his protest about his undeserved suffering, the Jewish and Christian traditions have rich histories of protest against unjust suffering.4 In the Christian tradition(s), this protest is often rooted in the image of a tortured and crucified messiah. Many centuries before Jurgen Moltmann systematized divine pathos5 in his highly influential book, The Crucified God (German: 1973), the idea of a suffering G*d had been theologically articulated in the symbolically rich world of popular religion. This can be witnessed in processions and pilgrimages prepared in conjunction with Good

See Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (2002), for an insightful reading of the role of chaos monsters in the Bible. Against the predominant supposition that religion is about the restoration of sacred order over chaos (Eliade), Beal argues convincingly that the Bible canonizes ambiguity with respect to the role of chaos monsters. For Beal, some traditions deify monsters, as in Job, while some traditions demonize monsters, as in the prophetic traditions and in Revelation. For his analysis of Job, see chapters 3 & 4. The Japanese Lutheran theology of Kazo Kitamori, Theology of the Pain ofGod (1965), pre-dates Moltmann's work.

55 Friday, and in specific regional/national devotions, such as the famous Quechuan Senor de los Temblores (Cusco), or the Qoyllur Rit'I,6 naturally formed out of rock and situated in the heights of Ocongate, 4500 meters above sea level, in Peru's Andean mountains, or the very important Peruvian devotion of El Senor de los Milagros,7 which attracts millions of practitioners to Lima every October, especially Aymaran and Quechuan peoples. These are all images of the crucified Lord and they represent a deep religious expression of vanquishment and hope among Indigenous, Black, and mestizo peoples formed by a history of conquest and domination. Like Job before them, the vulnerable and marginalized who follow the crucified or tortured Christ in processions also protest the suffering they experience everyday. According to Orlando Espin, the symbols of the passion in popular religion "do not hinder the building up of the Reign, but, in fact, preach solidarity and compassion as attitudes of the Crucified God that are also expected from Christians" (1997, 73). In other words, the tapestry of popular devotions that make up what is being referred to here as popular religion have been (at least for the last 500 years) a way of doing theology (or a way of performing and embodying theology), for vulnerable and marginalized lay people in the Americas. Attuned to this, Moltmann insightfully wrote that "[the poor] find in [the suffering Christ] a God who does not torture them, as their masters do, but becomes their brother and companion" (1974,49). But the question of why a tortured people - especially people who have experienced colonialism - would choose as a privileged site of worship and theology a tortured messiah cannot be reduced to neat answers. Hence, with Moltmann, we should all ask, "[w]hat is the significance of 6

See Carlos Flores, El Taytacka Qoyllur Rit'I (1997).

See Diego Irarrazaval, "Crista Morado: Senor de los maltratados," in Irarrazaval and Klaiber, El Senor de los Milagros: Devocidn y liberacidn (1998). The original was published in Pdginas No. 13, December, 1977.

56 the mysticism of the cross in popular devotion?" (1974,47). Latin American liberationists grappled with these questions from initial the moment of their constitution as a theological grassroots movement. Liberationist hermeneutics are explicitly concerned with soteriology, or the study of salvation. Hence, the overwhelming reality of the cross and passion at the center of popular religion was quickly addressed by liberation theologians. If Jesus' death on a Roman cross is salvific, how do practitioners of popular religion understand salvation? Do they appropriate and re-configure soteriology in their own terms? Is it a liberating vision of the cross, or is it a vision that leads to alienation and passive submission to fate? Or is the "mysticism of the cross," as Moltmann called it, much more than a dialectic between liberation and alienation? These are questions of tremendous import for liberationists who favour what Maldonado called a conflictive perspective: namely, 'the people' as bearers of class/national/continental conflict for a transformed social and political order. Unitive perspectives are much more concerned with questions of culture and national/continental identity than with questions of liberation and socio-political transformation. Hence, the binominal contrast between unitive and conflictive, proposed by Maldonado, does not necessarily follow a conservative vs. progressive dynamic, or a traditional vs. liberationist framework. While there are very real differences between untive and conflictive perspectives, I will also show that both perspectives are porous and difficult to classify. I use the terms here as a starting point for a broader understanding of the polemics that erupted around the notion of 'the people.' An important question for theologians promoting a unitive perspective (especially conservative theologians) was this: if 'the people' have a kind of collective essence, how does 'the people' preserve its

57 identity in the face of a quickly changing Latin American/Caribbean context? In other words, for unitive theologians, the question of how 'the people' resists the incursions of secularizing modernity with its instrumental rationality was central. This chapter will look at some key moments in the development of theological perspectives on popular religion among Latin American theologians who promoted both unitive and conflictive perspectives. While not attempting to offer an exhaustive history of these perspectives, I will examine how some theologians grappled with popular religion, and in the process found themselves promoting different definitions of 'the people' {pueblo) in order to support movements that attempted to transform the church, and ultimately the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. I will begin with the unitive perspective and look at the theologies of Pedro Morande and Juan Carlos Scannone, and conclude with examples of liberationists who are more closely aligned with the conflictive perspective.

POPULAR RELIGION AND IDENTITY In the first epoch, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, were laid the bases of Latin American culture and its solid Catholic substrate. In that period evangelization was deep enough for the faith to become a constitutive part of Latin America's life and identity. (CELAM, Puebla 1979) Despite the defects and sins that are always present [in popular religion] the faith of the Church has set its seal on the soul of Latin America. It has left its mark on Latin America's essential historical identity, becoming the continent's cultural matrix out of which new peoples have arisen. (CELAM, Puebla 1979)

The question of how popular religion was (and is) being defined by Latin American and Caribbean theologians, and more precisely by liberation theologians, represents a highly complex history of research, solidarity, commitment, and grassroots accompaniment. Hence, any discussion about the place of popular religion in Latin

58

America and the Caribbean, even within a framework of liberation struggles, cannot dismiss questions of cultural identity, especially with respect to its relation to modernity(ies). By modernity, I am referring to the ideas of European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, with precursors in the philosophical works of Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Niccolo Machiavelli. I do not wish to examine the development of modernity here, but to say that Enlightenment thinkers understood modernity to champion the basic ideas of freedom (especially intellectual autonomy), newness, the rational-scientific, the secular, and progress, all in opposition to metaphysics, religion (especially religious authoritarianism), tradition, and the irrational-superstitious. According to Jiirgen Habermas, Hegel was modernity's first clear proponent because he spoke of modernity in a historical context as a new age, as progressive stage that moved from a inert past into a dynamic future, from the traditional to the new (1987,4).

Whose Modernity? In The Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel defined the modern world in terms of a development of human subjectivity and self-consciousness within a progressive history with roots in the "beautiful democracy of Athens" (2001,228). Hegel articulated a view of modernity as a progressive historical trajectory with its culmination in Western Europe. This passage encompasses Hegel's view of human subjectivity: Self-consciousness had at that time [in the beautiful democracy of Athens] not yet risen to the abstraction of subjectivity, or to the fact that concerning the matter to be judged upon must be spoken a human 'I will.' This 'I will' constitutes the greatest distinction between the ancient and the modern world... (2001, 228-229).

Challenging this tradition, Peruvian social scientist Anibal Quijano writes that the "defenders of the European patent on modernity are accustomed to appealing to the

59 cultural history of the ancient Greco-Roman world and to the world of the Mediterranean prior to the colonization of America in order to legitimize their claim on the exclusivity of its patent" (2000,543). Quijano forcefully argues that the view of modernity inherited from Hegel and many others after him, is Eurocentric and based on five hundred years of colonial pillage and conquest. Quijano reminds us that the process of colonization in the Americas was not only about the extraction of natural resources through forced labour, but also the expropriation of the discoveries of colonized peoples for the accumulation of wealth, the repression of local forms of knowledge production, and forced implementation of the dominant culture on the colonized. In his view, this process amounts to the colonization of cognitive processes, modes of producing meaning, and the imaginary, nothing short of a colonization of culture (2000, 541). According to Quijano, modernity involves a colonization of the "totality of the global population and all the history of the last five hundred years..." (2000, 545). Hence, for Qujano modernity is the constitution as a world-system by the colonization of bodies and souls through racial superiority (coloniality of power), the superiority of knowledge systems (Eurocentrism), and the accumulation of wealth (global capitalism). This has been the history of Latin America and the Caribbean since 1492. But the history of colonial modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean is also full of paradox. The colonization of the region (and the reconquista of Iberian soil) constitutes the beginning of European modernity (1492), through the construction of Indigenous Amerindia as 'other' to this same modernity. In other words, Amerindia was constructed as 'primitive' to Europe's self-constructed civilization. Hence colonial powers sought to keep Latin America/Caribbean distinct from the processes of modernity shaping Europe, yet the

60 movements for emancipation and independence that surfaced in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were deeply inspired by "modern" notions of autonomy and freedom. Following the slave revolts of 1791 led by the "Black Jacobin" Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Vodou priest Boukman, Haiti became the second free republic of the Americas, and the first independent black nation in the world. While the traditions of Vodou cobbled together by slaves on the plantations of Saint-Domingue helped focus slave anger and resentment into an anti-colonial struggle, it was the French revolution and the Enlightenment ideas that inspired the slave rebellion. As Paul Farmer suggests, "if Saint-Domingue might be likened to barrels of gunpowder, the French Revolution of 1789 was the spark that ignited them" (2003, 59). On the other hand, the revolts of 1780 in Peru and Bolivia, led by Tupac Amaru II, are usually understood as precursors to the modern independence movements of the nineteenth century. But this reading of history may over-determine the liberating role of European modernity on these insurrections. The "Great Rebellion," as it was called by the colonial administrators, was in fact an Indigenous revolt against Spanish rule inspired by the Andean utopic Inkarri myth, which longed for the "recomposition" of Inca ruler Atahualpa's body (captured by Pizarro and his men in 1532) and the golden era of Inca rule (Flores Galindo 1995, 147). Tupac Amaru II, or Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, an Indigenous nobleman and prosperous trader, took the name of, and saw himself as, a direct descendent of Tupac Amaru—the last Inca executed by the Spanish - and led a revolt of 80,000 to 100,000 people against the Spanish crown.

61 The Great Rebellion ignited during the second half of the eighteenth century. At a time that saw the implementation of many reforms under the Bourbon dynasty that sought to "reorganize the imperial state and streamline an antiquated colonial system" in Latin America (Flores Galindo 1995, 149). These reforms attempted to reorganize the colonial administration in light of the changes in 'modern' capitalism, the centre of which by this time had shifted from Spain-Genova to Holland, from capital accumulation (resource extraction) to Dutch-style mercantilism (joint-stock companies). These modern reforms have been called a "second conquest" of the Americas, and generated much resentment among Indigenous peoples as new and higher taxes were instituted and tax evasion was persecuted (Flores Galindo 1995, 150). Hence, some historians argue that it was the modern re-organization of the colonial administration that sparked the Great Rebellion. Flores Galindo wrote that "[i]nadvertently, the Bourbons had prepared the way for the break-up of Spanish authority through their rapid reforms, but in the Southern Andes the process occurred faster than in any other place..." (1995,151). The revolts of Saint-Domingue and those in the Andean highlands, separated only by eleven years, differ considerably with respect to the role of European modernity(ies) in the construction of Latin American history. They demonstrate the multiple trajectories and appropriations of European modernity(ies) in Latin American history and multiple sources of independent resistance. During the process of national independence in the nineteenth century, the Latin American criollo elite, the main protagonists of the independence process, enthusiastically embraced Enlightenment ideas. According to Jorge Larrain, this enthusiasm was limited to

62 their formal, cultural, and discursive horizon than in their political and institutional practice, where for a long time, traditional and excluding structures were kept in place. When finally political and economic modernity began to be implemented in practice during the twentieth century, cultural doubts began to emerge as to whether Latin America could adequately modernize, or whether it was good to modernize by following European and North American patterns (2000,4).

According to Quijano, modernity is an equivocal term with an ambiguous trajectory. Not unlike the term pueblo, it spans countless definitions and contested perspectives. Modernity, in Quijano's understanding, is "also a question of conflicting social interests. One of these interests is the continued democratization of social existence. In this sense, every concept of modernity is necessarily ambiguous and contradictory" (2000, 548). Quijano argues that it is contradictory because, while its founding element is a new subjectivity and the perception of historical change, modernity is also constituted by a "eoloniality of power," sustained by Eurocentric knowledges that stratify the world's population around the notion of race and by a Eurocentered capitalism as a new global order. Modernity is understood here as an ambiguous phenomenon: one that promises subjectivity, freedom, and historical change on one hand, but delivers a Eurocentric "eoloniality of power" on the other. For a progressive modern intellectual like Quijano, the process of modernity is double-edged, for he welcomes its critique of religious hegemony, especially Latin American Catholicism, but also critiques its instrumentalizing Eurocentric rationality, especially as it has impacted Indigenous peoples of the Americas. However, modernity—with its emphasis on newness, the secular, progress, and its critique of religious authoritarianism—was often perceived by 'official' nineteenth century Catholicism as an affront to its hegemony and more specifically as a critique of its religious identity. In fact, up until the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, the Catholic church was, at least in its 'official' pronouncements, anti-modern in

63 perspective.8 In Latin America for example, some sectors of the Catholic church saw themselves as a bulwark against encroaching secularization, which was perceived as eroding the traditional identity of the people, what the CELAM Puebla documents called the "solid Catholic Substrate" (CELAM 1979, 180). As I mentioned above with respect to the pre-Quiet revolution Catholicism in Quebec, the Catholic officials saw themselves here too as bulwark against the encroachment of secular Anglo-Saxon dominance, which threatened the fragile French Catholic identity of the so-called French-Canadians. Hence, a more conservative perspective attentive to the importance of tradition in the construction of Latin American/Caribbean identity also advanced a critique of the impact of modernity, especially with respect to the often dehumanizing effect of what they described as modern instrumental reason on religious peoples. At Puebla, the CELAM bishops argued that "[t]he Catholic wisdom of the common people is capable of fashioning a vital synthesis" that protects the region's Catholic identity in the face of increasing secularization (1979,185).

Pedro Morande and Baroque Modernity It is here, at the intersection of these critiques of modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean that the so-called "issue" (or even "problem") of popular religion surfaces. In other words, it is at the intersection of a peculiar Latin American/Caribbean modernity that popular religion is often found captive, or instrumentalized for the purposes of one or another ideology. I use captive here, because, whether one is speaking of the captivity of a people under authoritarian rule or the captivity of a people under the encroaching 8

As I will mention in chapter four, I also argue that the Catholic church's conservative anti-modernism is very modern, especially in how it organized itself institutionally by embodying the features of modernization.

effects of modernization, the dialectic between autonomy/freedom and dependence/liberation is central to how Latin American theologians after Vatican II, both progressives and conservatives, grappled with the reality of popular religious practices in every country of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is in this intersection that the work of conservative Catholic theologian Pedro Morande is important to consider. Morande is a lay Catholic from Chile, a country that has often been perceived as more secular and Western-assimilated than most other Latin American countries. While many intellectuals in Latin America argue for a common Latin American ethos (such as liberationists who claimed to be doing theology for a "Latin American" context), the region is not monolithic. Strong national identities and radically divergent histories exist. Some Latin American intellectuals have tried to classify "Latin America" in various ways. I will follow the classifications of Mario Sambarino who argued against a common Latin American ethos. Sambarino divided the region into three areas: "Indigenous America" (Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, Mexico), "Mestiza America" (Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela), and "European America" (Uruguay, Argentina) (1980, 52). This tends to obfuscate the experience of "Black America," or "Creole America" in the Caribbean and elsewhere, but I use Sambarino here only to suggest that regional and national identities are important when considering the theologies of Latin America and the Caribbean. According to Morande, popular religion with its history of mestizaje, (biologicalcultural-religious mixing) is at the center of Latin American identity. This, of course, is linked to Morande's experiences as a Chilean. Skidmore and Smith write about Chile's history that "a relatively homogenous population emerged from the colonial era, mestizo,

although few of the 'European' inhabitants wished to admit the extent to which their Spanish forebears had mixed with the Indians" (2001, 107). Morande's lived context in "Mestiza America" is not incidental to his construction of a theology of mestizaje, which would not have the same resonances in "Indigenous America" where cultural and religious alterity, with its memory of colonial vanquishment, takes precedence over mixing and integration.9 Morande followed the conservative tradition of defining modernity in a unitary fashion, and critiquing it as a process that ultimately leads to atheism and elitism. Thus, he insisted that "Latin America" has an intrinsic traditional identity that is both religious and popular. Morande argued that since the Second World War, Latin American intellectuals (neoiluministas) betrayed the Latin American people by adopting the social sciences as a "new religion" rather than immersing themselves in the popular traditions of Latin American culture. These intellectuals, argued Morande, "replaced God with Society," namely, the religious wisdom (of the people) with an instrumental rationality of the elite (1986,65)*. In particular, Morande critiqued intellectuals who are on the left of the ideological spectrum, especially Catholics strongly identified with the Vatican II reforms. He argued that they have embraced modernity's dehumanizing rational-technological perspective at the expense of Latin America's most important traditional identity: its mixed Catholic identity. In the post-Puebla context of the mid-1980s, Morande was directly critiquing liberation theologians, who, according to him, had adopted an atheistic framework, namely Marxism, at the expense of the authentic traditions of the people (1986, 57). He argued that liberationists, whom he refered to as "technocrats of social It is important to remember that these classifications are always too monolithic and that a place like Chile has its own

"Indigenous America" within its national borders: for example, in the Andean range and in large urban megacities like Santiago, where the Mapuche and Quechuan speaking Indigenous people have settled into communities.

66 change," falsely believe that society can be transformed at any time only if it is armed with a proper modern rationality (1986, 68)*. In 1972, one year before the U.S.-supported Pinochet coup that ousted Salvador Allende from government, an organization called Christians for Socialism was formed in Chile. Christians for Socialism organized a conference in Santiago that same year that brought together delegations from all over Latin America. The final document noted '"a growing consciousness of the need for a strategic alliance between revolutionary Christians and Marxists', utilizing the term employed by Fidel Castro on a visit to Chile in late 1971" (Berryman 1984, 29). More than ten years later, in April 1982, and under dictatorial rule, "more than four hundred people converged in Santiago for an international conference of Christians for Socialism (despite the opposition of the Chilean bishops)" (Berryman 1987, 28). According to Phillip Berryman, the final document used terminology that was clearly Marxist, "with frequent references to 'relations of production, capitalist appropriation of surplus value, class struggle, ideological struggle,' and so forth" (1987, 28). Although he did not name them, the documents of the Christians for Socialism movement represented for Morande an example of the crude instrumentalization of the social sciences, which "monopolizes the totality of knowledge of the real" into the spheres of the rational and irrational (1986, 59)*. Popular religion, Morande contended, cannot escape this division and ultimately falls prey to its characterization as illusion, fantasy, and false consciousness. Morande wrote that the people hold their own wisdom, and they have arranged it to conserve their own ethos, their own historical memory. And instead of ordering their lives according to a principle of rationality that necessarily implies the secularization of their beliefs and values, they have revitalized their own forms of religious expression to the total perplexity of the elites. Instead of accepting the social sciences as the new religion of the epoch, they have conserved their traditional religious expressions that go back to the baroque synthesis forged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through the evangelization of the church (1986, 68)*.

67 While Morande's popular-elite dichotomy here is characteristic of the very same modernity he critiqued, his appeal to a "baroque synthesis" needs some unpacking. Morande argued that Latin American identity is deeply rooted in what he calls Baroque modernity: a different modernity than the Western European one, one that is characterized by a Baroque trajectory, indigenized by contact in the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and characterized by symbols and oral culture. Morande critiqued the criollo elite of the nineteenth century, which he called the Enlightenment-minded iluminista who attempted to organize the new republics around the European Enlightenment ideal of the primacy of rationality (1986, 67). While the criollo elite may have experienced secularization, Morande claimed that the authentic identity of the pueblo is religious. According to Morande, this constitutes a betrayal of the Baroque roots of the people, which are not based on a European instrumental rationality, but on the symbolic, oral, and affective dimensions of popular religion. This religious dimension is what the bishops in Pueblo called the "Catholic substratum," and defended as an essential characteristic of Latin America. "Baroque modernity," according to Morande, is a result of the biological-culturalreligious mestizaje that occurred between the Spanish Catholic settlers and Indigenous peoples. It is based on the premise of kinship ties, especially between Spanish conquistadors and Indigenous women who formed a new pueblo, a new cultural language, and a new religious perspective, different from both the European roots of Spanish identity and the local roots of Indigenous identities. This new pueblo is the mestizo of the Americas. Morande wrote that "[t]he mestizo breaks the dominatordominated dualism" (1985, 71)*. Morande framed the category of mestizo as a one-time

68 mixing that created something completely new in history. Thus, out of this newness was fashioned a specific Latin American identity, one that transcends the 'old' dualisms of oppressor and oppressed, of conqueror and conquered, of triumph and vanquishment. The mestizo, as defined by Morande, falls into the category of unitive definitions mentioned above, one that understands history in terms of continuity and synthesis and one that that attempts to unify class/gender/race/colonial conflicts and antagonisms.10 The mestizo, argues Morande, is not driven by modern secularizing rationality, that is an elite imposition, but by its own festive, symbolic and religious sensibility, which was created through the contact of the Christian gospel with Indigenous cultures. Morande wrote, "our thesis is that the mestizo was the privileged subject of evangelization... because the mestizo was the subject of the new cultural synthesis that sprang up out of the encounter between the American cultures and Europe" (1985, 71)*. For Morande, the category of mestizo, formed within the crucible of "Baroque modernity," is also a critique of the indigenista theories that had been popular in other parts of Latin America. Very briefly, these theories argue that Eurocentic rationality can be resisted by a re-appropriation of local Indigenous epistemologies. As I mentioned above, Quijano critiqued a serious lacuna in much Marxist and dependentista theories, by arguing for the importance of race in the understanding of colonial relations. Quijano's world-systems theory focuses on the notion of "coloniality of power" as a way to frame the history of colonialism in Latin America/Caribbean through the experiences of the vanquished Indigenous peoples and Black slaves who were constructed as the racial

Again here, the term unitive is never all-encompassing. Morande was also developing an intellectual framework that posited the mestizo to be in conflict with elite and Eurocentric Enlightenment perspectives. However, this conflict was never defined in terms of an actual historical class conflict against elite interests as it was in some variations of Marxism. It is this historical conflict defended by what Morande called the "technocrats of social change" that unitive perspectives rejected.

69 'other' to Europeans. Quijano argued that the early Andean communities, for example, have a long rich history of non-Eurocentric rationality, which is not instrumental and scientific, but shaped by a sense of reciprocity with nature. For Quijano, Andean reciprocity could "show us the way out of the blind alley into which the ideologues of capital and power have taken us" (1991, 36). The leftist historian, Eduardo Galeano, has also written from the perspective of Indigenous vanquishment. In 1971, he wrote that [t]hese societies have left many testimonies to their greatness despite the long period of devastation: religious monuments built with more skill than the Egyptian pyramids, technically efficient constructions for the battle against nature, art works showing indomitable talent... The conquest shattered the foundations of these civilizations. The installation of a mining economy had direr consequences than the fire and sword of war... The Indians were taken to the mines, were forced to submit to the service of the encomenderos, and were made to surrender for nothing the lands which they had to leave or neglect (1973, 54-5).

Galeano's perspective was, of course, one of redress, namely redress for years of colonial history that described the pre-conquista societies as primitive, and Indigenous peoples as soulless. While neither are actually mentioned by Morande, he rejected the kind of essentialism that freezes Indigenous peoples into the Romantic notion of the "Noble Savage," a nostalgic return to Indigenous civilization as a posture against the ravages of modernity: "the thesis that we are critiquing here, is in the end, Rousseau's ideology of the 'Noble Savage' to characterize the cultures living on American soil" (1985,70)*. It is important to note here that Quijano and Galeano also reject the notion of the "Noble Savage" and that Morande's characterization of "indigenista theories" is crudely monolithic. Morande rejects indigenista theories because he believes they re-construct history through romanticized and essentialized notions of Indigenous purity before the conquista. In some ways, Morande was right to argue that the history of mestizaje cannot be overlooked in a post-conquista context, but from a methodological perspective that

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prioritizes liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics, Morande's thesis is highly problematic. For example, it does not take seriously the history of conquest in the region by treating the history of mestizaje without referencing the accompanying violence that produced such a category in the first place. In other words, Morande's thesis presupposed an original moment of European/Indigenous and male/female unity as a manifestation of the "authentic essence" of Latin American identity. Moreover, Morande's notion of "Baroque modernity," characterized by the ethos of symbols, ritual, and oral culture, is uncritically opposed to "enlightened modernity," which is characterized by instrumental rationality. This is misleading on many fronts. First, enlightened modern intellectuals have developed their own critiques of instrumental rationality; hence "enlightened modernity" should not be reified into a single 'essence.' Second, in some aspects of Baroque culture, which developed during the modern era in Spain, was an anti-modern project that championed a certain version of Christendom. Hence, Morande's thesis is a triumphalist championing of colonial/modern Christendom that posits Catholicism as the primary player in the originating moment of Latin American identity. And third, it is a highly kyriarchal11 version of colonial relations that veils the history of rape, concubinage, and abandonment experienced by Indigenous women and children at the hands of Spanish and Portuguese men. Not all versions of mestizaje or cultural mixing contest colonial essentialisms. As we see with Morande's work, some versions of mestizaje reproduce colonial perspectives A term introduced by feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza: "... I introduced in But She Said the neologism 'kyriarchy,' meaning the rule of the emperor/master/lord/father/husband over his subordinates. With this term I mean to indicate that not all men dominate and exploit all women without difference and that elite Western educated propertied Euro-American men have articulated and benefited from women's and other 'nonpersons' exploitation. As a consequence, the hermeneutical center of a critical feminist theology of liberation cannot simply be women. Rather, it must be constituted and determined by the interests of women who live at the bottom of the kyriarchical pyramid and who struggle against multiple forms of oppression" (1994,14).

71 by freezing cultural formation as a one-time-event in the past. The postcolonial perspective that I am advancing in this work understands historical mestizaje or hybridity as contesting essentialism. Moreover, postcolonial hermeneutics tend to understand cultural formation as something to be constructed in the midst of changing historical contexts, not as something frozen in the past. The works of Quijano and Galenao are much closer to the methodological concerns defended here then to the thesis defended by Morande, but the question of mestizaje or hybridity has not been sufficiently explored in indigenista theories either. Some so-called indigenista theories also fall prey to the same historical essentialism present in the works of the first Spanish evangelizers, but from an inverse romanticizing perspective. Yet, while they obviously differ considerably, both the indigenista perspectives and Morande's mestizo perspective share a common concern in attempting to critique modernity's dehumanizing instrumental rationality and Eurocentrism. They differ significantly on a number of issues, but primarily on the importance one places on the effect of asymmetrical power relations in history.

Liberationist Hermeneutics: Two Major Trends? As mentioned in the introduction, the Sri Lankan liberationist Aloysius Pieris presented an important paper at the Fifth Conference of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT), in New Delhi, in 1981, which critiqued a certain Marxist-oriented strand of Latin American liberation theology for being against religion—which he labeled the "Christ-against-Religions" paradigm (1988, 89). In this paper, Pieris also critiqued some Asian theologians who uncritically appropriated Latin American liberationist hermeneutics for their own context without taking into account the

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reality of Asia, which is overwhelmingly poor and overwhelmingly non-Christian (1988, 59-65). Pieris wrote "[tjhat there are two major trends in liberation theology—one with a Marxist mood and method, and the other with a pastoral rootage in popular cultures—is perhaps not sufficiently appreciated here in Asia" (1988, 90). Pieris was referring to what Luis Maldonado termed the conflictive and unitive accents in liberationist hermeneutics. And while it may have been overly dichotomous to define liberation theologies as consisting of "two major trends," at least Pieris was drawing attention to reality of diversity among liberationists. In the so-called "Marxist mood" camp, Pieris specifically referenced papers presented by Gustavo Gutierrez and Enrique Dussel at the International Ecumenical Congress of Theology, Sao Paulo, in 1980,12 and more broadly, the work of Juan Luis Segundo and Jose Miranda. In the so-called "rootage in popular cultures" camp, he footnoted an article written by Juan Carlos Scannone in the mid-1970s.13 But, like many scholars who operate primarily in English and who have access to only a handful of translated articles, Pieris said nothing more about the "popular cultures" trend in Latin American liberation theology, opting instead to deconstruct Western Marxist views of religion. This, of course, has the consequence of relegating what he called a "major" trend in theology to a minor status, especially among an Anglo-Saxon readership, for whom "liberation theology" (always discussed in the singular) unfortunately equaled only those authors who represented the movement in English translation. But the theology of Juan

12

See Gustavo Gutierrez, "The Irruption of the Poor in Latin America and the Christian Communities of the Common People," and Enrique Dussel, "Current Events in Latin America (1972-1980)," in Torres and Eagleson (1981). 13

Originally published in Spanish in 1975, the article was translated and published in English in Rosino Gibellini, ed. Frontiers of Theology in Latin America (1979). Scannone's article is entitled "Theology, Popular Culture, and Discernment." It is interesting that Gibellini recognized early the importance of Scannone's work. This article is one of the few Scannone articles translated into English.

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Carlos Scannone cannot be overlooked within the history of liberation theologies, for it constitutes a methodically original, thoroughly rigorous, and enormously prophetic voice from the Argentinean context. Gutierrez never identified Scannone's work to be in opposition to liberation theologies. On the contrary, Gutierrez perceptively wrote, [t]he intense political experience of Peronism, for example, has led certain Latin American theologians to distinguish, within the theology of liberation in recent years, a particular current, having its own traits, which they call the "theology of popular pastoral ministry." Juan Carlos Scannone has systematized this approach with clarity and penetration, centering it on the category of "people" (1983,205).

Gutierrez affirmed that Scannone's work should be understood within the trajectory of liberation theologies and as an influential and important articulation of the Argentinean experience. But he also critiqued Scannone for setting up, like Pieris, an opposition between "two vectors in the theology of liberation" (1983, 205). For Gutierrez, the Argentinean stream is not opposed to Marxist/dependentista streams. Even if differences exist, both operate within the family of liberation theologies. Following Gutierrez, I will categorize Scannone's theology as a branch within the family of liberation theologies, but one that emphasizes a unitive perspective rather than a conflictive perspective with respect to defining the role of 'the people' in history.14 Unlike Morande, Scannone hails from what Sambarino called "European America" and has worked within a climate that was institutionally hostile to liberation theologies. For most of the 1970s and 1980s, with a few exceptions, the Argentinean bishops opposed liberationist concerns and even quietly supported the military dictatorship.15 As mentioned earlier, the Argentinean bishops challenged the Medellfn

14

In contrast to Scannone's work, Gutierrez wrote that the "theology of liberation is rooted in a revolutionary militancy. It is aware of the grave questions posed by social conflict, but it considers that these should be attacked and overcome in their roots, without turning one's back on the concrete situations in which they have arisen" (1983, 205). Phillip Berryman remarked that in "Argentina, during the 'dirty war' of the late 1970s, the bishops were noticeably silent even though at least one bishop and ten priests were murdered. It was the Madres de Mayo, the mothers and

74 documents on their understanding of pueblo, and advanced a specifically Argentinean definition. Scanonne explained that the bishops published the so-called Documento de San Miguel, in which special importance was given to the chapter referring to Popular Pastoral Ministry which was no longer viewed as it had been in Medellin, from the opposition "elites-masses," but from an understanding of a nation-people based on culture and on justice toward the poor (1998, 89).

Scannone, along with another Argentinean, Aldo J. Biintig, was present at the first meeting of liberation theologians in Europe, at El Escorial, Spain, 1972.15 Argentinean liberation theology has often been called the "Theology of the People" because of its roots in Peronist populism, because of its interest in popular religion, and because of its tendency toward a more unitive definition of the term pueblo (Scannone 1998, 88). Hence, from its very beginnings as a movement, liberation theologians grappled with important questions about the role of popular religion in transforming society, especially as they referred to the question of what has often been called the elite-mass dialectic. That a significant part of the El Escorial (1972) documents focused on popular religion speaks to the pressing concern of this phenomenon for early liberationist thinkers. At the Second El Escorial meeting twenty years later (1992), Rosino Gibellini, an important Italian editor and commentator on Latin American liberation theologies,17 approached Scannone and said: "You will be pleased to see that other positions have come closer to that of Argentinean theology" (Scannone 1998, 87). Gibellini's statement highlights the polemical nature of the debates and discussions concerning popular religion that transpired in the earliest years of Latin American liberation theologies.

family members of the disappeared, who challenged the military, while the bishops temporized and some even made pro-military statements" (1987,114). See Instituto Fe y Secularidad, ed. Fe Cristiana y cambio social en America Latina (1973). See also Juan Carlos Scannone's '"Axial Shift' Instead of 'Paradigm Shift'" where he wrote: "Twenty years after the first meeting of liberation theology organized in Europe in El Escorial (1972), a second such meeting was held in the same place in 1992.1 participated in both meetings..." (1998, 87). 17

See Gibellini, Rosino, ed. Frontiers of Theology in Latin America (1979).

75 English-speaking readers caught a first glimpse of these discussions in the wellknown book, The Liberation of Theology, by the Uruguayan liberationist Juan Luis Segundo, which was based on lectures he gave at Harvard and was published in the U.S. in 1976. Except for a book of essays published in 1970 in conjunction with an important French-speaking academic conference in Quebec, called Les religions populaires,18 many North American Christian theologians, especially in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant world, had either not encountered the phenomenon of popular religion or dismissed it as Catholic folk superstition. But in the wake of Vatican II reforms, Latin American theologians, pastoral workers, and bishops engaged in discussions on the role of modernity in the region, and popular religion was always front and center. Would modernization simply bring an end to these practices, which were perceived by some as traditional rural practices being secularized in cities? What role could popular religion play in the transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean? In his book, Segundo devoted a full chapter to these questions by analyzing the presentations made at El Escorial (I) on the specific topic of popular religion. In the theological classrooms of North America, however, Segundo's book was read and re-read for his astute perspectives on liberationist method, the hermeneutical circle, and ideology; but the chapter on popular religion was often forgotten or simply deemed of little interest.19 But for Latin American theologians, questions arising on the role of popular religion in the region were intimately linked to questions of theological method, hermeneutics, and

"Le colloque international des religions populaires" (Quebec, 1970). See Lacroix and Boglioni, Les religions populaires (1972). 19

During my Masters program, I had a conversation with a university professor about why the chapter on popular religion in The Liberation of Theology, entitled "Theology and Popular Religion" (chapter 7), was omitted during the section on Segundo's work in liberationist hermeneutics. His answer was unequivocal: "it's not as relevant as the other chapters."

76 especially ideology. Issues relating to method, hermeneutics, and ideology were related to important questions such as: who is 'the people' and what is the role of 'the people' in the church and society? Are 'the people' subjects or objects of liberation? How do 'the people' function in relation to the workings of hegemony? How do intellectuals or the elite relate to 'the people'? In his book, Segundo was critical of Buntig's El Escorial paper, which he negatively labeled a "populist approach" (1976, 196). Segundo argued that Buntig's work on popular religion demonstrates many worthwhile elements; but he also dismissed Buntig's "acritical attitude" toward popular religion, and argued that Biintig does not believe that the church can transform the religion of the people (1976,197). Segundo's reading of Buntig's "theology of the people" specifically, and Argentinean theology more broadly, is confusing. He ascribed to Biintig attitudes Biintig is himself critiquing in the El Escorial paper, such as the "acritical popular" attitude (1973, 134)*. Biintig described his position as such: "we adhere firmly to this attitude that we have identified as popular critical" (1973,135)*. This polemic in Segundo's book tended to ascribe to Argentinean theologies a romanticized populist definition of 'the people' in an unnuanced and acritical way, and to over-emphasize the distinctions between Argentinean theologies and other liberationists. According to Segundo, the problem with popular religion is of a semantic order, what he called "verbal terrorism," because "populist theology" assigns a positive evaluation to the notion of 'the masses' by using the term 'the people' (1976, 192). In Segundo's mind these terms are synonymous, but by shifting the semantic value of the term can contribute to "popular messianism," whereby 'the people' become immune to criticism, and whereby any critique of 'the people' can lead to questioning one's

77 commitment to them (1976, 265). Religion, according to Segundo, has both mass and minority elements. The role of the minority is to help the "process" of development of 'the masses' into a revolutionary force (1976, 187). Popular religion is thus a mass religion. For Segundo "it is the highly charged superstitious Catholicism of the popular masses in most Latin American countries" (1976, 186). Segundo insisted that "[mass religion] cannot appeal to the whole population and unsettle the existing order simultaneously. A religion with both characteristics would be a contradiction in terms" (1976, 186). On the other side of this polemic, there was a tendency to critique the perceived vanguardist elitism coming from the theologies of some liberationists, especially Segundo, who lived and worked in the much more secularized country of Uruguay. According to Scannone, this strain of liberation theology asserts that "pastoral strategies are directed by the elites in order to form conscientized Christian communities in the midst of a secularized world" (1990, 160; Spanish: 1984)*. Scannone championed the concept of 'the people' as a critique of elite Marxist trends in Latin America/Caribbean. He wrote: "renouncing elitism in the area of possession and ownership is not enough, we must also renounce elitism in the area of knowledge that we now find among enlightened elites of both the right and left" (1979, 224). Scannone's reference to "possession and ownership" refers to liberationists who hold too closely to vanguardist analysis, which upholds an elite/masses dialectic.20 These polemics resulted in monolithic distinctions between those who prioritize culture (the unitive populists) and those who prioritize socio-economic issues (the

See Juan Luis Segundo, Masas y minorias en la dialectica divina de la liberation (1973).

78 conflictive Marxists). While important differences did in fact exist among liberationists, the somewhat exaggerated implications of this dichotomy were perpetuated by an unfair evaluation of both the unitive and conflictive approaches as either too populist or too elitist. It is obvious here that both approaches have their own nuances, complexities, and advanced legitimate concerns. These polemics have not gone unnoticed. In 1990, Michael R. Candelaria published his dissertation (supervised by Harvey Cox) under the title, Popular Religion and Liberation: The Dilemma of Liberation Theology, which framed these polemics for English readers by contrasting the works of Scannone and Segundo as mainstream Latin American liberation theologians with opposing views on popular religion. The so-called "dilemma of liberation theology" for Candelaria is not popular religion per se, but more specifically how "liberation theology" defines 'the people' as subjects of liberation (Scannone' populist approach), or as objects of liberation (Segundo mass/minority approach). While his book offered important insights to English readers on the importance of popular religion to Latin American liberation theologians, Candelaria's framework veiled the diversity of approaches that developed in contexts such as Peru, which I will examine in the second half of this chapter. In between the opposing distinctions of populist/unitive vs. elitist/conflictive lies a spectrum of approaches and initiatives that highlight different theoretical categories. In his work on popular religion, Scannone delineated typologies that underscore these diverse approaches.

79 Scannone's Typologies for Popular Religion Scannone argued for a definition of 'the people' that is firmly rooted in the historical memory and cultural ethos of the Argentinean people, but also one that preferentially opts for the poor and marginalized. In an article published in 1984, Scannone wrote, as for the people as a collective subject, I understand this approach above all in the sense of people-nation. However this does not define it in terms of a geographical territory, or the state, or a race, but in terms of a culture and of an ethical-historical decision for the same common good... Everything that I have said up to this point as to the analogical identity of the collective subject of the people and its opposition to the anti-people [all that opposes the common good] can help to understand how it links up to the adjective "popular" in the expression "popular religion." It belongs to all the people, but— in the words of the Puebla document, n.447—it is lived preferentially by the poor and simple folk... (1990, 165,166)*.

It is important for Scannone to define 'the people' as belonging to all (universal), but especially in the poor (specific), because like Morande, he also argued against an overly determined elite-people dichotomy plaguing Latin American history. For Scannone, popular religion embodies a popular wisdom that can resist the secularizing modernity embraced by the elite few. In the article quoted above, he offered a critique of three divergent approaches that have contributed to this betrayal of popular religion, which he believed to be at the root of Latin American identity. Scannone's "typologies" of responses to popular religion are one effort among many to categorize the diversity of opinions that existed in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America with respect to these practices. Too often, authors have characterized liberationist responses to popular religion as overwhelmingly negative. Even the Latina feminist theologian, Maria Pilar Aquino, who is originally from Mexico, and who acknowledges the important influence of liberation theologies on Latino/a theologies, has written that liberation theology "has disdained popular Catholicism in theological epistemology, in spite of it being the

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omnipresent expression of faith of the people throughout the continent" (1999, 16).21 This kind of negative remark is characteristic of how some theologians perceive liberationist perspectives on popular religion. The first category in Scannone's typology is the traditionalist approach; it is characterized by a stark division between "popular Catholicism" and "official Catholicism" (1990, 158)*. Here, popular religion is understood as "vulgar, popularizing, uneducated, and deficient-and often times superstitious-with respect to the official religion" (1990, 158)*. In the traditionalist approach, popular religion is accepted as a belief system and part of the Catholic tradition of a country or continent. But it is treated with a paternalistic attitude, and the so-called "ignorance of the people" is approached with condescending tolerance. According to Scannone, its "pastoral strategy is simply conservative—without creativity—and defensive with respect to the threat of modernity, and especially with respect to rationalism, progressive criticism, and Marxist materialism" (1990,158)*. The traditionalist approach does not simply defend popular religion as traditional. Rather, Scannone argued that it also "uses popular religion as an ideological tool to uphold national security states, as a defense against Marxism, or to disqualify the pastoral practices and theologies of liberation, etc." (1990,158)*. According to Scannone, the progressive approach to popular religion is born from a critique of the traditionalist approach and its theology of Christendom. However, the division between official-popular is retained in this approach through an elite-mass division described earlier with respect to the theology of Segundo. Here the religion of 21

I realize here that Aquino is following Orlando Espfn's comments that even "liberation theologians have tended to downplay popular religion's role in the Church." See Espfn, The Faith of the People (1997,64). Oddly, Espfn footnotes the work of Galilea and Scannone as examples of this tendency of downplaying popular religion! While Scannone is much more nuanced in his understanding of popular religion than Galilea, these two Latin American theologians hardly downplayed the role of popular religion. In fact, the opposite is true.

81 the masses is understood to be affective, devotional, and ritualistic; it is ahistorical and individualistic in outlook. The condescending attitude of the traditionalist approach is thus turned into an attitude of purification through the cultivation of critical consciousness. According to Scannone, this critical posture does not worry about orthodox doctrine, but about the autoconsciouness of the critical subject, which is one of the values typical of modernity. Here the popular wisdom of popular religion is not valued as much as ethics and commitment to fundamental human values (1990,159). According to Scannone, there are two trajectories within the progressive approach. The first is born in Latin America, but is heavily influenced by the theology of secularization developed in Europe and North America. Here popular religion belongs to pre-industrial agrarian societies, which are perceived to be on the verge of extinction in modern urbanizing Latin America. Scannone posited Segundo as the most ardent proponent of this thesis, but also reminded us that Segundo "was heavily influenced by the lay character of Uruguayan society, which is atypical within the Latin American context" (1990,160)*. The second trajectory of the progressive approach Scannone called the "maturity of the faith" thesis. Because popular religion is understood to be simply devotional and ritualistic, it is characterized as infantilistic and opposed to a mature faith, which is characterized by conscientization and commitment to a cause. Scannone reminded us that this thesis is heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory and opts for the "necessity of a more integral critical consciousness, purification, and evangelization of popular religion" (1990, 160)*. Here Scannone refered to the work of Aldo Biintig, Segundo Galilea, and Tokihiro Kudo. Especially with respect to Galilea, Scannone explained that this thesis

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argues for the necessity of base communities (CEBs) as an evangelizing force, which will transform the infantile devotionalism of popular religion into a mature faith. With the inclusion of Biintig, Scannone identified differences emerging within the so-called Argentinean "theology of the people." Scannone wrote in a footnote that "without fully belonging to this trajectory, the [maturation of the faith] method was used by Biintig" in his earlier works (1990,160)*. While the progressive approach adopted both a secularization thesis and a maturation thesis with respect to popular religion, a third perspective, the liberationist approach, reacted against its elitist currents. The theologians presented by Scannone in the progressive approach can all be categorized as liberation theologians; hence there is much cross-over between these two approaches. But what distinguishes them is a more conscious conflictive and dialectical approach in the liberationist approach between oppressor and oppressed in its understanding of 'the people.' I mentioned earlier that the Argentinean bishops had, in the early 1970s, re-defined the Medellm understanding of 'the people' in a unitive way. In 1979, the unitive definition of 'the people' resurfaced in some documents of the Puebla CELAM conference, which were very anti-liberationist in character. According to Scannone, these documents galvanized in the 1980s a liberationist response that was decisively conflictual in its understanding of 'the people' as bearers of social change. However, this conflictual perspective was also quite prominent in the 1970s. Scannone remarked that the first thesis developed in this optic can be seen in the early work of Hugo Assmann, who argued for a critical Marxist view of religion, which posits an opposition between faith and religion.22 Faith, in this instance,

22

For a critical evaluation of the faith/religion divide in the work of Jon Sobrino, see the section "Revelation against Religion" in Bellemare, Prophetic Ascetism in the Wilderness (1998, 38-44).

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is understood as a political and revolutionary commitment, which rejects alienated religion.23 The second trajectory in the liberationist approach is what Scannone called the "emergent class" theory, which posits popular religion as authentically belonging to the popular classes that struggle for liberation. This approach entails a "reactivation of the dialectical force of popular religion in history" (1990, 163)*. Scannone mentioned in this respect the work of Tokihiro Kudo (also mentioned in the progressive approach) and Raul Vidales, both of whom worked closely with Gustavo Gutierrez in Peru in the 1970s. This trajectory can be discerned in the work of another theologian who worked closely with Gutierrez in Peru, Jose Luis Gonzalez, whose research I will discuss below. This trajectory draws on anthropology, especially the work of Peruvian anthropologist Manuel Marzal. These theologians framed popular religion as a form of resistance by an oppressed and believing people. Scannone wrote, "from there, they attempted to distinguish between what was authentically popular from its 'popularizing' elements, in other words, what was introduced in the conscience of the people by dominant culture and its distinct idols" (1990, 164)*. Gonzalez' approach represented a more anthropological approach to popular religion from a liberationist perspective that is acutely preoccupied with the strategies of subaltern peoples.

The work of Jose Miranda can be slotted in this perspective. Miranda writes, "the anticultus of Jesus Christ and the prophets was a struggle against religion... Religion lubricates the cycles of eternal return in history. Rebellion against religion is mandatory for anyone convinced that justice must be achieved, because persons with moral conscience cannot resign themselves to the eternal return of all things." See Miranda, Being and the Messiah: The Message ofStJohn (1977). It is important to remember here, however, that religion for him means primarily the so-called 'official' cultus of Christendom and its hegemonic control of subaltern religion.

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Scannone's Historical-Critical and Sapiential Typology Scannone opted for a fourth category, what he calls the historical-cultural approach. Scannone reminded us that the liberationist approach described above should not be read as a general critique of liberation theologians, but only those specifically mentioned. Indeed, he quoted Galilea positively, and described his later work as being in agreement with his own approach.24 However, Scannone could not accept the notion of "resistance," because it pre-supposes "alienation" and thus a conflictive Hegelian-Marxist dialecticism. Scannone's more unitive approach is of an analogical order. He argued for an approach that critiques the elitist dimensions of the other approaches, and which delineates a specifically Argentinean approach that understands 'the people' as a collective subject with its own cultural ethos and historical project. Scannone explained that in this approach one cannot determine who the pueblo is, through socio-structural analysis or otherwise, except through historical discernment. In other words, Scannone argued that this meant discerning between what promotes the common good and those things that "oppose the common good (whether in ethical-historical terms—justice— or ethical-cultural ones—cultural identity)," which he calls antipueblo (1990, 166)*. Such an approach does not, Scannone insisted, invalidate the socio-structural approach, but insists on a mediation between the social sciences, such as anthropology and history, with poetic-symbolic categories and explicitly religious categories for a more holistic theological-pastoral reflection on popular religion (1990, 166). Hence, for him, the poor sectors constitute the privileged place for this reflection. Scannone wrote, "in Latin America those sectors can culturally resist oppression and better preserve than others 24

Earlier in the article Scannone recognized a positive development in Galilea's work on popular religion. He contrasted Galilea's article at the El Escorial meeting of 1972, entitled "La fe como principio critico de promotion de la religiosidad popular," with a book from 1979, entitled Religiosidad popular y pastoral.

85 those human and Christian values born from a cultural mestizaje on which evangelization left a decisive imprint" (1990, 166)*. Scannone's work in the mid-1980s upholds the Catholic substrate notion that we have seen in the work of Morande and the CELAM documents at Puebla, whereby popular religion, or more precisely popular Catholicism, is perceived as the privileged place for the construction of Latin America identity, which was born of mestizaje, and from which evangelization was a decisive, if not privileged, factor. But in the early1990s, Scannone developed the notion of a "sapiential rationality" at work in Latin America/Caribbean, which coincides in part with the impact of Christian evangelization, but differs from it as well. This is a significant development in his work because he did not frame this "sapiential rationality" as an essence fixed once-and-for-all in the past. This "sapiential rationality" is characterized by a logic of gratuity {la logica de la gratuitad) and constitutes an/other kind of epistemology that is specifically Latin American (1993b, 213)*. For Scannone, this constitutes what Gutierrez25 had called an "irruption of the poor in Latin America," not only in terms of the place of the poor in the transformation of history, church, and theology, but in the transformation of Latin American philosophy as well (Scannone 1993a, 123). In other words, Scannone's concern here was to follow through on Gutierrez' liberationist discernment of how the "absent ones" were making their "presence felt" in both church and history (Gutierrez 1981, 108). But Scannone was also locating this irruption in the area of knowledge processes. Scannone retrieved from the ethos of popular religion a rationality different

See Gutierrez, "The Irruption of the Poor in Latin America and the Christian Communities of the Common People" (1981).

than modern instrumental rationality, but one that is not anti-modern. In an article written in the early 1990s, Scannone wrote that because it is essentially respectful of both differences and plural unity, it can respond to the challenges of modernity, relocating the sapiential forms of other rationalities without compromising their autonomy, their critical character, and their differences, which are inherent parts of the modern inheritance (1991, 160)*.

While Scannone's work in the 1980s tended to essentialize his constructs by fixing an original moment of mestizaje as the underlying authentic identity of Latin America, his work in the 1990s showed interesting developments. His historical-cultural approach is a valuable perspective because it is framed through a preferential option for the poor and through attentiveness to the poetic-symbolic world of popular religion. Unlike Morande, Scannone is mindful of historical asymmetries, methodologically opts for the poor and marginalized, and most importantly, does not insist on a mestizaje as the product of kinship relations, which veils the brutality of the conquest. I will return to this issue when examining the work of Cristian Parker, who has developed the notion of an otra logica in Latin American popular religion along the lines of Scannone's "sapiential logic" and as a response to Morande's kinship model.

POPULAR RELIGION AND LIBERATION One of the values of the people of Latin America is popular religion. Popular religion is something beyond the comprehension, and beneath the contempt, of the 'enlightened' bourgeois mentality. And yet of course the representatives of this mentality do not hesitate to manipulate it in defense of their privileges. Hence the presence of elements of the dominant ideology in popular religion. But the religious experiences of the people are also charged with values ofprotest, resistance, and liberation. Gustavo Gutierrez (Peru, 1979)

In this section, I will briefly review some of the progressive and liberationist approaches to popular religion described by Scannone. This section is not an exhaustive account of liberationist responses to popular religion. I intend to highlight only a few

87

liberationist perspectives on popular religion within what Maldonado has called the conflictive perspective. I do this to show that different priorities existed among liberationists on the topic of popular religion in Latin American and the Caribbean and to begin to explore the context of the next chapter, which is devoted to Diego Irarrazaval, a theologian deeply influenced by the research that was being developed in the Peru of the mid-1970s. I will end the section with a return to the theology of Juan Luis Segundo, because his work illustrates how the liberationist critique of religious oppression, especially as it is focused on the church of Christendom, included certain aspects of popular religion that were perceived as promoting fatalism and alienation. The critique of religious oppression was/is an important aspect of liberationist perspectives, and was/is usually directed at powerful religious institutions. The so-called disparagement of popular religion that tends to be associated with liberation theologians in Latin America/Caribbean was in fact rooted in a critique of the ruling ideology of 'official' Catholicism and its subsequent impact on subaltern peoples. One of the most important voices emerging in the Latin American liberationist movement of the 1970s, Gustavo Gutierrez, insisted early on that the complex and contested phenomenon of popular religion was an area in need of research and analysis in the development of liberation theology. The above quote by Gutierrez was first published in Peru, in 1979. Yet some years before this publication, Gutierrez suggested popular religion as an area of special attention and elaboration at the Centro Bartolome de Las Casas, in Lima. Diego Irarrazaval fled the Pinochet dictatorship because he had been active with the Christians for Socialism in Chile, and was invited by Gutierrez to come to Peru and study popular religious practices in the north of the country. An important study

88

by Gutierrez' students, Raul Vidales and Tokihiro Kudo, entitled Prdctica religiosa y proyecto historico, published in 1975, pre-dated Irarrazaval's first Peruvian publication by a few years. In this study, Vidales and Kudo described popular religion as having an authentic liberative dimension among the peoples of the emergent popular class (1975, 111-116). This work falls into the "emergent class" theory noted earlier in Scannone's liberationist typology, and it is also a perspective that influenced Irarrazaval. I will return to this perspective in chapter two when I examine Irarrazaval's pioneering article, "Cristo Morado: Senorde losmaltratados" which was published in 1977. Irarrazaval's appreciative liberationist book on popular religion in northern Peru, called Religion del pobre y liberation en Chimbote (1978), is another example of the studies that were underway in the mid to late-seventies on popular religion.

Culture and Conflict: The Peruvian Example More recently, Scannone noted that "there appeared in liberation theology, including its main current, an ever growing interest in popular religion..." (1998, 92). This interest in popular religion took root in Peru in the mid-to-late seventies. A project was initiated in 1979, the "Proyecto de investigation sobre la religiosidadpopular en el Peru,'' which assembled a country-wide team of researchers, including anthropologists, sociologists of religion, and theologians, who responded to "the recommendation that was made at the Second Latin American Bishops Conference [CELAM] (Medellin, 1968) to study the forms of popular religion for the purpose of pastoral ministry" within poor and marginalized communities (Gonzalez 1987,15). Although the project remains partly unfinished, the study was, at the time of its publication, one of the most comprehensive

89 studies on popular religion in Latin America.26 The results are based on five years of research, consisting of over 2000 responses to surveys by people in all regions of Peru, and over 100 in depth interviews and biographies on the place of popular religion in the cotidiano of poor people's lives. As a student of the anthropologist Manuel Marzal, a specialist in Andean religions, the coordinator of the project, Jose Luis Gonzalez, gave special attention to a cultural analysis of popular religion in Peru while holding fast to a liberationist option for the poor and excluded. Popular religious practices in Peru are imbued with Quechuan and Aymaran perspectives, and these important Indigenous perspectives opened the doors for anthropological trajectories to take root in theology. Also, responding to the recommendations made at the Medellin meeting, the Catholic bishops of southern Peru had founded the Instituto Pastoral Andina (IPA) in Cusco, in 1969. The IPA is a research centre that studies Andean cultures, both Quechuan and Aymaran, in order to assist pastoral ministries in empowering Indigenous communities to become subjects of their own histories. The IPA has published ethnographic research material, and has been at the forefront in educating pastoral agents about cultural and socio-political issues in the Andes. The IPA has also worked very closely at the grassroots level with women, youth, and rural peoples. The anthropological research done at the IPA was very important for the study of popular religion in Peru insofar as it enriched the previous research by Vidales, Kudo, and Irarrazaval, as it was informed by a social scientific approach with a strong emphasis on structural-economic issues.

The results can be found in Gonzalez, La religion popular en el Peru (1987).

90 The ''Proyecto de investigation1 also helped to precipitate the founding of the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras, in Chucuito (on the shores of Lake Titicaca in the Altiplano), which also sought to promote the study of Aymaran culture utilizing anthropological research.27 Hence, as early as 1979, anthropological methods were being utilized to understand the role of popular religion in Latin America. This is important to note, because some commentators tend to draw too starkly a methodological shift from socio-political analyses to cultural analyses in the late 1980 to earlyl990s.28 It is true that the late 80s and early 90s was a significant time for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the world more generally; it is a time that corresponds, among other developments, with the fall of the Berlin wall, the first invasion of Iraq, the defeat of the Sandinistas, the assassination of the six Jesuits and their two friends in San Salvador, and the 500th year commemoration of the conquest of the Americas. And while important shifts certainly occurred at this time, framing the history in these terms tends to veil an interest in culture already present within the so-called conflictive or dependentista stream of liberationist hermeneutics. Historical context is very important when trying to understand the trajectory of religious and social movements in the diverse context of Latin America and the Caribbean. Gonzalez' work differs from the work of Segundo, for example, in that his research context of Peru, what Sambarino called "Indigenous America," influenced in important ways the development of the project. From a liberationist perspective that

27

One of the founders of the Instituto was Curt Cadorette, an American Maryknoll priest, and one of the researchers on the 'Proyecto de investigation sobre la religiosidad popular en el Peru.' He was joined by Diego Irarrazaval in 1981, also on the research team of the Proyecto, who later served as the Instituto's coordinator until its closure in 2004. Irarrazaval moved back to Chile after 29 years in Peru. See Irarrazaval's moving tribute to his Peruvian friends in "Gracias a Dios y a ustedes" (2004b). 28

See Pablo Richard, "Challenges to Liberation Theology in the Decade of the Nineties" (1994, 251-252).

91 methodologically and pastorally opts for the poor and marginalized, the history of vanquishment among the Indigenous peoples of "Indigenous America" was always a priority. As mentioned earlier with respect to Segundo's secular experience in Uruguay, perspectives on the role of popular religion in Latin American society vary from place to place. Irarrazaval noted, for example, the existence in 1975 of "clear tensions between the CEBs and popular religion in Chile and Brazil" (1999a, 82)*. But as Scannone noted about Peru, quoting Gutierrez, the "concern about culture [among liberationists] had been present from the beginning" (1998, 87).

Gutierrez, Dependency, and the CEBs The question of how dehumanizing culture, oppressive religion, and especially dominant ideology, can be resisted or transformed by a subaltern group is difficult and complex. As mentioned above, Scannone argued that the notion of resistance presupposes the notion of alienation. From a perspective that prioritizes the pueblo as a subject of its own history and of its own knowledge systems, deploying the notion of alienation is dangerous insofar as it can strip subaltern peoples of agency. However, many liberationists attempted to grapple with this question by appealing to notions of ideology. Hence, Gutierrez referred to this issue specifically when he wrote about his concern for "the presence of elements of the dominant ideology in popular religion" (1983,193). At a time when dependency theories were favored among some liberationists, Gutierrez adopted a perspective that understood popular religion, like the peripheral countries of Latin America in general, as being in a state of ideological dependency. As Gutierrez asserted in his groundbreaking book, A Theology of Liberation,

autonomous Latin American development is not viable within the framework of the international capitalist system" (1988, 54). In the context of the post-Cuban revolution which, according to Gutierrez, "has played a catalytic role," "liberation is a term which expresses a new posture of Latin Americans" (1988, 55). Moreover, in his book, The Power of the Poor in History, Gutierrez wrote that "the theory of dependency, in the social sciences, has contributed in recent years to a new political awareness in Latin America... In the dependency framework one can analyze other confrontations as well" (1983,192). Gutierrez analyzed one of these "confrontations" directly: "Popular religion is beyond the comprehension, and beneath the contempt, of the 'enlightened' bourgeois mentality. And yet of course the representatives of this mentality do not hesitate to manipulate it in defense of their privileges..." (1983, 193). In this historical context, liberationists, such as Gutierrez, argued that to uncover the liberative dimensions and expressions of popular religion and bring them to fullness required a process of "conscientization" (Freire), which could be organized in conjunction with ecclesial base communities (CEBs). In his article entitled "Irruption of the Poor," Gutierrez argued for an inter-related "twofold character" definition of the Latin American people: "simultaneously oppressed and believing" (1981, 112). For Gutierrez, the first characteristic (oppressed) entails an element of social conflict, which is why Maldonado has referred to this perspective as conflictive. Hence, Gutierrez wrote, "the word 'poor' has a collective connotation and entails an element of social conflict" (1981, 112). According to Gutierrez, what Jose Mariategui had previously called the "religious factor" in Peru, has been an "obstacle preventing the people from getting a clearer view of their oppressive situation" (1981,

93 113). Gutierrez was careful to assert that "[w]hat we know as popular religiosity is one expression of [Mariategui's notion], but not the only one" (1981, 113). Thus, this assessment does not entail a wholesale rejection of popular religion. As noted above, Gutierrez also argued that popular religion displays "the presence of an immense possibility for liberative faith" (1981, 114). However, it is also "held captive in a dehumanizing, capitalist society" (1981,114). According to Gutierrez, it is therefore the role of the CEBs to help uncover this liberative faith out from under its hegemonic ideological captivity and assume the fullness of its liberative potentiality. Some liberationists argued that the CEBs constituted, in Leonardo Boff's words, an "ecclesiogenesis," a "re-invention" of the church from below in Latin America, and a "leaven of renewal" for the church as a whole (1981, 33). CEBs sprang out of the overwhelmingly lay character of Latin American Catholicism, which developed, according to Boff, in part because of the scarcity of ordained priests on the continent. Like many liberationists who argued for a new ecclesiology that was lay-centered, participatory, horizontal, and communitarian, Boff argued that the CEBs could transform the whole of the church, including popular religious practices, which were often viewed to be under the control of the clerical class. But he also argued that the Catholic church is "genuinely church [when it is] assimilating the characteristics of the people, a church in which the people can express their faith in a key that belongs to their own values, to their yearning for liberation that will bring participation and communion injustice" (1981, 378). This early work by Leonardo Boff (Ecclesiogenesis, published in Brazil in 1977) expressed widely held concerns in liberationist circles for a church that was re-inventing

itself according to the concrete realities of poor lay people as subjects of history (1981, 37). Liberation theologians were pioneers in developing lay-centered and grassroots ecclesiologies that attempted to take seriously the agency and subjectivity of subaltern peoples within a hierarchical and clerical church. Popular religion, with its seemingly traditional character, posed problems for some liberationists who sought a church transformed into a new participatory model that eschewed so-called obscurantist traditionalism. They understood that popular religion derived from 'the people,' who were subjects of their own informal narratives, practices, and theologies. How could this subjectivity be liberated from this obscurantism, which was believed to originate with the clerical class? This was a crucial question, and indeed still is, for Latin American and Caribbean liberationists.

The Question of Ideology Ideology is also a notoriously contested term. According to Aloysius Pieris, there were over 150 definitions circulating in academia by the late 1980s (1988,24). Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Antonio Gramsci held different views about the process by which domination is imposed or manufactured by the ruling classes. Pieris described his concern with ideology and religion in this way: My analysis of this question presumes that every religion, Christianity included, is at once a sign and a countersign of the kingdom of God; that the revolutionary impetus launching religion into existence is both fettered and fostered by the need for an ideological formulation; that its institutionalization both constrains and conserves its liberative force; that religion, therefore, is a potential means of either emancipation or enslavement (1988, 88).

Pieris asserted that in "all organized activities of religiously committed persons there is invariably an ideology at work" (1988, 24). With Lenin and Gramsci, as well as with Georg Lukacs, Pieris' understanding of ideology is a positive one. In other words,

95 ideology is not simply a distortion of thought (reason corrupted by interest) as Marx had argued. According to Lenin, for example, there can be both a bourgeois and socialist ideology, and distortions or strengths of any given ideology are related to its social context.29 Pieris recalled once hearing a progressive Latin American bishop respond to a conservative bishop who had labeled liberation theology as being ideologically biased, by saying: "let the person who has no ideology cast the first stone" (1988, 24). In other words, the progressive bishop believed, like Pieris, that all theologies are shaped by ideology. Some Latin American liberationists and European political theologians in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both Catholics and Protestants, appropriated Marx' critical understanding of ideology in constructing their own contextual theologies in dialogue with the modern world. As Scannone has suggested, this has had negative repercussions for a comprehensive understanding of popular religion. Ironically, it was among Catholic political theologians that a more pronounced suspicion of popular religion came to the forefront after Vatican II.30 In light of these reforms, some progressive supporters of the Council's new openness to the modern world tended to identify popular religion as remnants of a pre-modern religiosity perceived as 'irrational' and/or 'alienated.' This is because elite manipulated versions of popular religion, such as the nineteenth century devotions of Our Lady of Lourdes and the Sacred Heart of Jesus for example, were often imposed as 'official' versions of popular piety among Catholic traditionalists. In other

See Michele Barrett, Politics of Truth (1991), Chapter 2, for her examination of the distinctions between "positive" and "critical" understandings of ideology. 30 Edward Schillebeeckx, for example, argued that when Marx critiqued religion, he was really critiquing the "otherworldly" direction of popular religion (1983,712).

96 words, popular religious practices were often co-opted by the elite and 'official' versions were imposed on the pueblo. In Latin America, Segundo delineated a progressive approach toward popular religion and utilized a positive definition of ideology in his work. For Segundo, faith must critically engage with ideology if it is to have historical applicability and relevance. Faith without ideologies in Segundo's framework is ahistorical; it is "dead as a doornail" (1976, 121). According to Segundo, it is ideology that gives the incarnated Christian faith its enfleshed and historical dimension.

Segundo and Religious Oppression In The Liberation of Theology, Segundo defined ideologies as "the system of goals and means that serves as the necessary backdrop for any human option and line of action" (1976, 102). This definition is inclusive of Marx' notion of ideology as the corruption of reason by interest, but also moves beyond it to include all committed endeavours that seek to mobilize or motivate praxis. Moreover, Segundo explicitly critiqued both church conservatives and Christian Marxists who were positing a transcendent faith that is over and above ideologies. According to Segundo, liberationists in Latin America were often reproached by church conservatives with the declaration that "faith is not an ideology," which was an attempt to critique the so-called ideological bias in liberation theology. Also, Segundo noted that in the early 1970's, faith was understood by Christian Marxists to be in need of an ideology resulting in a method that too easily substituted Marx for scripture in the process of forging a revolutionary praxis. For

97 Segundo, both approaches separate too readily faith and ideologies and assume that faith is either an absolute untouched by history or an empty vessel waiting to be filled. Applying a child development model, which posited a framework of maturation in the faith, Segundo argued that if there is a gap to be filled, it is not between faith and ideologies, but between G*d and history. Thus, according to Segundo, if faith is "permanent and unique," and ideologies "changing and bound up with different historical circumstances," the revelation of G*d is never appropriated in pure form (1976,116). Such a schema must be the starting point to understand faith and ideologies as "inextricably intermingled" (1976, 105). Segundo wrote this: So we must build a bridge between our conception of God and the real-life problems of history. This bridge, this provisional but necessary system of means and ends is what we are calling ideology here. Obviously each and every ideology presented in Scripture is a human element even though in the intensely unified psychological processes of human beings it may seem to be a direct and straightforward translation of the proper conception of the God who has been revealed (1976, 105).

As we have seen, Segundo also wrote of the danger of popular religious practices corrupted into expressions of alienating ideology. For Segundo, as with many other theologians concerned with a liberative praxis that seeks to prophetically challenge oppressive and dehumanizing structures, popular religion was understood in part to be a passive acceptance of hegemonic church ideology. In other words, popular religious practices among subaltern peoples, especially those practices that promote fatalism, reveal an acceptance of suffering that sustains an oppressive status quo defended by the church hierarchy, elite land owners, and the military. This passive acceptance of suffering was understood as the result of unjust power relations that impress themselves on the most vulnerable in society. Segundo's critique of religious oppression is a crucial component of liberationist hermeneutics because alienated and/or fatalistic aspects did

98 (and do) indeed exist in popular religion. Segundo was preoccupied with how dominant paradigms tend to get reproduced at the popular or mass level. This is an important liberationist contribution in a context where some popular religious celebrations were used to baptize dictatorships and other dehumanizing systems. However, this critique did not leave much room for what James C. Scott calls "hidden transcripts" (1990) and other forms of protest that belong to the world of subaltern peoples. Unlike the Peruvian research mentioned earlier, Segundo's theology was never rooted in pastoral involvement with popular religious practices. His perspective tended to be elitist and overly abstract, leaving no room for the cracks that can disrupt ideological domination. We have already seen that Segundo is especially critical in this respect of the Argentinean "Theology of the People," which was more firmly focused on popular culture. According to Segundo, Argentinean theology, especially the work of Aldo Biintig, tried to salvage the values found in popular Catholicism rather than inject it with a dose of critical consciousness (1976, 199). Segundo argued that the Argentinean school did not take seriously the asymmetrical power relations in Latin American society and thus constructed a romanticized understanding of popular culture, which is too monolithic in its desire to find a unified people's culture. In contrast, Segundo judged that the method of Chilean theologian, Segundo Galilea, which sought to exert a process of liberative evangelization, to be more deeply transformative (1976,201).31 According to Segundo, both "liberation theology and the closely related liberation pedagogy of Paulo Freire have stemmed from the conviction that the Latin American masses are not only oppressed and exploited but also alienated' (1976, 188). For Segundo, it was not enough

31

See Segundo Galilea, "The Theology of Liberation and the Place of 'Folk Religion,'" (1980a).

99 to attempt to "salvage the values existing in sacral gestures" (1976, 203). The role of the "vanguard," or "minority groups in possession of a mature faith" within the context of a serious commitment toward the masses, was "to inject into them the crisis of an authentic evangelization process" (1976, 202). The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, in his widely read book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (originally published in 1967), defined the process of alienation as such: "the oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his [sic] guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility" (1990, 31). Freire began teaching literacy to peasants in the late fifties and early sixties, but rejected traditional literacy training, what he called the "banking idea" or the attempt to deposit knowledge into the heads of people as if they were empty vessels (1990, 57). Freire argued that teaching adults was radically different from teaching children and sought to teach literacy by engaging the everyday knowledges of peasants as starting points: land, plowing, crops, water, etc. By appealing to the everyday context of peasant life, the bottom up pedagogy developed by Freire sought to deconstruct strict teacher-student hierarchies, which lead to the emergence of conscientization (from the term conscientizacao in Portuguese), a critical affirmation of themselves as knowledgeable subjects in the education process and of themselves as subjects in transforming the oppressive context in which they lived. Peasants were learning with agency and with a sense of dignity about their cultures, rather than being made to feel ignorant, uneducated, and primitive. The constant stress on peasant culture as the center of attention, rather than trying to introduce peasants into an alien urban culture, nurtured peasants toward a critical consciousness about their own

marginalization vis-a-vis the center. Even if Freire's efforts were cut short by the military coup of 1964, the "Freire Method," as it has come to be called, revolutionized pedagogy and inspired a whole generation of activists, pastoral workers, and liberation theologians working in solidarity with the popular sectors in both urban and rural areas. At the Medellin CELAM conference in 1968, the bishops used the term conscientizacion in several passages calling on religious educators to introduce liberating education. As Phillip Berryman pointed out, the conference's "document on education is especially Freirean in spirit" (1987, 37). The conscientization process not only involves coming to consciousness about one's plight in unjust and dehumanizing contexts, but also, seeking alternatives, articulating needs, and organizing into movements. For Freire, this could be achieved only if the chains of internalized oppression were cast off. As Freire wrote, "[o]ne of the greatest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge men's [sic] consciousness" (1990, 36). Freire's definition of internalized oppression is important for understanding the critique of popular religion by some liberationists in the 1970s. In order to construct a contextual theology that opposed systems of oppression deeply ingrained in Latin American and Caribbean culture, some liberationists were influenced by the "Freire Method" and emphasized the role of the "organic intellectual" as an integral part of the conscientizing process.32 Antonio Gramsci used the term to critique vanguardist forms of leadership in some Marxist-Leninist writings and practices. Gramsci distinguished between traditional

In A Theology of Liberation (Spanish: 1971), Gutierrez wrote: "Only with the exercise of the prophetic function understood in this way, will the theologian be—to borrow from Antonio Gramsci—a new kind of 'organic intellectual'" (1988, 10)

101 intellectuals, those who remain divorced from popular struggles, and organic intellectuals, those who align themselves with, or come out of, the subaltern classes. For liberation theologians influenced by Freire, the task of the organic intellectual served a prophetic function to stand in solidarity with the oppressed. Gutierrez noted that "the theologian does not work in some kind of ahistorical limbo... [but must be] an 'organic intellectual'—organically linked to the popular undertaking of liberation" (1983, 13). Segundo constructed his minority/mass dialectic within a Freirean framework, whereby the task of the organic intellectual was to help inject a critical consciousness, or what Segundo Galilea called "liberating evangelization," about the potential for resignation in popular religion (1980a, 44). Segundo and Galilea differed in their approaches to popular religion,33 yet they were keenly aware of the ambiguities and contractions of this religious phenomenon. The attempt to articulate a need to "inject" a critical consciousness about potential resignation and/or alienation was a serious attempt to respond to the power of internalized oppression that subaltern peoples continue to face everyday. Although not a theologian, Eduardo Galeano depicts Freire's internalization theory in stark detail in his widely read Open Veins of Latin America (Spanish: 1971). Galeano's description is important to include here, not because it influenced some liberationists in the 1970s, but because it is good representation of the genuine concern by 'critical' thinkers about the oppressive dimensions of the conquest in contemporary 33

Galilea critiqued Segundo in an article in 1980: "The first evaluation of folk religion dates from the 1950s. At first, religious sociologists, theologians, and most pastoral workers were united in a negative view... thereby accentuating a Christianity of elites and the Church capable of being an evangelical sign and witness. From this standpoint popular religion was seen as a grey, murky, area of Christianity. This line of thought is still operative in certain quarters" (1980a, 42). The "certain quarters" relates to the work of Segundo. Galilea is far less critical of the Argentinean school, which he sees as a "critical reaction" to the "earlier positions [that] laid stress on socio-economic liberation and their ideological consequences in their judgments of popular religion" (1980a, 43). Here, again, we can see the conflictive/unitive contrast that I discussed earlier in this chapter.

102 Latin America. Galeano's distress was shared by many who critiqued the pre-Medellin Catholic church, which historically blessed a social order characterized by systemic poverty, racial discrimination, and dependency on imperial powers. Galeano describes the effects of conquest on the Indigenous poor in their appropriation of Christian ritual practices. Galeano wrote that [t]he effects of the Conquest and the long ensuing period of humiliation left the cultural and social identity the Indians had achieved in fragments. Yet in Guatemala this pulverized identity is the only one that persists. It persists in tragedy. During Holy Week, processions of the heirs of the Mayas produce frightful exhibitions of collective masochism. They drag heavy crosses and participate in the flagellation of Jesus step by step along the interminable ascent to Golgotha; with howls of pain they turn His death and His burial into the cult of their own death and their own burial, the annihilation of the beautiful life long ago. Only there is no Resurrection at the end of Holy Week (1973,62).

Galeano's powerful description of the effects of the conquest on Indigenous peoples was meant to reveal the explicit responsibility of the Catholic church in maintaining the interests of the conquistadors. In Galeano's view, the ideology of the conquest is powerfully maintained in the religion of Indigenous peoples through the reenactment of the sufferings and death of Jesus. Internalized oppression is externalized in the ritualistic re-enactment of Jesus' passion. For Galeano, this re-enactment reinscribes the interest ideology of the powerful within the practices of the poor. But is Galeano correct in asserting, "there is no Resurrection at the end of Holy Week"? Most liberationists disagree with Galeano's stark assessment. Even if he never attempted to articulate more deeply the implications of the liberative dimensions of popular religion, Gutierrez for example, insisted that this liberative dimension is also present and could ultimately be recovered. As we have seen, Gutierrez argued that "the religious experiences of the people are also charged with values of protest, resistance, and liberation" (1983,193). Gutierrez' liberationist perspective argued that a transformed Latin American/Caribbean society and church was possible only if the popular religious

103 practices of subaltern peoples were taken seriously. In the next chapter, I will examine a theologian deeply inspired by Gutierrez' call to focus on the symbolic world of subaltern peoples as a starting point for the creation of liberation theology. In this chapter, I have examined the work of two unitive theologians who positioned popular religion at the center of their theologies. The first, Pedro Morande, whose perspective was very influential in conservative Latin American circles in the 1980s, developed the notion that popular religion was at the core of Latin American identity. Morande framed popular religion as the result of mestizaje, the mixing of European and indigenous worlds into a new formation, not European and not Indigenous, but fully Latin American. His framing of mestizaje essentializes Latin American identity as once-and-for-all event that occurred in the past. For Morande, the mestizo is the result of "kinship" relations between European men and Indigenous women. The violence of the conquista is totally absent in his work insofar as the asymmetrical power relations that created this "new Latin American identity" are veiled. Morande argued that with this new identity, the mestizo "breaks the dominator-dominated dualism" (1985,71)*. The work of the other unitive theologian examined in this chapter, Juan Carlos Scannone, attempted to steer his theology away from Morande's kinship perspective, and also away from a socio-structural analysis, arguing that it inevitably led toward a characterization of 'the people' as alienated. Instead, he offered a historical-critical perspective that sought historical discernment of 'the people' as collective subjects with their own historical projects. Scannone insisted that this discernment must be rooted in what liberationists call the "option for the poor." While Scannone should be understood as a pioneering theologian in the areas of culture, symbols, and the popular religious

104 practices of the people, it should also be noted that his theology also essentialized an original moment of mestizqje as decisive for Latin American identity. However, he did not veil the violence of the conquista as in Morande's work. Those liberationists whom Maldonado has described as conflictive, namely those who refused to characterized 'the people' in a national-continental way but instead as the poor, marginalized and excluded, also showed a wide range of approaches to popular religion. I have examined a limited number of perspectives here since the next two chapters will focus on how liberationists creatively framed popular religion in their theologies. Even if some liberationists, such as Segundo, were decidedly more skeptical about the transformative possibility of popular religion, other Latin American theologians also developed culture-focused liberationist perspective. Encouraged by Gustavo Gutierrez, the research being undertaken in the Peruvian context of the mid-1970s demonstrates that some liberationists argued for more critically nuanced understanding of the religious practices of subaltern peoples. Moreover, even Segundo's elitist conceptions must be understood as an affirmation of the powerful effects of ideological domination in Latin America and the Caribbean. For Segundo, the critique of religious oppression was central to his framing of popular religion. This critique is also present in the more nuanced liberationist perspectives that I examined from Peru. Liberationists attempted to understand the ambiguities and contradictions present in Latin American/Caribbean society and also how they were reflected in popular religion. And this framing continues to this day. This chapter has shown that while important differences did exist between unitive and conflictive perspectives, there were ideas that cross-fertilized with each other. While

105 these groupings impose a one-dimensional perspective on a complex reality, they nonetheless help to identify opposing poles in the debates on popular religion from the 1970s and 1980s. As I have shown, these debates tended to position scholars on either side of the unitive-conflictive divide even if the debates were themselves more complex. While some scholars have attempted to frame the debates around popular religion in dichotomous ways (for example, culture vs. socio-economy), the porous character of these divisions is exemplified in the work of Scannone, whose unitive perspective crosses over into liberationist hermeneutics, and in the work of Diego Irarrazaval, whose early work in Peru was moving toward a focus on culture. He will be the focus of the next chapter. In the broadly dialogic theologies of liberationists in the mid to late 1970s, which was at times also highly polemic, popular religion was prioritized as an important feature in the development of liberationist hermeneutics, and as I will show, Irarrazaval expanded this critical research beyond the early formulations of his mentors.

106

' '• * r l i *

Images: A plasticized prayer card of El Senor de los Milagros found on the streets of Lima, Peru, and Aymaran feast in Chucuito, near Puno, in the Peruvian Andes (2001) Photos by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare

107 CHAPTER TWO

AN INVITATION TO THE FEAST: DIEGO IRARRAZAVAL, FIESTA, AND LO COTIDIANO

The revelation of the living God is approached from various points of view: modern rationality, eco-feminism, indigenous thinking, cosmic and syncretic thinking. As Latin American and Caribbean peoples moving within neo-colonial contexts, we hope and work and pray for liberation... Latin American theology began emphasizing its roots in biblical spirituality and in the faith of basic Christian communities. Now we also acknowledge songs and pilgrimages, common people's art and contemplation, their beautiful oral traditions, and so much more, as theological resources. Diego Irarrazaval (Peru, 1998)

This chapter will look at the liberation theology of Diego Irarrazaval, who developed a theology focused on popular religion through the frameworks of Indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Andes. I begin with an examination of an early article written by Irarrazaval in Lima in 1977 on the feast of El Senor de los Milagros, as an early liberationist perspective on popular religion that is rooted in a perception of the processional character of a people moving through history. I also examine the festive theology of Irarrazaval, which he developed in the Andes in close proximity to Quechuan and Aymaran peoples. I discuss the research he undertook on popular religion in the 1980s and also the many books and articles he published on this research in the 1990s. Irarrazaval research's on popular religion is framed within the context of what Quechuan folks have called manchay tiempo,1 times of fear in the 1980s brought about by the "dirty war" with the Sendero Luminoso, and within the context of Fujishock in the 1990's, which saw the implementation of globalized neoliberalism under the president Alberto Fujimori. Irarrazaval has argued that Indigenous notions of fiesta, or chayraq in A hybrid Spanish-Quechuan phrase meaning: time of fear.

108 Quechuan, were important ways for indigenous peoples to navigate these very violent times. Irarrazaval has been developing a liberation theology deeply rooted in the cultures of Indigenous peoples since the late-1970s. As I will argue in chapter four, his pioneering perspective has been invaluable for the new directions liberation theologians are undertaking in the contemporary context, and in light of the emergence of the "new (and ever newer!) voices" in Latin American/Caribbean theologies, such as feminist and women-centered theologies, Indigenous theologies, Afro-American theologies, and ecological theologies.

I begin this chapter on the festive theology of Diego Irarrazaval with an image of El Senor de los Milagros, from a dirty plasticized prayer card I bought on the streets of Lima, in front of la Iglesia de las Nazarenas, from a young Indigenous boy of about ten years of age. The stains on the plastic card alerted me to the fact that it was probably picked-up off the street, or from the garbage, by the boy and sold to tourists like myself. I bought it immediately, thinking to myself that a dirty garbage-strewn image of the crucified Jesus was much more in keeping with where G*d is found in the world than the slick images of the crucifixion found inside the church gift shop. While I was thinking through this theological rationale for buying the card, I looked in the direction of the young boy and saw that he and his group of friends were mimicking people entering and leaving the church. Their antics captured, in very exaggerated form, the often overtly pious expressions of some of the men and women going into the dark and solemn church. The mimicking was pointedly directed to people from a higher economic strata, often signaling out the most respectable looking church folk. But no one attempted to scold the

109 boys. Most people ignored them, but a few laughed at their highly theatrical behavior. As I watched the antics of the street urchins for a few minutes, I saw a man take out some coins and give them to the boys. They all made the sign of the cross, laughed, and ran away! Suddenly, I saw a procession of mostly Quechuan-speaking people turn the corner. They were walking toward the Nazarenas church, wearing traditional Quechuan garments, playing instruments, clasping flowers, lifting crosses up high in the air, and carrying a banner from another parish outside of Lima. They walked right into the church, breaking its gloom and solemnity with processional fiesta and joy. They had come to pay their respects to El Senor de los Milagros, the popular Peruvian image Irarrazaval has called "the Purple Christ, Lord of the Mistreated"2 on a day that was not its 'official' feast day. Trailing behind them was the group of mimicking boys who were now keeping close to the procession and counting their coins. On that day, I realized that I had witnessed a public devotion by Indigenous peoples, the most excluded peoples of Peru, in the metropolitan center of Lima, at a time that seemed out of synch with the 'official' devotional calendar. It was as if the Quechuan group had simply appropriated the 'official' church space for their own devotion. Moreover, the mimicking boys offered me an introduction to a larger dynamic of fiesta that I encountered within the procession. All at once, I had witnessed a sudden little miracle of Quechuan chayraq (carnival), which transformed the mundane and ordinary into celebration and joy. It was here that I understood on a more affective level a more radical meaning of the wedding banquet parable (Mt 22: 1-14) from the gospels. At that moment, my anchor point for understanding this public performance was not only my

2

See Diego Irarrazaval, "Cristo Morade: Senor de los maltratados" (1992).

110 theological studies, but the cinema of Luis Bunuel! Yes, Bunuel, that Spanish filmmaker of the surrealist school who called himself an "atheist by the grace of God."3 Not unlike the processional fiesta I had just witnessed, Bunuel has shown an acute awareness of the importance of the festive in the world of subaltern peoples. His 1961 film, Viridiana, is about what happens to a rich household when a benevolent woman invites the "uninvited" from the "main streets" of Madrid into her home. The film generated much controversy upon its release; it was Bunuel's first Spanish film during a long self-exile in Mexico, which he initiated in order to work outside of the restrictions imposed by the Franco regime. Bunuel was invited back to work in Spain by Carlos Saura (a young Spanish filmmaker who wanted Bunuel to help regenerate the Spanish film industry that was under the strict control of the Franco regime at the time), but the film was banned outright upon its release and called an insult to Christianity in an article by the Vatican's own VOsservatore romano. While it is a trenchant critique of bourgeois sensibilities, and a critique of the Catholic church's sanctioning of the Franco regime (and other oppressive regimes), Viridiana is also a radical cinematic embodiment of the Wedding Feast parable, a parable that informs the main themes of the theology of Irarrazaval—a theology deeply informed by the festive everyday practices of Quechuan and Aymaran peoples. The main protagonist in the film, Viridiana, is a Christian nun who at the beginning of the film is about to take her final vows, but through unexpected events ends up inheriting her uncle's feudal-like estate. In order to remain committed to her religious 3

This reference comes from the appreciative commentary on Nazarin (1958), Bunuel's film from his Mexican period, offered by Gustavo Gutierrez in A Theology of Liberation: "Luis Bunuel's film Nazarin is an excellent illustration of the idea we are attempting to convey [the Samaritan's experience of compassion from the heart]... The lesson of Bunuel (that "atheist by the grace of God" as he himself once said) is paradoxical but fruitful: there is nothing more 'horizontal' than charity with no color or human flavor" (1988, 114).

Ill charism, she decides to invite society's uninvited onto the grounds of her new estate. Expecting gratitude from her guests, she instead realizes that the uninvited take pleasure in mimicking and mocking the rich. In the later part of the film, the guests literally preempt the narrative space of the film by deciding to have their own feast after Viridiana and the others leave the estate for several hours. This is visually depicted in the famous scene where the uninvited imitate Leonardo Da Vinci's last supper to the music of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. A photograph of this mimicry of 'official' church imagery is taken by a leper dressed as a bride who bears his genitals in imitation of a camera. The photographic camera, that fetish of tourist culture, is most obviously present in the hands of rich tourists who visit the famous museums and churches of Madrid. It is while visiting those public places that tourists come into contact with the uninvited who live on the "main streets." In the film, mimicry4 is the way subaltern people take pictures, paint religious imagery, and even make films. In other words, popular mimicry of dominant culture ('high art') is a key dimension of subaltern deconstructions of dominant culture and subaltern self-representation. The feast, however, takes a turn for the chaotic after a fight breaks out between two of the guests. Bufiuel is notorious for his portrayal of the everyday brutality that exists in some places among the subaltern classes; Viridiana is not exempt of this representation. When Viridiana returns home to the chaos, one of her guests attempts to rape her. The rape is avoided when another guest, who has been promised money to intervene on her behalf, delivers a blow to the head of the rapist. Not all forms of fiestas

Mimicry is an important concept in postcolonial theory, especially in the work of Homi Bhabha (1994). As Leela Gandhi noted, "'mimicry' is also the sly weapon of anti-colonial civility, an ambivalent mixture of deference and disobedience. The native subject often appears to observe the political and semantic imperatives of colonial discourse. But at the same time, she systematically misrepresents the foundational assumptions of this discourse... (1998,149150).

112 are rooted in solidarity and friendship. Like the popular religious phenomena that I have been examining thus far, fiestas are also shaped by historical context, and especially by power asymmetries. The filmic vision of Viridiana intersects with Matthew's parable in the dark tone that underscores the feast. In Matthew, a whole city is burnt down (22:7) and a man without a wedding garment is thrown into the outer darkness "where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (22:13). This is not a celebratory vision of the world. Is Matthew also warning us about the extent to which feasts can be dehumanizing? Or is Matthew imposing a dualistic reading of the feast, which is embedded with the same imperial violence5 the fiesta is supposed to subvert? As it is written: "For many are called but few are chosen" (Mt 22:14). This is not a liberating vision. The vision of a feast deteriorating into violence in Viridiana, or the vision of a wedding feast occurring while a city is burned to the ground by Roman legions, speaks to the 1980s Peruvian context we will explore in this chapter, what Quechuan-speaking peoples called manchay tiempo. Subaltern peoples create their own celebrations and feasts, not as they are understood by the "kings" of this world, but often as subversive re-readings of dominant paradigms.6 In Peru, the vision of the wedding feast parable can be witnessed in the chayraq (carnival) of Indigenous desplazados (displaced), who have been displaced by war and violence, but who walk in festive procession because they hope for a world different from the one that promotes exclusion and dehumanization. In the theology of

See Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire (2001) for a good overview of Matthew's anti-imperial theology. Also see Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, "Border Crossing with the Uninvited in Matthew's 'Wedding Feast' Parable and Jacques Tourneur's / Walked with a Zombie" (2007), for a postcolonial/liberationist reading of the Matthew's wedding feast parable contrasted to a B-horror film from 1943. In Subaltern Studies, the notion of interruption has been labeled "ungovernability." It is that space of subaltern resistance that also implies the failure of hegemony. See Garrett Williams, "Death in the Andes: Ungovernability and the Birth of Tragedy in Peru" (2001).

113 Diego Irarrazaval, subaltern peoples are processional peoples, whose festive character sustains then in times of deep violence and oppression. In this chapter, I will examine some aspects of Irarrazaval's theology that align themselves with the processional fiestas of Aymaran and Quechuan peoples. The deeply festive and religious character of Peru's Indigenous peoples has profoundly informed Irarrazaval's theology. But like Bufiuel and other liberationists, he refuses to romanticize Indigenous cultures and appeals to the notion of desculturacion (exculturation) as a way to uproot dehumanizing aspects found in all cultures.

CAMINAR CON EL CRISTO

In Lima and other Peruvian cities, millions accompany el Senor de los Milagros every year from October 18,h to the 2$h. This procession has evolvedfromits origins among black slaves during colonial times, to its present pluri-social configuration and a symbol of Peruvian identity. The challenging walk makes its way along well-organized streets. It is an unforgettable experience of penitence (the procession is an instance of the forgiveness of sin), of religious association and faith-based identity. In a context of globalfragmentation,the procession establishes union and tenderness. This is how the people of God expresses itself, requesting concrete favours and always trusting in its Senor of Life.* Diego Irarrazaval (Peru, 1999)

Born in Chile in 1942, Diego Irarrazaval was forced to flee the Pinochet dictatorship in 1974. Before his departure, Irarrazaval was a leader in Santiago—along with Sergio Torres, Gonzalo Arroyo, and Pablo Richard—of the Christians for Socialism, an organization that argued that there was no incompatibility between the Christian gospel and the emerging socialist project in Chile. Christians for Socialism encouraged Christians to be involved in the programs conceived by the left-leaning Allende government. But the U.S.-backed Pinochet coup on September 11th, 1973, that ousted the Allende government constrained these aspirations. Irarrazaval's involvement with the

114 Christians for Socialism helped shape a more militant form of Catholicism, which sought to liberate Latin American society from its state of dependency within a center-periphery world capitalist system. In 1975, he was invited to work in Peru by Gustavo Gutierrez. In Peru, Irarrazaval revealed a new appreciation of the everyday religious practices of ordinary people. I will write at length throughout this chapter about Irarrazaval's life and context, because these aspects cannot be divorced from his scholarly research and pastoral work. Irarrazaval is not a traditional scholar and does not work primarily within academic institutions. Like many liberationists, he has always sought to immerse himself in the daily lives of excluded peoples. He represents a great example of a grassroots theologian who lives an incarnational Christian life by embodying the liberationist ideal of opting for the poor and excluded. Over the years he has demonstrated an increasing preoccupation with working in dialogue with other "new (and newer) voices" in theology, such as feminist theologies, Indigenous theologies, Afro-American theologies, ecological theologies, and theologies springing out of popular movements. Irarrazaval calls this dialogic work towards liberation "communion in plurality," where convergences and meeting points collide in a deepening pluralism that calls to mind the Spirit-imbued experience of the Pentecost (2000a, 10). Irarrazaval was ordained a priest in the order of the Congregation of the Holy Cross.7 He holds a Master's degree in theology from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, but did not pursue academic work at the doctoral level. Among his principle teachers have been the poor Aymaran and Quechuan peoples of the This is same order that accepted, in 1870, Alfred Bessette, as a lay brother into their ranks. Before entering the religious order, Bessette was an uneducated doorkeeper at le College Notre-Dame in Montreal, which was founded by the Congregation of the Holy Cross. Better known by his religious name, Frere Andre, this man is the source of a rich tradition of popular religion in Montreal. Upon visiting the Oratoire St-Joseph in Montreal, which was built in honour of the popular healer, Irarrazaval related to me that he had much respect for Frere Andre's healing abilities, which he compared to the practices of the Aymaran and Quechuan peoples of Peru.

115 Altiplano, especially in and around the small village of Chucuito, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, along the Bolivian border, where he worked as a priest and researcher. Irarrazaval spent twenty-three years in Chucuito, most of the time as a parish priest and coordinator of the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras, which was founded in 1980 by the U.S. Maryknoll priest and scholar, Curt Cadorette. Irarrazaval left the Altiplano and returned to Chile in 2004. Irarrazaval is a proficient writer. Since the early 1990s, he has published over fifteen books of theology and become a major voice in the development of liberation theologies in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has also published papers and articles on a wide variety of topics, including popular religion, inculturation and syncretism, religious humour, Indigenous religious systems, feminism and eco-justice, and religious pluralism. Only his book, Inculturation: The Dawn of the Church in Latin America (2000), has been translated into English, thus making Irarrazaval's work relatively unknown within the academic circles of the 'First World.' In 2001, Irarrazaval was elected president of EATWOT (the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians) in Quito, Ecuador. His EATWOT tenure ended in 2006. He is presently a board member of the international journal of theology, Concilium, and part-time on the faculty at the Redemptorist run Instituto Superior De Teologia y Pastoral Alfonsiano, in Santiago, Chile.

Critiquing Religious Oppression In his book, entitled Popular Religion and Liberation, Michael Candelaria wrote that as a member of the Christians for Socialism, Diego Irarrazaval "berated popular religion as a false praxis" (1990, 7). Candelaria quoted from an article written by

116 Irarrazaval in 1975, entitled "Cristianos en elproceso socialista": "[Popular religion] appears as a false practice of liberation, because it departs from the consciousness and struggle of the oppressed. It is a false practice because it does not break free from the chains that enslave the people" (1990, 7).8 However, Candelaria's characterization of Irarrazaval as "berating" popular religion must be understood in context. It is important to remember that during the early 1970s in Chile, the members of Christians for Socialism were preoccupied with demonstrating to Christians, especially Catholics, that they could be both faithful Christians and Socialists. They were also attempting to demonstrate to the radical groups they sought to form alliances with that Christianity could be revolutionary and socialist. The members of Christians for Socialism argued that religion was a crucial and necessary element in the transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean from its state of dependency on imperial powers. They argued that all forms of religion, especially 'official' forms, should be transformed. During this particular moment, these Christians developed a critical consciousness about how hegemonic religion could impede the revolutionary process.9 Hence, a Marxist critique of religious oppression moved to the center of leadership discourses, which targeted the church of Christendom in Latin America and the Caribbean because of its history of blessing elite structures.10 As I mentioned in the first chapter with respect to Segundo's work, liberationists were influenced in part by the idea of ideological domination, and were particularly Candelaria wrongly characterized Irarrazaval as being a "liberation theologian from Peru." See Popular Religion and Liberation (1990), p. 7. Pablo Richard explained that the concern in the early seventies within these circles in Chile was to "orient popular religion toward a socialist dimension" (1975, 147)*. As Fernandez notes in his history of the Christians for Socialism movement in the early 1970s, some of the people he interviewed in Santiago "experienced the CpS {Cristianos por el Socialismo) as a vanguard of the revolution with a strong sectarian flavour" (1999, 293). Irarrazaval was a leader in Santiago with the CpS. It is precisely because of his actions in this role that he was forced to flee the Pinochet dictatorship.

117 attuned to the ways subaltern peoples internalized this domination in their religious practices. Religious practices that centered on the cross were an area of deep suspicion, because, as we saw with Galeano's work, they were perceived by Marxists and Socialists as blessing colonial triumph and fatalism about one's own suffering in the world. In a later book, Irarrazaval said this about his perspective on popular religious practices while in Chile, especially the cross-centered practices of Good Friday: "on this matter I can confess that during many years I loathed those rites and did not see in them the contents of the faith, but in this—and in so many other areas—the people have taught me much" (1999a, 70)*. For many radical Latin Americans in that period, especially Marxists, religion was seen to be within the hegemonic control of the ruling classes and was dismissed as reactionary. Religious displays that exhibited conquered or oppressed peoples, especially Indigenous peoples, carrying the cross were often met with disgust and disdain by progressives and radicals. This was perceived as the ultimate symbol of the ongoing spiritual and material conquest of Latin America and the Caribbean. But, as I will show below, Irarrazaval quickly shifted his perspective and would later argue that for 'the people' of Latin America and the Caribbean, the cross is, "the principal religious symbol..." (1998b, 41)*. After his arrival in Peru, Irarrazaval faced a context where, "the church wanted to be able to connect their pastoral work more concretely with the people's context and experience" (Appendix I, 306). Irarrazaval arrived in Peru shortly after the publication of an important study by Raul Vidales and Tokihiro Kudo, entitled Prdctica religiosa y proyecto historico (1975), which sought to highlight the liberative dimensions of popular religion present in the emergent classes. Moreover, Gutierrez had invited Irarrazaval to

118 go to Chimbote, in northern Peru, specifically to study popular religion within a liberationist perspective. Hence, the context in Peru was much more receptive to popular religion than his earlier experiences had been in Santiago. This was partly due to the culturally Indigenous stamp, with its radically different and diverse traditions, that shapes the Peruvian context. In an interview with Irarrazaval in 2001,1 asked him how his work on popular religion from 1976 onwards (in Chimbote, Peru) was perceived at the time, considering that some liberationists rejected popular religion. His answer was quite revealing of a liberation theologian for whom a critique of religious oppression is central: "Yes, that critical perspective continues. And I'm so happy that it does, because it is not simply a critique of popular religion but a critique of all forms of religion that are oppressive" (Appendix I, 307). This critical approach was very prominent in the context of the 1970s, because many Latin American Christians made the radical move of opting for the poor: religious educators left elite schools for the barrios; pastoral workers opted for marginal areas; priests focused their energies on building CEBs in rural areas; and some bishops opted to speak with, and help give voice to, the voiceless and excluded. After Medellin, some parts of the Latin American Catholic church consciously opted for the poor. This was a time of unprecedented change for religious institutions, for men and women religious, and for lay and ordained Catholics in Latin America and the Caribbean. After many years of reflection, those who had switched sides, so to speak, became keenly aware of the colonial framework that underlined the Catholic presence in the region. This entailed a sharp critique of all forms of religious oppression and alienation. And they found in the Bible, in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, a

119 solid framework of prophetic criticism of religious oppression, especially one's own beloved traditions.11 Because of a long history of sharp stereotypes fashioned by elites within modern liberal perspectives, popular religion was interpreted as a phenomenon of mass superstition and ignorance. Elite liberal discourses argued that popular religion was irrational and anti-modern, and therefore the 'mass' character of popular religion was dismissed. Some liberationists leveled their critique against the impact of hegemonic religion on popular religion more specifically. But Irarrazaval's work demonstrates that this exclusively negative reaction was short-lived among discerning liberationists. By the mid-1970s, Irarrazaval had moved from a position of critical evaluation to one of critical openness.

;Un pueblo caminando con el Cristo Moradol In the 2001 interview, Irarrazaval stated that "popular religion was clearly something I was concerned about before I arrived to Peru" (Appendix I, 306). Also, he made his decision to go to Peru after he was invited "to do research on how people practice their faith at a popular level" (Appendix I, 306). Irarrazaval's move to Peru to work with Gutierrez at the lnstituto Bartolome de las Casas, in Lima, confirms that a serious interest in popular religion was developing among these early liberationists in the mid-1970s. Upon arriving in Peru, Irarrazaval made his way north to the coastal fishing town of Chimbote to research popular religion. Irarrazaval stated that there "was a sector in the church at the time in Chimbote that was interested in [popular religion] and had begun a study of these things before I arrived" (Appendix I, 306). Two years later, Rosemary Radford Ruether defined prophetic criticism as a critique that originates from within a tradition. She insightfully noted, "[t]hus our own critique of scripture for failing to live up to its own prophetic promise reflects and is rooted in the self-criticism that goes on in, and is basic to, biblical faith itself (1981, 5).

Irarrazaval produced his first book, entitled Religion delpobre y liberation en Chimbote (1978), a theological study of popular religious practices with a methodological focus that prioritized the social sciences, especially sociology. The engagement with a social science perspective by progressive Catholic scholars and theologians in a post-Vatican II context was significant. Many theologians turned to the social sciences as a way of articulating an alternative to the highly abstract philosophical paradigm that had been entrenched in traditional systematic theology.12 For Irarrazaval, a more empirical sociological/anthropological/historical approach meant that, instead of attempting to formulate theories about the role of 'the people' in Latin American society, he developed a method called the "accion-teorica," where he collected interviews in communities with practitioners of popular religion (1978, 35). Irarrazaval asserted that this was a "new approach" in the doing of theology: in this actual decade, we are seeing a new approach being developed toward the religion of the people and toward its evangelization. It is the posture of pastoral teams and organic theoreticians who are acting in relation to the history of the popular classes, within the perspective of the theology of liberation (1978, 30-31)*.

This was scientific research rooted in concrete pastoral work, which did not claim to be objective or neutral. Emphasizing wider concern for liberation among the pastoral teams he worked with, Irarrazaval conceptualized a perspective which is "characterized by its approach to the religious factor within the project of liberation of the poor" (1978, 31)*. He affirmed that "the intention is an interdisciplinary focus appealing in particular to sociological, anthropological, historical, and theological elements; its scientific rigour responds to the interests of the oppressed classes..." (1978, 31)*. In his research,

See for example, Gregory Baum, Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology (1975).

121 Irarrazaval concretely found a 'people' deeply engaged in the creation of their own popular religious symbols and practices. In his investigations, Irarrazaval began to think in terms of a processional 'people' creating their own history. Irarrazaval began formulating a perspective on popular religion as the action of a people walking forward, on life's pilgrimage, with the people's own images, songs, dances, and fiestas. This became for him an important hermeneutical key for understanding popular religion in the daily life of Latin American peoples, and was an aspect that concretely resonated with the world of popular religion, with its many processions, pilgrimages, and fiestas. Irarrazaval sought to move beyond paternalistic prejudices that imposed themselves on the faith of 'the people,' in either vanguardist or elitist ways. As I will explain below, Irarrazaval's approach emphasized eschatological hope in the image of a forward moving people. jUnpueblo caminando con el Cristo Morado!13 was how Irarrazaval framed Peru's most important feast: El Sehor de los Milagros (October 18th). In 1977, Irarrazaval wrote a pioneering article from a liberationist perspective on the processional movement of 'the people' in the devotion to the Sehor de los Milagros. Entitled "Cristo Morado: Sehor de los Maltratados," it is one of the most important early liberationist appraisals of popular religion to surface in Latin America and the Caribbean. As in his study about Chimbote, the article drew upon the more empirical methods and findings of sociology, anthropology, and history in order to lay out concretely the tapestry of religious experiences that make up this stunning feast day. In reporting on interviews with practitioners, Irarrazaval demonstrated that this feast day meant very different things to

A people walking with the purple Christ."

122 the millions of Peruvians who participate in it. The participants in the processions in Lima were Quechuan and Aymaran peoples from all over Peru. According to Irarrazaval, the feast is especially popular with Indigenous peoples, who, among other reasons, strongly identify with the feast because of its humble origins among enslaved peoples. Hence, for Irarrazaval, it is a feast that belongs to all the oppressed and maltratados of Peru. The legend of the image is rooted in the anti-colonial practices of Black slaves who saw in the crucified One a man of sorrows like themselves and worshipped him according to their own cultural traditions brought to the Americas on slave boats. According to a church booklet, entitled "Historia de la sagrada imagen del Cristo de Pachacamilla,"14 the legend of the origins of the feast dates from the mid-seventeenth century, in Pachacamilla, on the outskirts of Lima, where Black slaves from Angola and elsewhere in Africa, began to sing, dance, and pray together before an image of the crucified Jesus painted by one of the slaves. The colonial and ecclesial authorities became alarmed by the ecstatic power of these practices, and attempted to put a stop to them for fear that they could irrupt into something more rebellious. But the devotion grew too rapidly. As Irarrazaval explained, like most systems of power that seek to maintain hegemonic control, the ecclesial authorities attempted to incorporate the rituals into the colonial order (1992,307). People attributed many miracles to the image, especially as protection against earthquakes. To this day, the feast's fraternal associations, or brotherhoods, link their origins to the first Black slaves who gathered before the image. Because of its multiple usages within the colonial order by dominant groups, which often domesticates its initial anti-colonial impetus, Irarrazaval argued that there are multiple

Anonymous popular booklet bought at the Iglesia de la Nazarenas, in Lima, with no publication date.

123 and even contradictory interpretations of the Milagros feast in Peru. Like all cultural and religious symbols and texts, popular religion was for him always multiple, polyvalent, and open-ended, with shifting meanings and interpretations arising from different social locations throughout history.

Irarrazaval's Typologies As Scannone did with his typologies of popular religion, Irarrazaval delineated four different interpretations of the Milagros feast. But Irarrazaval specifically focused on this one feast, rather than on popular religion more generally. Irarrazaval did not posit these interpretations as all-encompassing paradigms, but situated them in relation to the actual feast of El Senor de los Milagros. As I mentioned earlier, "there is no such thing as popular religion" for Irarrazaval; to believe this is to fall into reductionism, namely, when abstractions take the place of concrete reality. Herman Daly and John B. Cobb Jr. called this the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," in speaking of the propensity of some academic research to abstract from reality, especially from the communitarian realities at the grassroots (1994, 25). To abstract, these authors argued, means "to draw away from"; many academics have been socialized to think only in the abstractions of a particular discipline (1994,41). For Irarrazaval, "there only exits, and one can only study, the religious practices of concrete subjects in specific social conditions" (1980, 12)*. Accordingly, Irarrazaval identified these approaches to El Senor de los Milagros as "partial interpretations" (1992, 311)*. According to him, because there is no such thing as an abstract phenomenon called popular religion, no single interpretation can do justice to the complexity of this feast. And while practitioners cling to tradition, they also re-shape

124 the feast in response to the changing context in ways that are often imperceptible, especially to outsiders. As I mentioned above, Irarrazaval wrote "Cristo Morado: Senor de los Maltratados" in 1977, at a time when Lima had already experienced a surge of rural migrants (750,000 by the end of the sixties), which lead to the creation of pueblos jovenes around its core (Skidmore and Smith 2001,206). Latin America more generally was experiencing a massive influx of rural peoples into the major cities in this period.15 Regional diversity in tightly knit urban communities generated by rural migrants from all over the country was reflected in a shifting tapestry of devotions surrounding the feast. Hence, Irarrazaval's accent on changing historical contexts and the specificity of local feast is important to highlight in comparison with Scannone, for example, because he did not attempt to define popular religion in broader all-encompassing ways. In this article, Irarrazaval argued that what is truly "significant [about this feast] is how a mutation occurred at the symbolic level" (1992, 309)*. For example, Irarrazaval wrote, "[t]he Lord of the slaves went to being Lord of all races and classes, even though the devotion was strongly marked by the experience of the poor" (1992, 309)*. This mutation happened in part because the feast was appropriated by the dominant classes and redeployed as a national feast. But a feast such as El Senor de los Milagros never has only one single over-arching meaning. For Irarrazaval, a processional 'people' on the move making history is also making and re-making its devotions anew. In order to highlight the multiplicity of perspectives on the Milagros feast, Irarrazaval delineated four approaches. He identified the first approach as the The Latin American continent has experienced a massive shift in the last fifty years, going from what was a predominantly rural continent (70%) to an urban one. Berryman notes, "the typical Latin American living today is not a peasant but lives in the city. Indeed, 72 percent of Latin Americans are urban..." (1996,4).

125 "evangelical interpretation." This interpretation conceived of popular religious practices as a form of idolatry, where images are worshipped instead of G*d (1992, 311). Irarrazaval was referring to fundamentalist (integrista) interpretations that seek to defeat what is considered sinful pagan-like practices, in order to establish instead a biblical truth and a type of salvation that is individualistic and other-worldly. Irarrazaval is clearly referring to Protestant evangelicals whom he encountered in the streets at the time of his research. It is clear that during such an important feast many evangelical groups are in the streets speaking out against the perceived idolatry of popular religion. Because "venerated" images are often the focus of the processions, integristas tend to perceive this as idol worship. There is a long history of "extirpating the idols" of Indigenous peoples in the Altiplano that also has specifically Catholic roots; the negative appraisal of perceived idol worship is not only a Protestant phenomenon. The second approach, according to Irarrazaval, is the "traditionalist perspective." It is characterized by a dichotomy between 'official' and 'popular.' For Irarrazaval, this perspective is "the one that carries the most weight in Peruvian society" (1992, 312)*. Irarrazaval argued that, because El Senor de los Milagros had become an unofficial national feast, ecclesial authorities "attempt to defend popular religion in order to promote a spiritual doctrine of personal piety that merges with the social order" (1992, 313)*. In this perspective, the ecclesial authorities also attempt to control the meaning of the symbols related to the image (sun, moon, Father, Christ, Holy Spirit, Mary) by interpreting them in ways that are divorced from the people's own this-worldly everyday concerns. Most importantly, there is an imposition in this perspective of "practical recommendations, of a pietistic type, but with obvious political implications" (1992,

313)*. Thus, the traditionalist perspective can be understood as socially unitive rather than conflictive, because it tends to highlight the unifying-national aspects of the feast rather than to focus on power asymmetries and conflict. A person interviewed by Irarrazaval said this about the feast: "it seeks to promote unity in spite of all our problems and differences" (1992, 313)*. This kind of political reading did not sit well with liberationists, because it seemed to mask class differences and attempted to pacify class conflict. The third approach is the "functionalist perspective." This is an interesting proposal coming from a theologian like Irarrazaval, who at this time, was heavily invested in social science perspectives. Irarrazaval wrote that this perspective "uses the social sciences and appeals to modern theology. This is the case with the influential observations contributed by Manuel Marzal" (1992, 314)*. As mentioned already above in chapter two, Marzal was a leading anthropologist at the time who produced many books on Indigenous perspectives in Peru, and whose work has had a decisive impact on theologians such as Jose Luis Gonzalez, especially in the areas of syncretism and mission.16 In this instance, Irarrazaval, who is himself influenced by this perspective, attempted to highlight its potential limitations. Irarrazaval argued that the functionalist perspective has many positive features, such as laying out the social functions of this feast for the identity of a people who share a common religious vision. The functionalist perspective is positive in that it tends to highlight the importance of popular religion as a journey of life for individuals in limited situations, and because it attempts to understand See Manuel Marzal, El sincretismo Iberoamericano (1985), and for English readers, see The Indian Face of God in Latin America (1996). See also, Jose Luis Gonzalez' La religion popular en el Peru: lnforme y diagnostico (1987) for some of Marzal's contributions on popular religion. Marzal is listed as one of the research "project designers" on popular religion, which began in 1979 (1987, 17).

Peruvian culture, with its religious inheritance, in light of its public acts of worship, fiesta, and communitarian encounters (1992, 314). However, the functionalist perspective is limited, argued Irarrazaval, insofar as it does not "sufficiently go into the specific and profound fibers of the faith of the people, with its alienation and its symbolic resistance" (1992, 315)*. For Irarrazaval, this had the effect "of diminishing the historical amplitude of the 'encounter of God in Jesus Christ' in the terms of dominant individualism" (1992, 315)*. The fourth partial interpretation of El Senor de los Milagros is what Irarrazaval called the "reductionist perspective." Here, Irarrazaval was critical of attempts to reduce the figure of El Senor de los Milagros to a present-day revolutionary. Again, Irarrazaval did not shy away from critiquing a perspective close to his own (especially considering that he is coming from a context of militancy with the Christians for Socialism and working within a liberationist framework). He argued that it was a historically false to claim that Christ fought against capitalism and would lead the way toward socialism. According to him, "from a perspective of faith, Christ is not a popular caudillo nor 'just another of the world's freedom fighters'; He is the revelation of the Father and calls for the liberation of all from oppression and sin" (1992, 316)*. For Irarrazaval, the objective of this perspective in the end is to legitimize a 'humanist and Christian socialism,' and through this manipulate the religion of the poor... That's why the Christians who participate in the gestation of this socialist project do not need to put forward such distortions of the faith... (1992, 316)*.

Here, Irarrazaval was critiquing the facile attempt by some vanguardists who equated Jesus with a modern revolutionary who overcomes capitalism. This was not the Jesus that Irarrazaval had encountered in the feasts of the poor and excluded, but a construction of the vanguardist kind that sought to instrumentalize Jesus for its own purposes. For

128 Irarrazaval, the Purple Jesus belongs to 'the people,' not to an elite few who use the idea of "Jesus the revolutionary" to establish links with the so-called church sectors. Irarrazaval argued that "highlighting the liberative dimension of the gospel" must be deeply rooted in the faith of 'the people' who "accompany Christ" in their daily lives (1992, 316)*. Irarrazaval regarded 'the people's' faith as a place from which to construct a theology of liberation. However, liberation could never be an imposition of the elites, but a dimension emerging from within 'the people's' own accompaniment with Jesus in their feasts, processions, and pilgrimages.

A Church Moving Forward These four partial interpretations of El Senor de los Milagros require an approach that appreciates the feast on its own terms in order to accompany those who are accompanying the living Christ. As I mentioned earlier, Irarrazaval's central notion for this feast is pilgrimage. Irarrazaval explained that when the procession stops and pauses, every new movement forward is punctuated with the words: "let us move forward brothers!" (1992, 316)*.17 "This gesture," added Irarrazaval, "with its significance of ecclesial movement, suggests an actual demand. The practitioners of the Purple Christ are announcing the gospel, because the poor masses have the right and the duty to show publicly their profound experience of Christ." (1992, 316-17)*. For Irarrazaval, the practitioners of this feast are not simply objects of the evangelization process, namely from the clerical class down to the laity through the rituals, but are subjects of the evangelical process, whereby their own experience of Christ is announced as an At this time, Irarrazaval did not critique the patriarchal framework of these so-called "brotherhoods," but they were then, and are still today, dominated by men. In dialogue with feminist theologies, Irarrazaval has become more conscious of gender asymmetries in his theology.

eschatological journey, a movement forward, a life's pilgrimage toward a different tomorrow. The lay practitioners of this popular religious feast are thus not simply partaking in the traditions of the church, they moving the church forward in history and are announcing themselves as church. A practitioner whom Irarrazaval interviewed in the streets said very succinctly: "And to be in a procession, one feels a deep harmony of being accompanied" (1992, 322)*. This sense of accompaniment is not simply in relation to Christ, but also in the manifestation of Christ in history: the church. Another person is quoted as saying: "£7 Senor de los Milagros forms a brotherhood with all the workers, a sort of temple" (1992, 322)*. Here, Irarrazaval was carving out a lay ecclesiology proclaimed by the poor and marginalized in the procession of El Senor de los Milagros. Irarrazaval was very careful to remind his readers that there will always be very clear variations in how the feast is experienced in Peru. One cannot forget the ways in which those who hold to the "traditionalist" perspective attempted to use the feast to legitimize an oppressive and dehumanizing social order. Hence, for Irarrazaval, the processional pilgrimage of the people has two trajectories, one from above and the other from below. In the former, the procession is a mass of individuals, in whom is symbolized the appropriation of the popular by the dominant class. The groups with power transform the faith of the people into a worship of the political-national. But in the one from below, "the procession is an act of the masses, where the mistreated who accompany Christ express their collective yearning for liberation" (1992, 326)*. Here, Irarrazaval is expressing much more than the double dimension paradigm of the CELAM bishops at Puebla (1979), where popular religion is defined as having both positive

130 (cultural matrix, human dignity, etc.) and negative (superstition, syncretism, etc.) aspects woven together. This kind of analysis can lead to a "traditionalist" posture of imposed purification, whereby the 'official' church is called upon to evangelize the deficient aspects and purify the contaminated aspects of the faith. Irarrazaval's characterization of different trajectories from below and from above challenges the double dimension perspective adopted later at Puebla. In Irarrazaval's processional perspective, the people in the processions are not reduced to objects of evangelization whose practices have aspects that are orthodox and deficient. The processional people are moving forward as subjects of history. They are moving forward as a church yearning for liberation. The processional people, los maltratados con sufefirme y sencilla,18 incarnate eschatological hope, and everyone (the universal) is called to follow them (the specific poor ones), including the clerical class. With this important article in 1977, Irarrazaval began to enter the world of popular religion on its own terms using a multifaceted social scientific approach focused on the hopes and aspirations of the popular classes. In shifting to this processional perspective, where 'the people' walk in solidarity with their Purple Jesus, Irarrazaval was clearly developing what Scannone called the "emergent class" perspective, which I described in chapter one. This paradigm was characterized by its focus on popular religion as a strategy of resistance for subaltern peoples making history. Irarrazaval attempted to delineate articulations of the feast that belonged to 'the people' from those that were instrumentalizing popular religion for their own purposes. Through close contact with participants and through his own participation in their processional feasts,

I'm using Irarrazaval's language here: The maltreated ones with their simple and firm faith.

131 Irarrazaval critiqued attempts to control or purify popular religious practices—from the 'official' church sectors to the discourses of some left-wing vanguards. Similar to Gutierrez who insisted that "the religious experiences of the people are charged with values of protest, resistance, and liberation," Irarrazaval sought to highlight these aspects in his research without romanticizing everything that comes from the 'the people' (Gutierrez 1983, 193). He continued to utilize this approach after he moved to the Altiplano in the early 1980s to become the coordinator of the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras.

FIESTA IN THE ANDES However, we have there [in the popular and controversial figure ofEkeko, a small statue of a fat man dressed in Aymaran traditional attire, who symbolizes good fortune and monetary success in some indigenous practices] a great religious sensibility to what is lacking among the poor, to their basic needs, and a confidence in a God who provides concretes goods. On this path we encounter a "carnival of hope" with its evangelizing potential. Also we take value in the fact that small elements are signs of larger dynamics, and that hope in life is expressed through play, fantasy, pleasure, and joy. In this respect, we need to remember that the message of the Reign is symbolized in seeds, leaven, and other small sacramental elements. It could be said that small Andean symbols point to the salvation that we receive from God* Diego Irarrazaval (Peru, 1999)

In 1979-1980, Irarrazaval began research for a book that was eventually published in 1998 under the title, La fiesta: simbolo de libertad. At the beginning of the book, Irarrazaval noted that because he "assumed new tasks in the south of Peru" he was not able to complete the work until almost twenty years later (1998a, 9). These "new tasks" refer to his new position as coordinator of the Instituto de Estudios Aymaras, in Chucuito, in 1981. The book has a peculiar feel to it because of this history, even though it is methodologically balanced and intellectually rigorous throughout. The first part of the book was based on research completed in the late seventies, at a time when Irarrazaval's

132 interpretive lenses were more sociological. With this more empirical methodological emphasis, Irarrazaval focused on the festive life of three specific communities in Peru: Moquegache, a small Quechuan community of the Altiplano; Rivera, a campesino community in the Altiplano; and Santa Rosa de Huarmita, a campesino community in the center of Peru. But the last part of the book is more anthropological in flavour and inspired by twenty years of experience working with Aymaran peoples living in the area of Lake Titicaca. Hence, La fiesta is a fascinating book, especially if the reader is attuned to Irarrazaval's theological developments, which can be traced between the book's covers.

Manchay Tiempo and Chayraq The twenty-year span covered by La fiesta will not be easily forgotten for most Peruvians; it was a time of systemic violence and deep despair, especially for vulnerable and precarious campesinos living in remote areas. Irarrazaval's new position as coordinator on the Institute in Chucuito in the early 1980s also corresponded with important changes happening in Latin America more broadly, and Peru more specifically. On March 24th, 1980, Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated by a death squad as he said mass. Bishops, priests, religious men and women, pastoral workers, and ordinary people were being killed, disappeared, tortured, and threatened for their radical Christian faith in many places in Latin America and the Caribbean. Dictatorships and national security states had emerged from 1964 onward to control rising dissent and follow through on the new U.S. foreign policy in Latin America of fighting the enemy within by creating counterinsurgency forces.

In El Salvador, the escalation in violence, which climaxed with the assassination of Oscar Romero, sent many more vulnerable pastoral leaders into hiding. The radical Christian faith inspired by liberation theologies was constructed as a threat to the status quo by the landowning elite and other dominant groups 'blessed' by colonial religious institutions. Flyers saying "Be a patriot, kill a priest" were distributed in El Salvador. In neighbouring Nicaragua, the overthrow of the Sandinista dictatorship in 1979 was feared in other Latin American countries (and by the US government), which provoked the military to intensify its control of those who clamored for liberation in my places. In El Salvador, the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberation National) stepped up its insurgency tactics after Romero's assassination and the country fell into civil war. In the twelve-year period from the early-eighties to the early-nineties, the civil war caused 75,000 to 90,000 deaths in El Salvador. A United Nation 1993 Report found that the majority of deaths were perpetuated by army and government controlled death squads.19 Moreover, during this time, the U.S. sponsored the Salvadoran government with a $7 billion (U.S.) ten-year aid package, with most of the money going to the purchase of arms. In Peru, on the morning of May 18th, 1980, Lima residents were greeted to the sight of dead dogs hanging from traffic lights and lampposts with signs that read "Deng Xiaping, hijo de puta."™ This spectacle of death was orchestrated by Marxist/Maoist inspired vanguardist insurgency group, the Sendero Luminoso, considered by many to be 19

According to the 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report, over 96% of the human rights violations carried out during the war were committed by the Salvadorian military or the paramilitary death squads, while 3.5% were committed by the FMLN. See "From Madness to Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador: Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador," http://www.usip.org/library/tc/doc/reports/el_salvador/tc_es_03151993_toc.html (accessed April 5,2007). 20

Deng Xiaoping was China's Communist leader until his death in 1992. He was accused by the Sendero Luminoso, who saw themselves as the self-proclaimed defenders of Marxist/Maoist orthodoxy, as betraying the revolution by being the person responsible for opening the doors to a mixed economy, thus betraying the revolution.

one of the most violent, "rigidly sectarian, messianic, esoteric" insurgent groups in the Americas (Parker 1996,183). This event signaled the beginning of a "people's war" in Peru between the Sendero Luminoso (as well as other insurgency groups, such as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) and the state, producing a spiral of violence that took the lives of approximately 69,00022 (mostly poor Quechuan-speaking) people and created waves of desplazados. Irarrazaval moved to the Andes at the time of what many would later call "manchay tiempo"—& hybrid of Quechua and Spanish words meaning "time of fear." Moreover, the election of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. signaled the beginning of a decade of harsh neoliberal policies imposed on 'Third World' countries, such as structural adjustment programs. This time came to be known in Latin America and the Caribbean as "the lost decade," a time of fear, precariousness, and death. This was not a time of fiesta. Despite this, fiestas were always present within the peoples' daily lives and sustained them in this wilderness of fear. In the mid-eighties, in the midst of an intensification of violence between Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian armed forces in the area of Ayacucho, the main base of Sendero Luminoso's military operations, Gutierrez published a book entitled On Job (Spanish: 1985). In this context of fear and violence, his earlier more celebratory characterization of the church as a Wedding Feast of the "uninvited" was replaced by A 1984 document by a mid-level Sendero leader summarizes Abimael Guzman's (Presidente Gonzalo) perspective with these words: "Blood makes us stronger and if it's this 'bath' that the armed forces have made for us, the blood is flowing, it's not harming us but making us stronger" (Gorriti 1995, 325). The mystical-like insistence on the cleansing property of blood, the people's blood for the good of the revolution, was a trademark of the Sendero leadership in the mid-1980s. 22

The 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru reported that the killings reached 69,000 people and that 54% of the violence was perpetuated by Sendero Luminoso against mainly poor Quechuan peasants. In article 13, the "Final Report" states: "In the TRC's view, based on the number of persons killed and disappeared, the PCP-SL [Sendero Luminoso] was the principal perpetrator of crimes and violations of human rights. It was responsible for 54 percent of victim deaths reported to the TRC. This high degree of responsibility on the part of the PCP-SL is an exceptional case among subversive groups in Latin America, and one of the most notable unique features of the process that the TRC has had to analyze. See Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru, "Final Report" http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ingles/ifinal/conclusiones.php (accessed April 3, 2007).

135 meditations on the suffering of the innocent (1987, 119). In the last pages of his treatise on theodicy, Gutierrez delineated the difference between the political theology of Europe, focused on questions about G*d after Auschwitz, and Latin American liberation theologies doing theology within Auschwitz. Gutierrez asked "How do we do theology while Ayacucho lasts'} How do we speak of the God of life when cruel murder is on a massive scale goes on in "the corner of the dead [un rinconpara los muertos\T (1987, 102). "Ayacucho" referred not only to the Andean city, but also to its Quechuan meaning: the corner of dead. In Gutierrez description this corner has lived in the shadows of death for over 500 years. Present-day Ayacucho is a corner of the world that has born witness to multiple struggles and conquests: the Incan conquest by Emperor Huiracocha, who launched a genocidal campaign in the fifteenth century, gaving the area its name; the victory of Spanish conquistadors led by Hernando de Soto, following Pizarro's arrival in 1523 and the imposition of the encomienda system; it was also the place where a decisive victory against the Spanish army had been waged by the republican forces in 1824, sealing the Republic's independence. But even during the wars of independence, "very few of Peru's Indigenous majorities identified with this cause" (Starn 1995,163). With the racialized coloniality of power firmly intact, "the poor majorities who gave their lives as soldiersreaped few benefits from victory and its aftermath" (Starn 1995, 166). This history shows the extent to which Ayacuchan subaltern peoples (mostly Indigenous peasants, and more recently, youth who were being recruited by the Sendero Luminoso), have been marginalized in the region, it has generated generations of desplazados.

In the 1980s, the crisis in the Ayacucho region generated migrations from rural settlements into Lima (and other large cities) unlike anything previously seen in twentieth century Peru. In Lima, Ayacucho area migrants moved to places already settled by peoples of the Southern Andes: Pamplona, San Juan de Lurigancho, Ate-Vitarte, and Villa El Salvador. These migrant settlements in Lima are places where Quechua is heard on the streets more often than Spanish (Kirk 1995, 360). Also, these settlements are places where one of the most vibrant Ayacuchan transplanted traditions, chayraq, Quechuan for carnival, nourishes the displaced, the migrant, and the excluded. During chayraq, "identities change, orders invert, hierarchies collapse" (Degregori 1995, 461). Because of the systemic violence endured by the desplazados, chayraq "reflects an unbearable desire to be, in the wake of a war that has claimed many loved ones and the persistent grind of want and racism in the big city" (Degregori 1995,462). These fiestas are important spaces of celebration among the Peruvian peoples, spaces which nourished hope in the most fearful of times, and they have much to offer a theology that prioritizes an option for the poor and marginalized.

The Festive and "Real" Resistance In his book La fiesta, Irarrazaval found biblical affirmation for the festive ethos, as does Gutierrez, in wedding feast parables from the gospels of Matthew (22:1-14) and Luke (14: 5-24). For Irarrazaval, the Wedding Feast is not simply a characteristic of a church of the "uninvited," it is also a sign of G*d's coming reign in the world. Typical of

hberationist hermeneutics, which are reign-centered theologies, namely prophetic theologies of G*d's reign in history,23 Irarrazaval wrote, the identity and mission of Jesus is centered on the reign of God; this is a kind of celebration of the faith... Jesus presents the reign on various occasions as a fiesta. It is lived and anticipated in the eucharist (Mt 26:29p), it has a universal character (Mt 8:11), and it signifies a radical transformation in history (Mt 22:1-14; Lc 14:15-24)... In other words, the fiesta of the reign [in the wedding feast parable] initiated by the coming of the Messiah, inverts the religious and social order in such a way that those chosen for the banquet are the scorned ones and those who suffer (1998a, 282-283)*.

As I mentioned above with the Quechuan notion of chayraq, fiesta is a radical inversion of the social order, a space where, in biblical terms, "the last are first and the first are last" (Mt 19:30). But it is commonly argued that since this inversion is only temporary, it functions to alienate the "last ones" by allowing them to blow off steam for only a fleeting moment, thereby maintaining the oppressive social order. Is this focus on fiesta acceptable for liberationists doing theology while Ayacucho lasts? It is important to remember here that while the nightmarish socio-political context of the 1980s made it difficult to write on this subject, Irarrazaval has never stopped promoting the radical implications of joy, mirth, the festive, and celebration in his theology. There is a well-known theory in the social sciences that attempts to understand carnival, mirth, and fiesta, called the "safety-valve theory." It is important to mention this theory here, because it helps to frame the festive theology Irarrazaval was developing at this period within existing debates and presuppositions. Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote a definitive study of carnival in Rabelais and his World, quoted a letter from the Paris One of the most eloquent expositions of the liberationist reign-centered focus is by Jon Sobrino. See Sobrino, "Central Position of the Reign of God in Liberation Theology" (1996). In this article Sobrino argued against those who advance the primacy of the resurrection for doing theology, such as Bultmann and the younger Moltmann. Sobrino wrote, "[w]ith all its power to express the ultimate meaning of history, with all its radical hope, the resurrection does not have the same capacity to show how one should live in history. It has great power to show us the final Utopia, but it has less to show us how we are to live here and now... the resurrection can and does feed an individualism without a people, a hope without a praxis, an enthusiasm without a following of Jesus—in some transcendence without history" (1996,41-42). He warns that this resurrectional attitude can be present in cross-centered practices: "We do not deny that the resurrection can function as an antidote for a purely doloristic, resigned conception of the cross, that tendency of traditional popular piety [italics mine]..." (1996,42).

School of Theology in 1444 that described this theory perfectly: "[w]ine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air... This is why we permit folly on certain days so that we may return with greater zeal to the service of God" (1984,75). This theory has often been used by the vanguard or other elites to dismiss subaltern festive strategies. But as James Scott has persuasively argued, [i]n some forms, these rituals of reversal may be seen as a sanctioned and contained ritual effort to relieve temporarily the tension unavoidably produced by rigid boundaries. To stop here, however, would ignore both the degree to which such rituals often get out of hand and the strenuous attempts made by dominant elites to eliminate or restrict them. The centuries-long campaign of Roman Catholic authorities to eliminate the pagan aspects of carnival—burlesques of the mass, hedonism—and to replace them with passion plays and more orthodox ritual is a striking example (1985, 331).

For Scott, fiesta or carnival is stripped of its historical specificity in the "safety-valve theory," and can become a form of ahistorical essentialism. Moreover, he argued that the theory also takes for granted that the intentions of the elite will finally be taken up by subaltern groups. For Scott, fiestas are not always devised by the elite in order to let subaltern peoples fake rebellion, in case they attempt the real thing. Scott has asserted that these practices are often engineered first by subaltern groups and later manipulated by dominant groups for their own interests. This was explored in Irarrazaval's "traditionalist paradigm," where potentially explosive religious practices are often domesticated and assimilated into the dominant order. Scott wrote, [w]hy is it that a ritual modeling of revolt should necessarily diminish the likelihood of actual revolt?... A ritual feint at revolt is surely less dangerous than actual revolt, but what warrant have we for assuming it is a substitute, let alone a satisfactory one?" (1990, 178). Who is to say that chayraq ox fiesta, are not simply dress rehearsals for very real revolutions sometime in the future? Scott's work, which attempted to uncover the "hidden transcripts" of peasants, was asking important questions about inherited strands

139 of vanguardist Marxism that distinguished token forms of resistance from real resistance, the former being self-interested and the latter leading toward historical transformation. Scott wrote a deeply incisive critique of the token/real distinction in his book, Weapons of the Weak (1985), which is also important for this examination of Irarrazaval's festive theology. Scott is an anthropologist who studied the processes of modernization on the peasants of Sedaka, a small rural community in Malaysia. Scott's experience in Sedaka led him to re-examine the effects of unjust power dynamics on subordinate rural classes, especially as they have been conceived in the writings of Marxist-inspired theoreticians. Scott radically re-interpreted the mundane, even banal, forms of everyday resistance that undermine the status quo yet continue to be trivialized, or go unnoticed, by the "vanguard," or "organic intellectuals," of the subaltern classes. His work can be understood as a pioneering theoretical reframing of commonplace everyday practices. Scott's most significant insight is the distinction between "public and hidden transcripts," or between "full and partial transcripts" (1985, 284-89). Scott used these terms to call attention to the "art of dissimulation," in other words, the employment of a public mask of compliance by the oppressed as part of a strategy of resistance and/or as a means of survival in a hostile terrain. Scott's work among the rural poor of Sedaka alerted him to "backstage transcripts": those veiled techniques of dissimulation in the face of public interactions of uneven power dynamics. These techniques are in effect a kind of public performance of deference or compliance that masks the hidden, or backstage, transcript of resistance. Hence for Scott, the "full transcript" of power relations in Sedaka could never be adequately perceived from the "public transcript" of interactions between a poor peasant and a rich landowner. The "public transcript" is only

140 a "partial transcript" in the complex and multi-layered power relations in society, because potentially oppressive or violent situations force a portion of the "full transcript" underground (1985, 286). Scott's attentiveness to everyday forms of resistance among the rural poor led him re-evaluate how resistance is often defined, especially within Marxist discourses. By acknowledging the potentially veiled performance of the "public transcript," Scott is concerned with taking seriously the agency and subjectivity of the oppressed. Thus, his definition of resistance allows for both individual and collective acts, seeking to focus on "intentions rather than consequences, recognizing that many acts of resistance may fail to achieve their intended results" (1985, 290). Some of the acts may reveal self-interest and may be perceived as self-indulgent and disorganized by the more powerful, but their public face is never the complete picture of resistance. For Scott, a too narrow dualism exists between real resistance, which is perceived as organized, systemic, selfless, and produces revolutionary consequences, and token resistance, which is perceived as incidental, individual, opportunistic, and has no revolutionary consequences (1985,292). So-called token resistance is more often than not understood to as a means of accommodation to systems of oppression. Yet, even the Russian revolution of 1917 showed evidence that the so-called token resistance of soldiers, who deserted the army and returned home, helped propel the revolutionary process forward. Scott argues that the desertions were self-interested, unorganized, and individual acts which gave "peasant conscripts the chance of saving their skins and of returning home where bread and, now, land, were available" (1985,293). According to Scott, it was those self-interested ends that helped make the revolution possible. Thus, the inclination to dismiss individual acts

of resistance, or to subsume them under real acts of selfless collective resistance, is to strip the poor of their own weapons of resistance. Scott wrote that [m]ore than one peasantry has been brutally reduced from open, radical political activity at one moment to stubborn and sporadic acts of petty resistance at the next. If we allow ourselves to call only the former "resistance," we simply allow structures of domination to define for us what is resistance and is not resistance (1985, 299).

As we have seen earlier, Irarrazaval has been critical of functionalist theories about fiesta, because they tend to abstract from the specific and the concrete, and presume support for the prevailing order. While Scott's work is deeply original and extremely relevant to the everyday forms of resistance that occur among the subaltern peoples, Irarrazaval did not simply equate fiesta with resistance.24 However, as we have seen with his research on the feast of El Senor de los Milagros, he also did not downplay the liberative dimension inherent in some popular religious practices. Irarrazaval's work attempted to understand popular religion in the terms set by those who participate in the processions and feasts as active agents and creative participants of their own religious systems, but without losing sight of the liberationist critique of religious oppression. The festive too is multifaceted and complex, and like popular religion, Irarrazaval was adamant on examining it in a critically appreciative way, without falling prey to narrow theoretical frameworks25 that constrict human experiences into strict categories.

Irarrazaval's early research on the festive pre-dates Scott's work, yet Irarrazaval's insistence on approaching popular religion on its own terms hints at the developments in Scott's anthropological research that I have outlined. Otto Madura also argued that "human life circles around the festive, it moves in search of celebration" (1992,11)*. Focused on an everyday, plural, and inter-relational understanding of knowledge systems, Maduro was critical of narrow theoretical frameworks, especially scientific frameworks, and warned: "If for this reason we resist the critique and transformation of our 'theories of oppression and liberation,' these theories can stop being tools that overcome our oppressive conditions and convert themselves in obstacles of our liberation" (1992,76)*. Madura's re-evaluation of liberationist epistemologies, his critique of narrow dualist perspectives, and his attempt to "map-out" more relational knowledge systems, are important contributions to the liberationist trajectory that I am examining in this thesis. See his book, Mapas para la fiesta: Reflexiones Latinoamericanas sobre la crisis y el conocimiento (1992).

142 The Festive and Fujishock As mentioned above, Irarrazaval did not finish his book La fiesta until the late nineties. This was a time of growing poverty and exclusion among the popular classes of Peru. The 1990s were a time that saw unprecedented changes in Peru, Latin America/Caribbean, and the world more generally. Sendero Luminoso leader Presidente Gonzalo (Abimael Guzman) was arrested in 1992, and without his charismatic leadership (among other factors) what was left of the Senderista movement split over whether or not to persist in a revolutionary war. It was a time that also saw the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, and a shift in global Cold War dynamics. The rule of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s in the so-called "post-war era" in Peru was punctuated by the radical intensification of neoliberal globalization. Self-organized social movements, such women-centered collective kitchens in Lima, or the expanding informal economies of the cities, helped in part to cushion the severe impact of Fujimori-style economic shock treatments in the 1990s. But the neoliberal impact was nonetheless brutal. "Fujishock," as it is now known, was the program the Fujimori government conceived at the beginning of its term in talks with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Bank. "Fujishock" forcefully removed price controls, lowered tariff barriers, privatized industries, opened the country to foreign investment, weakened labour movements, and agreed to international control over Peru's budget. With the 1990 election of Fujimori, "Peru received a remedy much like the shock treatment imposed by Pinochet's 'Chicago Boys' in Chile fifteen years earlier" (Skidmore and Smith 2001,213). Thus, while the Peruvian context changed from

143 experiencing the terror of war to surviving in the wilderness of economic neoliberalism, the subaltern classes struggled more than ever to subsist from one day to the next. In spite of the harsh Peruvian context of the 1980s and 1990s, fiesta was a central focus of Irarrazaval's work on popular religion, because it was central in the lives of the people he worked with. As I mentioned earlier, Irarrazaval encountered the festive spirit in the everyday lives of Quechuan and Aymaran peoples in the Andes. Fiesta is so tightly woven into how Andean peoples enjoy and celebrate the everyday that it became for him a sign of G*d's liberating work in the world. With this appreciation of the festive, one may begin to perceive Irarrazaval's interest in the small and insignificant, in everyday micro-systems, as important themes in his theology. In a book from 1999, Irarrazaval wrote that "the Latin American heart beats to the rhythm of fiesta, in which people enjoy life as a shared gift, and symbolically celebrate liberation" (1999a, 143)*. In the tradition of Latin American intellectuals before him like Octavio Paz,26 Irarrazaval distinguished between modernity's recreation time and fiesta. For Irarrazaval, fiesta can be a radical critique of modernity's emphasis on the individual and its so-called work ethic, but unlike Paz' distinction, fiesta is not a pre-modern tradition in opposition to modernity's recreation time. Irarrazaval argued that the festive character of Latin America and the Caribbean is marked by modernity. He wrote that the "people's religious forms partially assimilate the patterns of modernity: subjectivity, reason, technologies, and the globalized economic and cultural order" (2000a, 84).

See Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1961). Here Paz makes his now famous distinction between the "recreation" of Mexican fiesta and Western recreation: "The group emerges purified and strengthened from this plunge into chaos. It has immersed itself in its own origins, in the womb from which it came. To express it in another way, the fiesta denies society as an organic system of differentiated forms and principles, but affirms it as a source of creative energy. It is true "re-creation," the opposite of the "recreation" characterizing modern vacations, which do not entail any rites or ceremonies whatever and are as individualistic and sterile as the world that invented them" (1961, 52).

144 Unlike some Catholic integrista and Protestant fundamentalist interpretations, for Irarrazaval the festive spiritual character of popular religion is not dualistic in its relation to the contemporary world. In fact, Irarrazaval noted that some forms of fundamentalism, especially those that promote a kind of individualistic consumption of the religious, are products of modernity itself, even if their proponents construct their religious identity in opposition to the 'sinful' modern world. Unlike the religious identity of fundamentalism, Irarrazaval argued that the festive religion of the people is relatively well-integrated into modernity, but retains a critical consciousness about it as well. Influenced in part by Cristian Parker's notion of the hemidernal (semi-modern), which I will examine in the next chapter, Irarrazaval argued that the symbolic and ritualistic logic (or wisdom) of the people has a kind of dual action, appropriating certain elements while critiquing others. Irarrazaval wrote, in effect, the rites of the people tend to correct the process of modernization. There is no doubt that contemporary science and technology purport to monopolize truth and guarantee the omnipotence of progress. In this respect, on the one hand, the people appreciate modern achievements and ideas, and on the other, they don't believe in its totalitarian pretensions. Another characteristic of popular wisdom is to have diverse and complementary ritual behaviors in order to express all their daily aspirations and necessities, which are not subdued under a unilateral framework (1999a, 378)*.

If at one time modernity was reserved for the elite, Irarrazaval argued that it is no longer the case; no-one is immune to the processes of modernity, especially in today's globalization. Irarrazaval noted, "youth play a notable role in modernizing religious celebrations; in such celebrations there is more room for the laity and particularly for young people, who are refashioning the modern world" (2000a, 82). But Irarrazaval also warned that the more dehumanizing aspects of modernity can be felt in some practices of the people: "[m]odernity cuts through the festive, and... the course of life today" (2000a, 81). He gave the example of how the ethos of fiesta among the

people stresses saving earnings for the community and "regards accumulation of resources for individual benefit as secondary," while the dominant characteristics of modernity stress individual wealth and success (2000a, 81). Moreover, Irarrazaval also argued that the festive character of the people and the spirituality that accompanies it enable 'the people' to survive the hostile terrain of modernity; they are thus "guideposts for contemporary inculturation" (2000a, 84). While he observed dynamics of exclusion and cooptation within this festive character that are a result of modernity's influence, there "is resistance and spaces and moments that are alternatives to the unjust order" (2000a, 85). In times of deepening neoliberalism under Fujimori, the festive spirit was a communitarian space of resistance to the daily grind, but unlike some fundamentalist perspectives, it was never a wholesale rejection of the modern world. For Irarrazaval, the festive traditions of the pueblo were spaces where 'the people' could re-create their everyday lives anew.

The Anti-Pueblo and Desculturacion In more recent works, Irarrazaval argued forcefully that hegemony is present in powerful ways in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially in the spiritual preservation of colonialism in the region by Christianity for over 500 years. Irarrazaval agued that this colonial legacy is largely found today in a form of "neo-Christendom absorbed into the project of modernity" (2000a, 29). For him, this dehumanizing hegemonic project requires a critical response, especially as it manifests itself in some of the popular religious practices of subaltern peoples. Irarrazaval referred to these dehumanizing aspects (in similar ways, discussed earlier, as Scannone) as the "anti-

pueblo factor (1998a, 133)*. The "anti-pueblo factor" is the convergence of elements that "originate from outside the people, but retain their mechanisms inside the people, and this decisively marks the fiesta" (1998a, 133)*. The anti-pueblo is the anti-reign; it is the anti-fiesta for Irarrazaval. Hence, Irarrazaval continued to be vigilant about never falling prey to romanticism when discussing fiesta. In his book Inculturation (Spanish: 1998), Irarrazaval maintained that inculturation, a dominant Catholic notion that defines the action of incarnating or indigenizing the 'gospel' into different local contexts, also requires a posture of desculturacion (translated as "exculturation" in the English translation of the book), namely the expunging of idolatrous practices of Western modernity that have been absorbed by popular religion (2000a, 3). This is the action of attempting to remove the "anti-pueblo factor," which hegemonic groups have introduced into the subaltern religious framework. Irarrazaval means those dehumanizing religious aspects, such as populism, fundamentalist authoritarianism, individualism, and the fetishistic search for wealth and success, which have been assimilated by the people into their religious practices. The inculturation/exculturation distinction in Irarrazaval's work is dichotomous, insofar as it reinforces other related colonial/modern distinctions, between hegemony/subaltern, official/popular, modern/tradition. But he is mindful about not reproducing such dichotomies, reminding his readers that "[h]uman processes are polyvalent and ambivalent" (2000a, 73). Irarrazaval has worked very closely with Indigenous peoples and he is very attuned to the ways these processes always interact and mix: I am not going to assume unreal dualisms where one factor excludes the other. For example, it is not realistic to imagine one inculturation is carried out by hegemonic sectors and another carried out by the oppressed, just as it is not realistic to propose that there is an official religion over and

against popular religion. Such dualism and others like them do not capture the interaction between nuanced and complex realities among social groups, among cultural universes (2000a, 73).

Irarrazaval is not very clear about what is involved in the action of desculturacion. Following Scannone's historical-critical approach in chapter one, I believe Irarrazaval would argue that it can only be achieved through contextually specific historical discernment. If in Irarrazaval's words, "the goal of inculturating activity is the unfolding of salvation," the goal of desculturacion is to remove that which prevents the unfolding of salvation in specific practices (2000a, 35). Desculturacion is Irarrazaval's attempt at developing a critical consciousness about the anti-pueblo factors within an inculturation framework. I will return to Irarrazaval's inculturation framework in chapter four. It is important to note that Irarrazaval has not dispensed with the notion of hegemony, which is integral to his nuanced critical liberationist perspective, even if he is also attentive to the ordinary and often times prosaic ways subaltern peoples subvert hegemony everyday. However, for some other Latin American theorists, such as Nestor Garcia Canclini,27 the concept of hegemony is inescapably constitutive of the dualistic processes articulated within the nation-state project of modernity and can no longer be sustained in times of globalization (1995, 145). He argued for the necessity of hybridity as a hermeneutical key into the postcolonial context of Latin America and the Caribbean in these globalized tiempos mixtos, where identities have become deterritorialized. Canclini did not dismiss the reality of asymmetrical power relations, but argued that the radical heterogeneity of subaltern experiences require a paradigm that operates "beyond" the hegemonic/subaltern binary of the modern nation-state. I will explore the work of 27

Canclini argued that the hegemony/subaltern dichotomy should be rejected for it is founded on the outmoded distinction that links hegemony to modern forms of culture and subalternity with pre-modern ones. The contemporary global/local context dissolves the modern/tradition binary, and with this, Canclini argued, the hegemony/subaltern binary as well. He thus argued for hybridity as a key hermeneutical term for interpreting present context. See Canclini, Hybrid Cultures (1995), pp. 145-152.

148 Cristian Parker in the next chapter, who also argued for a paradigm that situates popular religion in the in-between zone of syncretism as a key experience for Latin American and Caribbean subaltern peoples. Irarrazaval is also mindful that Latin American and the Caribbean is facing "vast cultural processes and a greater deal of heterogeneity" (2000a, 38). Arguing against the notion of a Catholic substrate, Irarrazaval wrote, [s]ome say that what is proper to us is our mixed-race ancestry, Catholicism, Latin America-ness, or national identity; they say that this is a common substrate and a cultural matrix. I prefer to place the emphasis on the processes that surround and differentiate, given the variations in impact according to conditions in each zone and with each person (2000a, 38).

Irarrazaval argued that the principal "processes" being developed under globalization are market-based homogenization, contact between cultures, and resistance/cultural creativity (2000a, 38). He argued that these processes are "assimilated and reformulated in a variety of ways" within Indigenous, Afro-American, peasant, urban marginalized, and hegemonic cultures (2000a, 38). But he insisted that market-based homogenization is the "weightiest cultural process," and that in Latin America, the "matters of globalization and the ideologies of death... affect us all" (2000a, 38-39). Irarrazaval highlights the heterogeneous face of Latin America and the Caribbean, its complex and ever-changing mestizo processes, without losing sight of his liberationist critique of hegemony. His emphasis on desculturacion demonstrates quite clearly that in the context of pluralism and hybrid processes, Irarrazaval's liberationist method will continue to critique hegemonic discourses, dehumanizing systems, and idols of death. Highlighting pluralism does not, in this perspective, mean foregoing a critical consciousness about processes that promote individualism and success at the expense of community and solidarity. These

processes are what Irarrazaval has called the "anti-pueblo factor," which impede the building of G*d's reign in history.

The Reign and Sanation For Irarrazaval, the notion of fiesta is much more than an expression of subaltern resistance to hegemony; it is a sign of the reign of G*d in history. Hence, for Irarrazaval, fiesta is also a theological category, focused on G*d's reign in history, which is central to the practices of Indigenous peoples in the Andes. Like the healing and miracle stories of Christian scripture, parables are stories about the reign of G*d. These stories pose the question: "What is the reign like, or what it is unlike?" In Matthew 22, the parable begins as such: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son." As we find out later in the story, the feast in question is ultimately for the initially uninvited. Hence, the reign of G*d in the parable is like a feast for the usually uninvited, and it is unlike a feast for the usually invited. Just as symbols partly embody the transcendent realities to which they point, symbolic resistance may also partially undermine the existing reality and partially prefigure an alternative order. As Jon Sobrino remarked, one must make a clear distinction between the signs and the reality of the reign of G*d in the world: [t]he presence of signs is of the first importance for the symbolical explicitation of the reality of the Reign and for generating a hope that that reality is possible, that it is near at hand. But once more such signs are not adequately the reality of the Reign (1996, 60).

The presence of signs points to the future reality of the reign and helps generate hope to make the reality possible. Writing about Jesus' ministry, Sobrino argued that "acts of healing do not eradicate disease, nor the multiplication of loaves hunger, nor the expulsion of demons the omnipresent power of the Evil One, nor a welcoming of sinners

150 marginalization and social contempt" (1996, 60). Hence, the use of fiesta imagery for the reign of G*d in the parable did not mean that dehumanizing working conditions have disappeared in Roman-occupied Palestine. Nor has the empire retreated! It does mean that the reality of the reign is "already" present, as long as signs of the reign are present in history. And it also means that the reign is "not yet" a reality in history insofar as the signs of this reality continue to be crushed by oppression, marginalization, and suffering. The eschatological already/not yet does not constitute a dichotomy between the present and the future; it is an interdependent binary that brings together the partiality of present with the partiality of the future as a source of resurrectional hope. If resurrectional hope is devoid of content when it is appropriated minus the cross, so is the future reign when it is understood minus the oppressive present. Central to the reign-centered ethos of fiesta in Irarrazaval's work is the very Indigenous concern for sanation (healing). Like the practices of the healer Jesus, sanation is central to the relational cosmology of the peoples of the Altiplano. By healing, Irarrazaval did not only mean the ancient curing techniques that are deeply rooted in the traditions of Indigenous peoples, but also the healing that manifests itself in community, of being in solidarity with other people, especially in a world that constantly seeks to fragment, individualize, and marginalize. In the biblical stories, to cure is to cure both physical ailments and to heal the stigmas associated with these ailments; it is physical, spiritual, social, and political healing. Biblical scholar Richard Horsley noted that "[l]ike the exorcisms, Jesus' healings were not simply isolated acts of individual mercy, but part of a larger program of social as well as personal healing" (2003,108). Similarly, Irarrazaval located his emphasis on sanation and fiesta in the reign-centred

151 praxis of Jesus, especially the parables and healing stories that emphasize the healing of illness and the expulsion of demons. This is especially evident in the story about the Gerasene Demoniac (Mk 5:1-20), and its counterpart, the story of the healing of the hemorrhaging woman and the girl-child brought back to life (Mk 5:21-43). Both these (inseparable) stories highlight the praxis of healing as a sign of G*d's reign, which is established in the text as a radical expression of anti-imperial resistance (the exorcized "Legion" drowned in the sea like the Egyptians of the Exodus narrative) for the renewal of Israel (the imperial hemorrhaging of the twelve tribes of Israel brought back to life).28 Irarrazaval developed a holistic reading of biblical healing stories in his work. He insisted that healing is holistic: physical, spiritual, social, psychological, and political. In all epochs, sin, illness, marginalization and exclusion were intermingled. Because of this, to heal physical pain would imply pardon, reintegrating the ill person into human co-existence, sharing joy, and so much more. The liberation that Jesus brings is a redemption from sin, a solution to physical illness and human relations, the expulsion of evil beings, the encounter with the God of Life. This is what appears in the texts on the ministry of Jesus (Mk 1:34, 39; Mt 4:23, 8:16), the relationship between sin and illness (Jn l:9ss; Mc 2:1-12), the clear-cut affirmation of the power of healing (Lk 13:32) (1999a, 248)*.

For Irarrazaval, sanation is clearly a sign of the reign of G*d; it is the way for the "Latin American people to show its faith and understanding of God" (1999a, 241)*. However, he argued that because 'the people' have their own ways of suffering and curing that are quite distinct from the 'official' world, this wisdom tends to go unnoticed. According to Irarrazaval, a theology of healing bursts forth from the clamor of a sick people who seek health and salvation through holistic medicine and other healing techniques. Holistic healing implies a host of curing techniques, rites, and other practices that have often been categorized as superstitions in the wake of the impact of modernity. It includes rites that

28

See Richard Horsley, Jesus and Empire (2003). For Horsley's exposition of the exorcism of the Gerasene Demoniac, see pp. 100-101. For his reading of the hemorrhaging woman and the girl-child brought back to life, see pp. 108-109.

utilize holy water, prayers, the use of religious objects and icons, rites of repentance and pardon, the visiting of sacred spaces, the struggle against evil spirits, and participation in ceremonies of the church (1999a, 243-245). The social sciences, argued Irarrazaval, tend to devalue the cultural dimensions of healing, the actions of the healers (los curanderos y curanderas), the therapeutic systems of the people, and the importance of religion in the techniques of sanation. Moreover, in the face of the stark discrimination that occurs in Latin American public health institutions and in the lack of access to private institutions, a discrimination marked by racial, class, ethnocentric and gender stratifications, there is an attempt by 'the people' to employ their own resources to create networks of solidarity and to sustain their own holistic healing wisdom in the everyday. For Irarrazaval, sanation does not only emerge out of the pueblo's need to survive hostile conditions. In other words, it is not a desperate measure that originates in an inescapable need for health services in places where they are non-existent. Sanation is primarily a sign of G*d's reign of solidarity in a world where sickness and death will not be the last word. Irarrazaval argued that the Latin American people have an immense capacity for love, an immense capacity for compassion (to suffer with), and an immense capacity for healing their discomforts and suffering. The traditions of sanation cannot be fully appreciated without affirming the central position occupied by women as traditional healers, or curanderas. Irarrazaval reminds us that if G*d is understood by the people as the great Healer, as the One who brings Consolation, and as the bringer of Life, this perspective is marked by "the important weight played by the women of the people in healing; this marks the spirituality and the theology of salvation" (1999a, 244)*. In other words, if the traditions of sanation, as a wisdom of the pueblo, are gendered feminine in

153 their imagery of nurturer, protector, healer, and giver of life, and if these traditions of healing are spaces primarily occupied by women in the private and public realms of the everyday (lo cotidiano), the soteriologies that springs forth from these popular practices are radically different from the kyriarchal soteriologies in so-called 'official' theologies of the church. Irarrazaval does not delve very deeply into the everyday feminist traditions of salvation, but he is aware of some of their implications for theology.291 will explore feminist notions of the everyday (lo cotidiano) in chapter four in order to underline their importance in layering and enriching Irarrazaval's notion of fiesta and liberationist hermeneutics more broadly. As early as the late-seventies and early-eighties, Irarrazaval was writing about the importance of the everyday in the life of marginalized communities. In his book La fiesta, he wrote that "daily life, in particular the activities that permit survival, is a source of human celebration" (1998a, 64)*. The everyday is a place of survival for the most marginalized in both rural and urban settings. The everyday has important implications for Irarrazaval's theology of fiesta, because in all celebration there is a inherent resistance to the dehumanizing aspects of the everyday, the dulling routine, the repetitiveness of work, the worries about putting food on the table, etc. Hence, fiesta and everyday cannot be divorced here, because "the festive synthesizes cultural processes" (1998a, 64)*. For Irarrazaval, "the celebration of the everyday expresses the religious meaning of the social practice of the people, and within this there is a kind of communitarian density" (1998a, 66)*. What is needed in these communities of the fiesta is a "pastoral focus of the 29

In 2000, Irarrazaval released a small book entitled, Misticay action de genero, where he deconstructed the patriarchal and masculinist framework of theology in Latin America and the Caribbean—which he called idolatrous— and he attempted to map out the implications of gender for re-thinking theology. Methodologically, I would call the theology discussed in this book a gender focused theology of interrelation, because it is inspired by his understanding of the relational and anti-dualistic epistemologies of Indigenous peoples.

154 everyday that stands up to modernity and the context of our changing epoch" (1998a, 64)*. Irarrazaval wrote: "in terms of keeping our traditions, it's not a matter of conserving the past, but of forging new possibilities from the roots of the people" (1998a, 66)*. This is a positive assessment of the everyday of subaltern peoples as a place for new possibilities. Irarrazaval is stressing a pastoral praxis focused on accompaniment and attentiveness to the everyday of the poor without losing sight of the liberationist insistence on a critical consciousness about the ways these very same processes may involve dehumanization and oppression. I have shown that Irarrazaval hoped in his work for a transformed Latin America rooted in the everyday cultures and popular religious practices of subaltern peoples. Irarrazaval's theology is deeply rooted in the peoples'—especially the Quechuan and Aymaran peoples—processional movement of walking forward in history, and in the people's everyday fiestas as a form of communal healing. Irarrazaval worked very closely with ordinary lay people, as a pastor who accompanied Indigenous peoples in the Altiplano, and as a researcher who utilized a social scientific approach in order to partially tap into their daily wisdoms. This proximity to ordinary people resonated deeply in his theology of the festive. Irarrazaval is an example of a life deeply immersed in the everyday of the people whom he accompanied. He is also an example of a liberationist who had a broader and more nuanced understanding of oppression and liberation, one that was clearly forged in the festive everyday cultures of excluded peoples. I will critically evaluate the work of Irarrazaval in chapter four. Now I will to turn to another Chilean liberation theologian (and sociologist of religion), Cristian Parker, for whom religious syncretism was an indispensable strategy of survival for Latin American and

155 Caribbean subaltern peoples. Like Irarrazaval, Parker showed an early interest in popular religion and made important contributions to liberationist perspectives in this area.

156

Images: San Ldzaro and Nuestra Senora de Regla Screen captures from video footage by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, from Cuba (2004) Worshipped by practitioners of Santeria as the Orishas Babalu Oye and Yemayd

157 CHAPTER THREE

THE ARRIVAL OF THE UNINVITED: CRISTIAN PARKER, OTRA LOGICA AND SYNCRETISM

These [descriptions of Latin American popular wisdom] are all efforts to think out the hermidernal, non-Western American worldview that is shot through semantically with Western cultural categories and influences that harvests pre-Columbian ancestral traditions, and that insists on being thought out in categories of its own still in gestation, still the object of search (and therefore indebted to categorical structures that come from Western tradition). That worldview, in its "vital synthesis," in its religious syncretism and cultural hybridization, has never been entirely Western and yet from the moment of the Conquista has ceased to be entirely indigenous. Cristian Parker (Chile, 1993)

In this chapter I will examine the work of lay Chilean theologian Cristian Parker, who initially pursued research on popular religion using liberationist hermeneutics in the early to mid-1980s, and later went on to develop the notion of otra logica (an/other logic) as a category of knowledge specific to the subaltern classes and to their popular religious practices. I will examine the "models" Parker delineated in his early research, which describe the different practices Parker identified in a barrio of Santiago. Unlike the typologies of Scannone and Irarrazaval, these "models" are not theological interpretations of popular religion, but Parker's own interpretations of different categories of approaches on the ground. These "models" will enrich the layered descriptions of popular religion that have surfaced in the previous chapters. In 1986, Parker also argued that popular religion was characterized by a symbolic cultural protest that could only be discerned in specific historical contexts. Hence, he argued against essentialist constructs that either attributed the essence of alienation or the essence of protest to popular religion. But his most important contribution was in the area of syncretism. In this respect, Parker was

158 acutely attuned to the syncretic processes at work, not only in popular religious practices, but in the construction of knowledge(s) within the subaltern classes. Parker's notion of otra logica is a crucial liberationist development that not only relativized essentialist notions of Latin American identity, as reflected in Morande's work, but that also chartered a new course in the understanding of pluralism and interreligious collaboration among Latin American/Caribbean liberation theologians.

The rural solidarity program was now over and the other participants had gone back home. I had planned to stay on a little longer in order to visit a few important Cuban popular religious shrines. I read the French warning to 'stop at the flashing lights' printed on back of the typically orange and black school bus and felt at home. For a split second I had forgotten that I was in Cuba! I looked around and reminded myself that I was not in Quebec, but traveling in a re-modeled baby-blue 1950s Chevy station wagon with a friend and nine other passengers going in the direction of Santiago de Las Vegas, about 30 minutes south of Havana. I had traveled to Cuba as part of a diverse U.S.-based delegation of church folk, activists, small farmers, and urban organic growers, who sought to forge links with Cuban agricultural cooperatives and small farms. The solidarity trip was coordinated by Agricultural Missions, a 75-year old church-based organization that promotes food sovereignty, rural sustainability, and works for the rights of small farmers all over the world. Agricultural Missions coordinates its work through rural justice tours, consciousness-raising, global networking, and study sessions. It was through my work as Vice-Chair of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) from 1999 to 2004, and as a member of North American Region of the WSCF, as well as the

Student Christian Movement (SCM) of Canada, that I had come into contact with Agricultural Missions and was invited to participate in the Cuba rural justice program. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the changes that transpired in the Soviet Union at that time, Cubans found themselves isolated. Cuba's economy, its technology, consumption goods, imports (oil) and exports (sugar), and methods of economic planning had been directly integrated with those of the Soviet Union. After the collapse, Cubans could no longer rely on the assistance of its old Communist allies, especially with respect to oil and agriculture. In isolation, and made vulnerable by U.S. Cold War foreign policies, they have sought to maintain socialist principles while developing alternate economic models. Hence, Cubans chose to diversify and return to organic farming in order to maintain basic food supplies. Akin to the baby-blue 1950s Chevy I was riding in, and the slew of vintage cars on the streets of Havana testify, Cuba is a land of recycling. The baby-blue Chevy was taking us in the direction of the sanctuary of the famous San Lazaro shrine, one of the most significant popular religious sites in Cuba. I was traveling with my South African companero, Moa, who was in Cuba as an intern working on HIV/AIDS-related issues with the WSCF. I had met Moa at a WSCF meeting in Johannesburg. Coming from a strict African evangelical background, Moa looked at me with a little bit of incredulity. His eyes told the story of a person trying to understand the interests of his Canadian Catholic friend, who, on the previous day, took him to a divination session in Regla with a Santeria babalawo (priest), and to visit the famous black Virgin, Nuestra Senora de Regla (who mixes with the Santeria orisha, Yemaya—the patroness of the waters). Regla is a municipality on the other side of the Bay of Havana with a working-class history imbued with a rich Santeria practice.

160 The Catholic devotions of Nuestra Seiiora de Regla and San Lazaro have been associated with miracles and healings, and devotees come from across Cuba to seek their soothing comfort and assistance. Our translator in the rural solidarity program told us a story about how Cuba's post-1989 'Special Period' was especially hard for him and his family. Like many Cubans, he went from a relatively secure and comfortable lifestyle as a teacher to no longer being able to provide for his family due to the soaring costs of basic foods. The new situation of precarity caused him much anxiety and prompted a serious bout of depression. Thus, he found himself before San Lazaro one day seeking the saint's blessed support. He told us how on that day his life was changed forever and his faith strengthened. Originally Catholic, he is now an active member of the Baptist church and an activist at the Martin Luther King Center, a progressive Christian organization that promotes social justice. It is always encouraging to know that popular Catholic saints can help strengthen ecumenical justice movements and support socialist ideals in Cuba! In the rich and complex imagination of Cuban popular religion, the cult of San Lazaro mixes with the Santeria orisha Babalii Oye, whose name means 'Father of the World. Disfigured by disease, Babalu Oye is associated with a healing power that preferentially opts for the excluded of society, especially the sick. He is a very important orisha in Cuba and his devotees can be seen sporting his trademark blue & black beads around their necks or wrists. An orisha is a divine being, who like the Catholic saint, petitions on behalf of humanity, and whose origins stem from the cosmic religious worldview of the Yoruba peoples from present day Nigeria and Benin. Like Babalu Oye, Yemaya is also an orisha worshipped by Santeria practitioners. She is associated with the traits of motherly tenderness, joie-de-vivre, and has a deep concern for justice.

161 Santena is to Cuba what Vodou is to Haiti: a hybrid religion cobbled together on slave ships and plantations, in-between the African, Indigenous, and pre-Tridentine Catholic traditions of the Americas. Like Vodou, Santena has been an important system of identity formation, cultural survival, and anti-colonial resistance for slaves and their descendants in Cuba. Ask how widespread Santena is on the island, and (as with Vodou) many will tell you 90 to 99%! A domestically-based religious system, Santena is understood to permeate all aspects of Cuban society (not only the 'Afro-Cuban' reality). As we approached the shrine in the horse drawn carriage that we boarded after leaving behind the baby-blue Chevy, I pondered this question: why is the om/ia/saint combination of Babalii Oye and San Lazaro so popular in Cuba? While everyone in Cuba is basically equally poor, it is nonetheless a place where everyone has access to free health care, dental care, and eye care, not to mention the place with the lowest patient to doctor ratios in the Americas. It is also the place with the highest literacy rate in Latin America and the Caribbean. Marx's idea that religion would become inconsequential in an egalitarian society is glaringly contradicted here. For Marx, religion had its utility as a pre-revolutionary tool of survival for the 'wretched of the earth.' But after the revolution, he believed, its utility would simply fall away. Because the conservative Catholic hierarchy felt betrayed by the Cuban revolution and distrustful of its atheist Marxist ideology, the prophetic Catholicism that we have come to know from other Latin American/Caribbean countries has been almost nonexistent—especially at the so-called 'official' level. When asked by a young woman named Regla (obviously named after Our Lady of Regla and whose white attire identified her as new initiate into Santena) what faith I adhered to, I told her I was Catholic. Then

162 she asked me: "Pero el catolicismo de las imdgenes (popular religion) o el catolicismo de la Biblia ('official' church)? I answered: los dos (both). Coming from her Cuban experience, Regla was telling me that the heights and the base of Catholicism in Cuba exist semi-autonomously. As I have shown already, I avoid dichotomies between 'official' and 'popular' for they presuppose unified and monolithic definitions of these realities. The real world is obviously more complex than this. In the Cuban context, however, this split seemed very strong. This may have to do with the influence of Santeria in popular Catholic devotions here, imbuing it with a syncretic quality that the so-called 'official' church seeks to disavow. The predominant syncretic reality of Catholicism and Santeria is but one example of the ways in which popular religion is in itself a distinct wisdom of the people. As this chapter will show, this syncretic quality is what Parker calls Latin America's otra logica. For Parker, this otra logica is distinctly 'other' within the framework of Western rationality inherited from modernity. The 'official' theologies of Catholicism tend to be too invested in the framework of Western modernity to understand popular religion on its own terms. This is not only true in Cuba, but everywhere in Latin American and the Caribbean. The healing miracles of San Lazaro/Babalii Oye and Regla/Yemaya are not simply the folk superstitions of past days of Cuba under the colonial subjugation of first the Spanish and later the U.S. empires. These devotions are alive and well today. On San Lazaro's feast day (December 17th), some devotees travel great distances on their knees in order to fulfill contractual obligations (mandas) with their transcendent ally. Diego Irarrazaval has helped us to see and appreciate that the popular religious imagination of Latin America and the Caribbean is imbued with milagros, which are everyday

163 occurrences. As I gazed at the face of San Lazaro, I was touched by the depth of religious emotion in the people here: sometimes humble, sometimes fierce, sometimes desperate, sometimes confident, but always very tangible. Yet I also remember that the everyday survival of the Cuban people, who must make a way out of no way in the wilderness of U.S. Cold War foreign policies, is dependent on the reality of religious bricolage. Outwardly, one may only see the face of San Lazaro compassionately looking out toward his devotees in this Catholic church, but Babalu Oye is here too: calling the excluded back into community, healing the sick, and strengthening the vulnerable. Was this not the same reign-centered program proposed by Jesus?

POPULAR RELIGION AND SYMBOLIC PROTEST Often symbolic protest is manifested in an underground form. The people, who have undergone a traumatic series of experiences of humiliation and oppression, protest covertly, without allowing their protests to come to the ears of the dominant power, in order to avoid annihilating reprisals. Therefore they often appear to be deprived of a voice. They are silent because they have been silenced but not because they are dumb. This is a protest which makes it possible to survive to reconstruct a meaningful world through an attitude to life which it is difficult to reduce to rationalist formulae, and which gives a collective identity to popular culture. This is the people's way of defending itself on a symbolic plane against the viciously destructive oppression to which it is subject on the material plane. Cristian Parker (Chile, 1986)

In the previous chapter, I sketched a few themes related to the notion of fiesta in Irarrazaval's work from the Peruvian context of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Furthermore, I argued that Irarrazaval should be considered a pioneer in developing a liberationist perspective that attempted to understand popular religion in its own terms. Irarrazaval is a liberationist who listened to other voices and accompanied marginalized communities within their own meaning systems. Irarrazaval's theological contributions are rooted in a dialogue with other voices, especially in his development of Andean Indigenous forms of Christianity. Irarrazaval's theology is deeply marked by his

164 proximity to ordinary lay people and the religious systems that are their own. In this chapter, I will use as a point of departure the image of the arrival of the uninvited in Matthew's wedding feast parable as a means to examine Parker's account of the strategic ways subaltern peoples create their own spaces in the midst of imperial spaces.

Beginnings and Liberationist Universals Liberationists from Latin America and the Caribbean have been dialogic theologians, especially if one examines, for example, the history of EATWOT (the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians) and the many intra-Latin American conferences and exchanges on the continent.1 The exchanges and polemics about the role of popular religion by the first generation of liberationists examined in the previous chapters paved the way for a younger generation of scholars and researchers to also think through the place of popular religion in the Latin America/Caribbean of the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s. This was a different context for the Latin American and Caribbean continent, where the traditional dictatorships and national security states of old were being replaced by a dictatorship of the global capitalist market.2 Hence, the hopes for an alternative indigenized socialist project in the region were crushed by the interests of empire. This was a time that saw a serious re-mapping of the global order from its Cold War division between the Soviet Union and the U.S. to a more stark division between the North and South. This was a time that corresponds with the fall of the Berlin At EATWOT meetings, liberationists from every corner of the globe dialogue about differences and contact-points in their contextual theologies, and later publish the results of these meetings in books and journals. To this day, articles and discussions are being published in an EATWOT-produced journal, entitled Third World Voices: a Semi-Annual Bulletin. See http://www.eatwot.org/mainfile.php/about/293/ (accessed September 21,2006). Also, for a good short history of the early dialogues between Black theology and Latin American liberationists, see James Cone, "From Geneva to Sao Paulo: A Dialogue between Black Theology and Latin American Liberation Theology" (1981, 265-281). 2

As I will mention later, unlike other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Chile the U.S.-lead coup that installed the Pinochet dictatorship on 9/11/1973 went hand-in-hand with the imposition of neoliberalism.

165 Wall (1989), the assassination of the six Jesuits and their two friends in El Salvador (1989), the defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (1990), the 500th anniversary of the conquest of the Americas (1992), and the intensification of neoliberalism in the region, such as "Fujishock" in Peru. This was also a time that saw the emergence of so-called "new voices" in Latin American theology that sought to prioritize the specificities of gender,3 race, and concerns with the earth within and alongside a liberationist tradition that was in a process of renewal and re-thinking. These "new voices" include the voices of women, indigenous voices, Afro-American voices, and burgeoning concern for the voice of our wounded earth. Of this younger generation, another Chilean Catholic scholar, Cristian Parker, was also a pioneer in the study of popular religion from a liberationist hermeneutical perspective. Born in Chile in 1953, more than a decade after Irarrazaval, Cristian Victor Parker Gumucio pursued a traditional academic career as a lay Catholic social scientist rather than the pastoral trajectory followed by his exiled senior companero. Around the same time Irarrazaval fled from the Pinochet dictatorship, Parker was a student at the Instituto Latinoamericano de Doctrina y Estudios Sociales (ILADES) in Santiago. In 1980, he received a licentiate in sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Later, he went to Belgium, like Gustavo Gutierrez and other Latin American liberationists before him, to study at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, where in 1985 he received a doctorate in sociology. In part undertaken before his departure to Belgium, his doctoral research focused on popular religion in Chile, in the impoverished area of

-a

The emergence of gender as a focus within liberationist discussions is present from an early stage. See Mercy Amba Oduyoye, "Reflections from A Third World Perspective: Women's Experience and Liberation Theologies" (1983, 24655).

Pudahuel on the outskirts of Santiago, which is inhabited by Mapuche-speaking Indigenous peoples.4 A revised version of this dissertation was published in Louvain, in 1986, under the title, Religion y clases subalternas urbanas en una sociedad dependiente: Religiosidadpopular urbana en America Latina: un estudio de caso en Chile. Parker is presently a faculty member at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, where he is the director of the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados. He currently carries out sociological research in the areas of religion, pluralism, social change, and development. As a sociologist of religion, Parker positions his work in relation to the first generation of liberationists: "as an attempt to delve deeper in the direction sketched by Otto Maduro,5 who, nearly two decades ago, proposed a reformulation of sociology of religion for our continent" (1996, 28). Parker's book, Otra logica en America Latina: Religion popular y modernizacion capitalista, originally published in Chile in 1993, was translated and published in the U.S. in 1996.6 This book is among the most important overviews of popular religion in Latin America and the Caribbean from a liberationist perspective. Unlike the work of Irarrazaval, which tends to be more micro-oriented, Parker's overview is very macro-focused and shaped by his orientation as a sociologist. I perceive this macro-perspective to be a good counter-point to the locally-based research examined in the chapter on Irarrazaval. This contrast highlights the scope of research undertaken in the area of popular religion by liberationists.

Pudahuel is located near Santiago's main airport, I'Aeropuerto International Comodoro Arturo Merino Benitez- In Mapuche language, or Mapudungun (which incorporates Spanish and Quechuan words) pudahuel means "the place where the waters fall." 5 See Maduro, Religion and Social Conflict (1982; Spanish 1979). The English title puts the "otra logica" in the subtitle instead of at the beginning. See Parker, Popular Religion and Modernization in Latin America: A Different Logic (1996).

However, I will not compare Irarrazaval and Parker as assuming radically different or opposed trajectories in the study of popular religion.7 This is not a method I find rigorous, especially when examining how liberationists in Latin America/Caribbean have grappled with the complex and multi-faceted tapestry of popular religious practices. Rather, I will argue that these authors approach the phenomenon called popular religion in similar ways: as liberationists with great sympathy for the subaltern peoples who are clamouring for the transformation of systems that cause dehumanization and exclusion in Latin America and the Caribbean. Unlike the emphasis on life experiences that characterized my examination of Irarrazaval's theology, with Parker's work, I will stay close to his academic texts and provide historical context when it is necessary. These two scholars have also approached popular religion very differently: the former as a scholar/pastor who developed a method of pastoral accompaniment in close proximity with ordinary people and who was involved in liberation movements and organizations; and the latter as a lay Catholic social scientist focused on empirical research and publishing. Parker's research on popular religion has had a significant impact on recent theological developments in Latin America and the Caribbean. During a research trip to Peru in 2001,1 was surprised at how many times I heard theologians and social scientists refer to Parker's notion of an otra logica 8 (an/other rationality) to describe the phenomenon of popular religion. While an examination of popular religion forms the substantive core of his book, Parker's main focus is on unearthing within these religious

This is the traditional method of many dissertations. Michael Candelaria's book, Popular Religion and Liberation: The Dilemma of Liberation Theology (1990), is a case in point. While the book has many positive aspects, the author structures his thesis around a comparison of Juan Luis Segundo, as representing the anti-popular vanguardist position, and Juan Carlos Scannone, as representing the romanticizing populist perspective. Hence, his examination of liberation theologies and popular religion is very dichotomous. Diego Irarrazaval writes that the "bearer of inculturation is each concrete community of faith, with its own 'other logic,' with its believing wisdom" (2000a, 89).

168 practices an otra logica that has experienced many years of pastoral, theoretical, and theological neglect. The postcolonial theologian, R.S. Sugirtharajah, has critiqued some Latin America liberationists for attempting to speak for a whole continent with "overarching categories which make sense only from a cosmopolitan perspective" (2002,104). He argues that this kind of perspective tends toward a universalizing discourse, a stripping of particularities, and a veiling of the pluralism that exists on the continent. I will examine Sugirtharajah's postcolonial critique of Latin American liberationist hermeneutics in the next chapter, but before I examine Parker's work, I want to address Sugirtharajah's critique as it pertains to Parker's later research. In his 1993 (Spanish version) book, Parker wrote about popular religion from a bird's-eye-view perspective and in much broader strokes than the work he undertook in Santiago de Chile in the early 1980s. The title of his book, Otra logica en America Latina, is a good example of the kind of universalizing discourse critiqued by Sugirtharajah. Because of this, his work falls prey to Sugirtharajah's critique that "overarching categories" generalize too readily the specificities of popular religion and the often times unmanageable complexity and diversity of popular religious practices. In response to this, I argue that while Sugirtharajah's critique of the universalizing impulse in some Latin American liberationist hermeneutics is very important, one cannot make this critique without also recognizing that, unlike other continents, in Latin America there has existed a shared culture of a common Latin American identity, which is deeply rooted in the history of the continent (Larrain 2000, 1). This is based in part on a shared history of three centuries of Spanish (and Portuguese) colonialism, independence

struggles in which the criollo elite of several countries fought together to end monarchical rule and to forge a mestizo identity, as well as religion, language, and other common cultural factors. This shared Latin American identity can be witnessed in the work of the unitive theologians examined in the first chapter, especially in the context of defining the Latin American pueblo. These authors tend to jump easily from the national to the continental and vice versa. For example, in an article originally published in 1979, Scannone defended his own "historical" definition of 'the people' against the socioanalytical method of some liberationists. He described 'the people' as the communitarian subject of the experience of a common history, a style of common life, in other words, a common culture and destiny (a historical project, at least implicit, of common goods)... In this semantic context 'the people' are articulated with the concepts of "history," "culture," and "nation," and cannot be determined socio-analytically but historically. We can speak of an Argentinean people, of an Aymaran people, of a Paraguayan people, of a Latin American people, for which Latin America is the "Great Nation" (1990,221)*.

This tendency has also been predominant in the arts. For example, one need only to think of the use of the archetypal town, Macondo, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Cien ahos de soledad (1967), or the developed sense of Latin American identity in the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Moreover, this identity is not shared only among elite intellectuals and artists, but it is also shared among the popular classes in the regional cultural practices of dance and music, such as the Cuban salsa, the Argentinean tango, or the Brazilian samba, that are practiced all over the continent and are "expressions with which Latin American people easily and spontaneously communicate" (Larrain 2000,2). The same argument can be made about the continent's popular religious expressions. For example, while Nuestra Sefiora de Guadalupe is the most important symbol of the Mexican peoples, she is also an important Marian devotion for all Latin American peoples—within Latin America and in the diaspora as well.

170 For better or for worse, the "universalizing impulse" among Latin American theologians can be understood as a consequence of the continent's own colonial history and the quest for liberation among its peoples. The continental identity among Latin America peoples functions today in a spontaneous way among people from almost every corner of the continent. In my experience within the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), and especially with the FUMEC (Federation Universal de Movimientos Estudiantiles Cristianos—the Latin American/Caribbean region of the WSCF), I have seen this shared identity as a source of solidarity among Latin Americans Spanish/Portuguese speaking peoples. At times, however, this shared identity can lead to the exclusion of some Caribbean countries, such as Haiti, which also shares "Latin" colonial roots, but not Spanish or Portuguese ones. Moreover, the spontaneous impulse to jump from the national to the continental is also a product of Latin American's peripheral position within a world-system, whereby continental solidarity is often constructed by the elite as a bulwark against the ravishing impacts of neoliberal capitalism and the accompanying forms of homogenizing globalization(s). At a time when dependency theories were at the forefront of liberationist critiques of the optimistic developmentalism (desarrollismo) that was aggressively promoted in Latin America in the 1950s, continental solidarity was a hope for radical liberation from the dependency that the Latin American pueblo experienced as a whole (Gutierrez 1988, 16-17). For liberationists, "liberation" was thus articulated as a break from continental dependency on imperial powers. In the mid-1980s, dependency theory was already perceived by some liberationists, such as Gutierrez, as an "inadequate tool, because it does not take sufficient account of the internal dynamics of

171 each country" (1988, xxiv). Hence, an awareness of the inherent short-comings of this analysis were present among liberationists themselves almost twenty years ago. Yet, it should also be noted that in our present context, the impact of neoliberal globalization— as in the case of the Argentinean crisis in 2001 clearly showed—has promoted renewed attempts at continental solidarity by social movements and by popular leaders, such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales, which are based on this history of a shared identity among Latin Americans.

Parker's "Models" within the Symbolic Field of Popular Religion The continental-focus in the work of Cristian Parker appeared in his writings only with the publication of Otra logica en America Latina in 1993. He did not always write about popular religion as the religious expression of a whole continent. His early work demonstrated a focused sociological method alert to the very local realities of Santiago de Chile. Before looking at Otra logica en America Latina, I will examine the five "models"9 of popular religious expression that Parker delineated in his dissertation research from the early to mid-1980s. These models are important, because they help to foreground the complexity and pluralism of popular religious practices in ways that only enrich the descriptions I have pursued in the previous chapters. However, Parker's "models" are not typologies or approaches about popular religion as found in the work of Irarrazaval and Scannone, but an effort to identify different expressions of popular religious practices on the ground in Santiago.

9

The use of "models" language here comes directly from chapter seven of Parker's book, "The Diverse Religious Models in the Symbolic Field of the Urban Subaltern Classes" (1986b, 293).

172 Parker began his study by stating his confirmation of Gramsci's observation that popular religion as a "common sense" philosophy exists in relative autonomy10 from the so-called 'official' church. For Parker, "this historical dialectic between official religion and popular religion, within dependent capitalist social formations, historically hegemonized by a universal religion with metropolitan tendencies in the symbolic field, explains to a certain extent why a very rational religion can co-exist today with magic..." (1986b, 301)*. Like Gramsci, Parker did not posit a complete separation between socalled 'official' and so-called 'popular' forms of Catholicism. He wrote, "it is important to relativize this separation, at times so acute, that typologies have established between popular religion and official religion" (1986b, 302)*. Thus Parker argued that these borders can at times be very artificial. He wrote, "and besides, historically the interaction between popular religions and official religions have been very fluid, at times mixed but at the same time conflictual in the Catholicism of Latin America and Europe" (1986b, 302)*. Parker's "mixed but at the same time conflictual" approach is very important for understanding the five models of popular religious expression that he delineated because the distinctions between 'official' and 'popular' do not translate into the strict binominal positions of autonomy and submission. The relationship between 'official' and 'popular' is much more fluid and complex. For Parker, even the most "traditional" model "combines in coherent ways the old traditions and dogmas of official Christianity and the

In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci wrote: "In these cases the contrast between thought and action cannot but be the expression of profounder contrasts of a social historical order. It signifies that the social group in question may indeed have its own conception of the world, even if only embryonic; a conception which manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes—when, that is, the group is acting as an organic totality. But this same group has, for reasons of submission and intellectual subordination, adopted a conception which is not its own but borrowed from another group; and it affirms this conception verbally and believes itself to be following it, because this is the conception which it follows in "normal times"— that is when its conduct is not independent and autonomous, but submissive and subordinate" (1971, 327).

173 people's own traditions that go back to ancient times, but are no less alive in the collective consciousness" (1986b, 314)*. Parker called the first model "traditional" popular religion. Practitioners of this type self-identify as strictly Catholic as opposed to all that is non-Catholic, such as the atheists, the so-called 'schismatics' of the Protestant tradition, the so-called 'pagans' of Indigenous and Afro-American traditions, the so-called 'Moors'11 and 'infidels' of Islam, etc. The "traditional" model enshrines a strict identitarian posture, in other words, a strict drawing of boundaries codified through the popular trinity of G*d, the Virgin, and the Saints. This does not mean an exclusion of the figure of Jesus, but only that he is not central in this model. The "traditional" model also opposes itself to the notion of experience, whereby unquestionable and timeless truths from orthodoxy are understood as self-evident and passed down from generation to generation. The practices in the "traditional" model are governed by religious supplication and sacrifice. According to Parker, this practice "helps with all the discomforts and concrete necessities in the present life, and saves, in the other life, from present sufferings, awarding the reward of eternal tranquility" (1986b, 318)*. Parker wrote, "the imprecatory ritual of the promise, called i

mandd' in the popular Chilean sociolecto (social intellect), is primarily oriented toward

the Virgin and the Saints" (1986b, 318)*. In a similar view, anthropologist Sidney M.

Parker demonstrated that the Christian vs. Moor {mow) identification is very strong in some tradition popular practices of baptism. To be baptized as Christian is often perceived in some traditional understandings to become a son or daughter of G*d, in other words, a human being. The unbaptized are thus understood to be Moors, or animals. In some rural areas, baptism is understood as a passage from the animal realm to the realm of the symbolic-cultural. This colonial depiction of non-Christians as Moors is a remnant from of the Spanish Reconquista and appropriated within the framework popular religious practices—particularly in rural areas. But there is more to this than simply a prejudiced posture. According to Parker, a 'Christian' is also understood to be a person with reason and dignity, rather than a brute or animal, which speaks to the sense of marginalization and exclusion often felt by campesinos (1986b, 320-321). My southern Italian grandfather often called people "Christians" in this sense and without religious prejudice, namely as a term that denotes dignity. He would often say that so-and-so "died like a Christian," which meant that this person died with dignity, as all human beings should die. My grandfather lived in a context of extreme poverty in the mountains of rural Calabria where too many people lived and died with very little dignity.

Greenfield has offered a description of the manda in terms of a patron-client exchange between the practitioner and the saint in Brazil, where they enter in to a kind of contract. Greenfield wrote that [t]he petitioner's offer to his other-worldly patron, however, is conditional. He [sic] is not expected to fulfill his part of the bargain - pay his promesa - until or unless the saint fulfills its. Should he not recover his health, obtain a job or promotion requested, or receive whatever else he has asked for, he may "punish" the saint, breaking its statue or turning it upside down in its place in the shrine in his home. He also is not obliged to deliver to the saint what he promised (2001, 61).

It is important to note here that not all practitioners of the manda fall into Parker's "traditional model"; I offer it here as an insightful description of the practice. While Greenfield description shows some autonomy on the petitioner's side of the exchange, Parker argued that the ethics of the "traditional" model tend to be focused on obedience and respect for authority as a means toward life-harmony. Sin is thus defined as that which disrupts a hierarchical harmony that moves down from divinity, to religious and civic authorities, to animals. The "traditional" is a model that is nostalgic for the so-called traditional Catholic church, namely, the church of colonial Christendom. Parker asserted that the "traditional" model is the model that many people tend to identify with popular religion. Hence, suspicions can arise, especially among liberationists, about the extent to which official hegemony sustains the identity of "traditional" practitioners. The "traditional" model of Christendom was the principal target of Catholic liberationist critique including the ways this oppressive model was reproduced in the popular sectors. Parker's second model is called the "renewedtraditional" model. He identified this expression as sharing many features with the previous model, yet it is distinct in that it follows the pastoral renewal of the 'official' church, especially a distancing from so-called folkloric beliefs present in the "traditional"

175 model. There are similarities with the previous model, except that the popular trinity of G*d, the Virgin and the Saints is changed to give space to the practice and ethics of Jesus. Yet, while Jesus may replace the Saints in this model, the Saints are not abandoned. The difference lies in the emphasis on the importance of miracles in the daily life of practitioners. Here, the modern liberal emphasis on rationality is appropriated into popular devotions replacing the patron-client manda framework of the previous model with an institutionalized form of prayer practiced in the 'official' church and in fulfillment of the holy sacraments. The ethical dimensions of this model share similarities to previous model, except there is more of an emphasis on divine judgment in this life as in the next. Parker wrote that practitioners avoid divine punishment by "the ascetic journey... as a morally defined ethic, which inescapably leads to definitive salvation" (1986b, 329)*. The next model proposed by Parker is the "justice-renewal" perspective of the popular classes, which is rooted in the Vatican II reforms of the Catholic church and can be perceived in the liberationist-inspired CEBs of Latin America/Caribbean. Here, proximity to the 'official' church exists on "certain fundamental points" but, Parker adds, a distinction can be seen in its "conception of Christianity as very much in line with ethico-social and [politically] engaged perspective" (1986b, 331)*. Following the historical Jesus takes precedence over the Saints and even the central figure of popular religion, the Virgin. Parker noted that "the Virgin is not mentioned once [in interviews and polls]" (1986b, 332)*. "Justice-renewal" Christians tend to be very critical of the previous two models, which they characterize as either too focused on the hereafter, thereby remaining passive with respect to their own suffering, or too focused on

176 individual piety, thus obfuscating the more social aspects of the faith. Hence, they tend to reject ritualistic elements like devotion to the Virgin or the Saints, mandas, and prayer without action, preferring commitment to a faith that liberates in the here and now. Hence, they privilege "the salvatory character" of the faith over the expressions of divine will or divine judgment of the previous models (1986b, 333)*. According to Parker, they understand G*d as a benevolent father and as a G*d of justice, while Jesus, the poor human being, is the Christ who brings salvation and liberation (1986b, 333). The practices of the "justice-renewal" model are dominated by an "affirmation of the autonomy of the human being" (1986b, 336)*. Therefore, the ritual of baptism, the most important sacrament among the popular classes of Latin American and the Caribbean, is not perceived simply as tradition to be followed, but as a serious commitment to live a Christian life in line with the teachings and practices of the historical Jesus. The ethical dimension of the "justice-renewal" model is obviously governed by a privileging of human experience, especially the experiences of those who are closest to the G*d of justice: the poor, marginalized and excluded. The understanding of sin in this model takes on social configurations, especially with respect to social injustices, offences to one's (poor and vulnerable) neighbour, and communal responsibility. Parker wrote there does not exist in this model the idea of a Supreme God, judging and vengeful, always disposed to punishment; instead in the image of the God of justice one can see the opposite of this, a God of mercy, always disposed to forgiveness and all that refers to reinforcing human responsibility. Sins are forgiven only if the subject has repented, an act that obviously involves a subjective conscience (1986b, 339)*.

The ethical dimensions of this model cannot be divorced from the post-Puebla notion of the "option for the poor" in Latin America and the Caribbean. This posture has lead, according to Parker, to the "recovery of human dignity... the critique and denunciation of

injustices, and the defense of violated human rights, the engaging in a pastoral solidarity oriented to the satisfaction of the urgent necessities of the people..." (1986b, 341)*. The fourth model delineated by Parker is even more complex because it is based in a syncretic framework that developed among rural migrants in the urban centers. Parker called it the "traditional protection" model. There are similarities with the "renewed-traditional" model, but with specific differences that Parker was himself wrestling to understand. The major difference is that the practitioners "verbally deny the existence of an 'other' life..." (1986b, 343)*. Parker explained that the practitioners interviewed put much emphasis on the here and now and decidedly expressed a clear rejection of the "reign of the dead," which is very important to Indigenous practices (and to Catholic practices to a lesser extent). Instead, there is a paradoxical emphasis on both a cosmology of "spirits and miracles" and an empirical attitude with respect to their results in the world. Parker explained that the typical believer of this model affirms a non-belief in an 'other' life, yet manifests a firm conviction in the spirits and the power of miracles. This apparent paradox can be explained in the syncretism that is constitutive of this model. Affirming themselves as Catholic through dualistic thinking, they incorporate a belief in spirits while the original symbolic production (secured in a re-interpretation of primitive animism) derives from an archaic belief in the soul of the dead residing in dead bodies and in those spaces and places where the dead continue to maintain a relation of continuity during life (1986b, 345)*.

Here, as in much popular religion, apparently opposed cosmovisions co-exist in the everyday. The manda is important to the religious practices described in this model, but without the institutional mediator of the shaman or priest. Ritual is a tool that produces results, miracles, which in turn are empirically verifiable in daily life. The ethical framework in this model is similar to the traditional model, whereby evil is understood as that which disrupts life-harmony. According to Parker, this magico-ritualistic model seeks to "manipulate the sacred beings in order to "live a quiet life free of disruptions

178 (vivir tranquilo)..." (1986b, 345)*. Even occasional attendance at Sunday mass can help regulate this harmony with the "the metasocial cosmic protector" (1986b, 347)*. The last is the "rationalist" model of popular religion. Parker called this a religious model for those who identify as non-practitioners. Again, there is much overlap here with the "traditional" protection model described above, but with a major symbolic rupture with respect to 'official' Christianity, or religions of salvation. Parker explained that, on one hand, someone may affirm a religious belief, but on the other hand, tend to relativize any connection to a church as a mediator for their beliefs. Hence, there is "an affirmation of the existence of God, as a sacred being that gives existence to other beings, and the necessity to believe in divine help and protection" (1986b, 353)*. While some practitioners mentioned the Virgin, there is a tendency for believers to deny belief in the Virgin's powers to petition on behalf of humankind. The main emphasis, according to Parker, is on "the central divinity of Christianity and a certain rejection of the sacred beings [the Saints] that accompany this divinity" (1986b, 353)*. There is little belief here in an after life or in an 'other life' of "spirits" and a rejection of the popular so-called "ritualism" of the other models, such as the use of the manda. The logic of this model is a kind of search for divine protection in the here and now without all the peripherals of the other models. Parker added that, while the petitioners do profess a belief in G*d, they live as if G*d did not exist in terms of the ritualistic character of their practices. There is no belief in miracles here either, only a belief in divine protection, especially in times of crisis. The ethical framework is closely related to what I described earlier as asceticmoral engagement fond in the renewed-traditional model mixed with a "tragic vision of

life found in the affirmation that "in this life nothing is free" (en esta vida todo se paga)" (1986b, 356)*. With these models, Parker sough to characterize, classify, and identify the different ways practitioners engaged popular religion in Santiago in the early to mid1980s. Parker insisted that all these models, from the most traditional to the most rationalistic, were rooted in a popular syncretic epistemology. In 1985, he called this an otra logica: It is possible to postulate that the religious field of the subaltern classes corresponds to a kind of thinking that is not homogenous. This should not be interpreted as a sign of incoherence, but as a sign of the existence of an 'other logic' (otra logica) underlying the interior of which co-exist and interpenetrate two representational worlds. The sacred and the profane intermingle at same time as they differentiate from each other (1986b, 294)*.

This paradigm will be developed by Parker in the 1990s. I mention it now because, while an important development in the notion of syncretism occurred with Leonardo Boff's liberationist 1981 (Spanish) ecclesiology, Church: Charism and Power, Parker expanded the notion as an epistemology, which had not yet been developed by liberationists. Boff was working in dialogue with Brazilian bishops, making his task much more problematic from the perspective of the 'official' church. As a lay sociologist Parker worked "under the radar" and was able to attend to the notion of syncretism without having to engage the question of preserving church traditions. Syncretism is perceived as a contamination of orthodoxy by the guardians of tradition, especially when developed in the popular classes, and Parker's work among the subaltern classes revealed a much deeper level of syncretism happening on the ground—one ultimately linked to how these same classes know reality and intervene in the world they inhabit. Boff's point was to argue that all Catholicism is syncretic from the ground up, and Parker reminded us that syncretism is not simply a matter of religious mixing, but also involves a completely different

180 (cosmo)vision of the world. Before continuing this discussion of syncretism in Parker's work, I will to attend to his notion of symbolic protest, because it is linked to his notion of otra logica.

The Chilean Example and Symbolic Protest In 1986, Parker wrote an important article on the specificity of Chilean popular religion that was translated into English, entitled "Popular Religion and Protest against Oppression: The Chilean Example" (1986a, 28-35). This article is a very concise rendering of the data and conclusions from his dissertation on Chilean popular religion, which Parker defended in Louvain in 1985. Chile was a distinct case in the history of post-Medellin dynamics in Latin American and Caribbean, because it was the first country to experience capitalist neoliberalism. In 1973 Chile experienced a U.S.-lead coup that installed the Pinochet dictatorship, which was a kind of early laboratory for neoliberalism in the region. Eric Hobsbawm noted that after 1974 the free marketers were on the offensive [led by the neoliberal economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman—both awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974 and 1976 respectively], although they did not come to dominate government policies until the 1980s, with the exception of Chile, where a terrorist military dictatorship allowed US advisors to install an unrestricted free market economy, thus, incidentally, demonstrating that there was no intrinsic connection between the free market, after the overthrow of a popular movement in 1973, and political democracy (1994,409).

Parker recorded very clearly the effects of theses changes on Chile. In an article published in 1991, he argued that the "1973 coup marked the complete close of a historic era. It replaced earlier economic structures with a model of capitalist accumulation... The new model forcefully destroyed all independent social and political organizations. A new project was launched that was neoliberal, exclusive, and concentrated" (1991,52). In this new neoliberal project, Parker argued, the "lower classes were excluded and repressed

181 from any active role in shaping society" (1991, 51). Hence this "new model of authoritarian, capitalist development evolved into a superexploitation of workers, a high degree of unemployment, and the legal banning of any protest or negotiation by organized labor" (1991, 51). According to Parker, the end of the 1960s saw many Christians shifting radically to the political left in Chile, and the early 1970s saw the rise of the Christians for Socialism and other progressive Christian movements (1991, 50). The victory of the Popular Unity coalition under Salvador Allende expressed the hopes of many for social and political transformation in Chile. As mentioned above with respect to Irarrazaval's involvement in the early 1970s, Christians for Socialism tended to promote a vanguardist perspective with respect to popular religion, especially in more urban centers such as Santiago. Irarrazaval wrote, while he was a member of Christians for Socialism, that popular religion was a "false practice of liberation" (Candelaria 1990, 7). Unlike Irarrazaval, Parker was not a member of the Christians for Socialism and was critical of their perspective on popular religion. Parker wrote that the more academic writings of leftist Christians were perhaps too radical for the political understanding of the pueblo at the beginning of the 1970s. In any event, they never took root among the popular masses. The discourse of these vanguards (of Christians for Socialism for example) was critical of popular religiosity, which it viewed as an aspect of alienation (1991,51).

Like Scannone, Parker argued that the elitist discourses of traditional left wing politics fell on deaf ears in the popular sectors of society. However, Parker argued that even if radical left ideology had not formally penetrated the popular sectors as such, "nonpracticing believers" utilized their own forms of symbolic protest, namely popular religion, as sort of an informal support of socialist ideals: nonpracticing believers appear to have given the most support to socialism in Chile. At the same time, perhaps because they were the masses farthest from official religion, it was among this group that traditional popular religiosity was strongest. Other research reveals a certain compatibility

between traditional (popular) religion and a Socialist option of sensitivity. Juan Van Kessel shows that among the religious dancers of northern Chile, where one finds a large concentration of the mining proletariat, the most widespread tendency [was] Socialist (1991,50-51).

In his research from the mid-1980s, Parker argued that at the heart of the popular sectors lies a core of symbolic protest that attempts to navigate the superexploitation of early neoliberalism in Chile. Parker understood this perspective as "a different interpretation of the phenomenon of religion among the peoples of Latin America, with the case of Chile as an example" (1986a, 28). For Parker, this perspective is different from the two paradigms that had become prominent among Latin American theologians, namely what I have been calling the unitive and conflictive tendencies. Parker wrote, [r]ecently certain theological and pastoral trends have attempted to rediscover the 'soul of the people' in traditional popular religion, that deeper Latin American identity [which is] opposed to liberal and Marxist secularism. Against this, there is the liberating approach which attempts to find seeds of liberation in a religion of the oppressed [which is] challenging the dominant culture (1986a, 28).

Parker argued for a sociological perspective on popular religion as a "form of symboliccultural production characterized by its self-reference to a transcendent reality" (1986a, 29). Thus, he underlined the realm of culture as important at a time when limited materialist readings tended to reduce it to an alienated expression of class relations, mere superstructure. Moreover, Parker argued that popular religion cannot be understood outside of its specific historical context: "[i]n this view, the meanings and functions of religious people are relative to specific times and situations of the social actors who produce and reproduce this conjunction of codified senses" (1986a, 29). In other words, Parker's view was similar to the one argued by Irarrazaval in the early 1980s, when he wrote that "there only exists and one can only study the religious practices of concrete subjects in specific conditions" (1980, 12)*. Parker had been especially interested in how meaning-production within popular religion both conditions and is conditioned by

183 different contexts. In these specific contexts religious actors can sometimes perform a kind of symbolic protest. "This protest is not always an open one," argued Parker, yet it is only in a few cases that this protest manages to "constitute an authentic class consciousness in the proletarian and sub-proletarian masses" (1986a, 29). By appealing to "authentic class consciousness" Parker's argument veers in a vanguardist direction. However, he was also attempting to argue against the view that popular religion is constituted by an essence of protest or an essence of alienation. These particular traits "have their existence only in particular social and historical circumstances" (1986a, 29). Parker was defending two important points at this period: first, popular religion is always much more than what a materialist reading can ascribe to it, and this much more can manifest itself as a symbolic protest, and second, popular religion does not exist in the abstract, but in concrete specific experiences. Parker was arguing against essentialist definitions that posit a single phenomenon linked to either protest or alienation as inherently present in popular religion. Hence, a romanticized definition of 'the people' as bearers of an authentic Latin American identity opposing elite liberalism, as in the work of Morande for example, frames protest as an essential element in the composition of popular religion. Furthermore, perceiving popular religion simply as a form of alienation, as in some orthodox Marxist perspectives, also falls prey to essentialism. Parker argued that if popular religion is simply interpreted "in the abstract using classical tools of interpretation, the people's religion can be considered in some cases as a mere reproduction of elements of official religion and the dominant culture. In this case the people would play a passive role of 'consumer' or 'user' of a religious production..." (1986a, 33). But if popular religion, according to Parker, is

184 examined from the point of view of its own socio-political class location, namely the popular classes, "their own production of religion represents a way of recovering meaning and dignity to face a life of poverty and oppression which is otherwise a nonsense" (1986a, 33). Moreover, protest is not at all times always the same thing; it varies according to historical context. Parker insisted that "the functions of protest are manifested differently in every historical period" (1986a, 33). For example, Parker argued that the traditional popular pilgrimage to the cemeteries on All Saints Day (Todos los santos) "acquires a character of public protest when in the Santiago General Cemetery there are hundreds of tombs marked N.N, meaning those who were arrested, disappeared, and murdered by the secret police" under the Pinochet regime (1986a, 33-34). Parker noted that symbolic protest is often manifested in an underground form. Similar to Scott's anthropological perspective, described in the previous chapter, Parker argued that, because of the reality of oppression, humiliation, and trauma, many vulnerable and excluded people "protest covertly, without allowing their protests to come to the ears of the dominant power, in order to avoid annihilating reprisals" (1986a, 34). While this may be true of symbolic production, protest also exists in a latent form. Parker wrote that historical practice and the influence of a critical culture—mediated by organic intellectuals, clerical and lay—are what can make this protest become open and conscious. In this way popular religion becomes popular liberating Christianity, as we have seen in the recent historical experience of Latin America (1986a, 35).

Hence, Parker's understanding of symbolic protest echoed other liberationist perspectives, such as Gutierrez, in focusing on the "conscientizing" role of what Gramsci

185 called the "organic intellectual."12 But he did so by emphasizing the often forgotten hidden aspect of symbolic protest. In 1980, for example, the Chilean theologian Segundo Galilea argued for a liberating or conscientizing evangelization with respect to popular religion. He argued that "folk religion has to be the object of a process of liberating evangelisation if it is to develop a consciousness of change and a spirituality of liberation in the people" (1980a, 44). Unlike Parker's approach, Galileo's approach was much more vanguardist; he argued for conscientization as a way to develop the authentic liberating core of popular religion. According Juan Carlos Scannone, Galilea's thinking evolved throughout the 1970s, from understanding popular religion as a degraded form of faith to recognizing its liberating core and advancing a pastoral strategy for developing this liberating core (1990, 166). However, from the beginning, Parker sought to avoid essentialism, which posits an unchanging liberating core in popular religion. Another example from the 1980s can be found in the work of Enrique Dussel, who distinguished between the shaman and the prophet in delineating popular religious practices as either alienating or liberative. According to Dussel, the shaman represents the magical realm, where the people are awash in superstition and myth, while the prophet is meant to represent the historical protagonist of change. Dussel wrote, "the field of popular religion is not totally in the hands of shamans; it is also has room for prophets. It is a field of conflict, and for that reason can serve the interests of the dominated classes,

For Gramsci, the organic intellectual was a re-thinking of the notion of the vanguard, which he had come to see as distorted in Marxist-Leninist theory. Gramsci emphasized the role of the organic intellectual, who unlike the traditional intellectual, plays a more integrated role in the ideological struggle between competing hegemonic forces. The idea of the organic intellectual was popular with Latin American liberation theologians, because in Gramsci's view, the organic intellectual should speak out of the concrete experiences of the subaltern peoples. Gutierrez wrote this: "Only with the exercise of the prophetic function understood in this way, will the theologian be—to borrow the expression from Antonio Gramsci - a new kind of 'organic intellectual.' Theologians will be personally and vitally engaged in historical realities with specific times and places. They will be engaged where nations, social classes, and peoples struggle to free themselves from domination and oppression..." (1988, 10).

186 in other words liberation" (1986, 87). Dussel was not deliberately representing Indigenous traditions as mere superstition; his appreciation of Indigenous and African cultures is fully apparent in the rest of this article. However, the shaman/prophet delineation is crude and problematic. This distinction is rooted in a long tradition of theology, and is evident, for example, in the early christology of Sobrino, whereby immanent religion is opposed to transcendent faith.13 But here, Dussel was developing the point also made in Galilea's work that the popular sectors need a good dose of prophetic critique or liberating conscientization to fully unleash their potential for protest. Like Parker, Dussel affirmed that this prophetic consciousness cannot simply be imposed from above, but arises in particular contexts through a very particular synthesis. For Dussel, "popular religion is centuries-old and modern, it is faithful and revolutionary, like the Indigenous peoples who rebelled in the colonial period (like Tupac Amaru, who saw himself as Moses fighting the Pharaoh...). Only Latin American popular religion can create such a synthesis" (1986, 93). In a similar spirit, Parker probed this very special synthesis in his later work.

See Chapter 9, entitled 'The Historical Jesus and the Christ of Faith: The Tension between Faith and Religion," in Christology at the Crossroads (1978, 273-310).

187 SYNCRETISM AND OTHER RATIONALITIES As the "colonization of souls" neared its close and the ancient religions no longer constituted a formal system, native rebellions were no longer directed against dominant religion; on the contrary, Christian significates and symbols were adopted in an attempt to defend subjugated interests and rights. Noteworthy in this regard is the Tupac Amaru rebellion, toward the close of the eighteenth century in Peru. The native chieftain of that name rose up against colonial abuses in defense of the Indians, but instead of reasserting his own religious traditions, declared himself a Christian and defender of the Church against the abuses of the hacienderos and encomendaros. He even won the support of certain clerics, and their charismatic leadership was interpreted by the natives as providential. For many, Tupac Amaru was a kind of Native American Moses, who through his acts of insurgency would lead his people to a land of promise ringing with the echoes of the most distinct past. Cristian Parker (Chile, 1993)

In Parker's analysis, popular religion and syncretism in Latin America and the Caribbean (although his emphasis on the Caribbean islands remains, as with other liberationists, underdeveloped) have a rich and vibrant history. For him, syncretism belongs to the pueblo that has shaped the syncretic contours of the diverse forms of popular religion on the continent. Parker is a sociologist and is not hesitant about using the term syncretism, unlike Irarrazaval, who has favored the term "symbiosis" (which is also championed by the Sri Lankan liberationist Aloysius Pieris)14 for his pastoral and theological work with Aymaran and Quechuan folk in the Andean mountains (2000a, 28). Before examining Parker's work on syncretism and popular religion, I will briefly explore some of the research that surfaced in conjunction with the term in the last twentyfive years, especially by the Peruvian anthropologist Manuel Marzal and the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff. As with my exploration of James C. Scott in conjunction with Irarrazaval's festive theology in the previous chapter, a brief examination of anthropological and theological perspectives on syncretism will frame my discussion of Parker's work. See Pieris, Fire and Water. Pieris defined syncretism "as the haphazard mixing of religions," synthesis as "the creation of a tertium quid, out of two or more religions, thus destroying the identity of each..." For him, symbiosis "indicates one's conversion to the common heritage of all religions (beatitudes) and also a conversion to the specificity of one's own religion as dictated by other religionists. You may call it interreligious dialogue, if you wish" (1996, 161).

188 Subaltern Syncretism Syncretism is a contested term in theology.15 Manuel Marzal has been a vocal defender of the term for many years. As an anthropologist, however, Marzal insisted that syncretism is a descriptive category, although he also noted that it carries loaded connotations in theological discourses. Marzal defined syncretism as the "other face of inculturation," i.e., what happens when the 'official' agents of inculturation disappear, are expulsed, or leave (1996,18). Though Marzal underlined the grassroots quality of syncretism, in its emergence from the underside of history among subaltern peoples, his definition suggests that syncretism is the distortion that happens where authentic inculturation fails. For example, Marzal wrote that due to the expulsion of the Jesuits from Tseltale, Aymara and Quechua communities in the nineteenth century, "there was a real regression in the evangelisation process and communication of Christianity. Aboriginal religious leaders were obliged to cling their original religious tradition to redefine Christianity" (1996, 18). Marzal characterized syncretism as what takes place when the "presence of the institutional church was very weak and almost nonexistent" (1996, 18). A question surfaces in relation to Marzal's definition: how could Indigenous religious leaders not but always "cling to their original religious tradition," even when the evangelization process was acute? One's own religious tradition is always the filter through which a completely different religious worldview can be interpreted and understood. Marzal advanced a dichotomous view of these complex processes by suggesting that syncretism is formed out of an incomplete or unfinished inculturation process. I want

See Gort et at. Dialogue and Syncretism (1989) for a good resource on debates around the term in theology, anthropology, and religious studies.

to insist that the term syncretism must be reclaimed from its second-class standing, especially for those attentive to postcolonial criticism. The term syncretism encompasses many contradictory definitions beyond the scope of this work.16 The definition of syncretism that haunts modern theology, namely that it causes a loss of basic structure and identity through indiscriminate mixing, re-surfaces in the "missionary movements from the seventeenth century onward" (Schreiter 1985,144). Anthropologists Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart remarked that "syncretism thus became an 'othering' term applied to historically distant as well as geographically distant societies" (1994,4-5). Another anthropologist, Andre Droogers, argued against essentializing definitions of the term, and made a convincing case for analyzing the term as a product of asymmetrical power structures (1989, 20). Droogers wrote that "syncretists rarely call themselves by that name. Syncretists are always the others" (1989,16). In contexts of power asymmetries, the syncretic phenomenon was defined by the 'official' church as a form of contamination, hence dehumanizing and ultimately death-dealing vis-a-vis the conceptualization of its opposite: orthodox purity. But as Leonardo Boff has argued, much of what is now conceived as "orthodox" theological discourse is also deeply rooted in religious and cultural syncretism. In other words, the one-time syncretisms that transpired, for example with Greek, Roman, and Germanic religions and cultures, have become hegemonic syncretisms. As early as 1981, Boff was arguing that "[p]ure Christinaity does not exist, never has existed, never can exist. The Divine is always made present through human meditations which are always dialectical" (1985,92). Shaw and Steward argue that at its origins the term had positive connotations and came to designate a "strategically practical, and morally justified form of political allegiance" (1994, 3). They write that "Plutarch clearly linked the word 'syncretism' to the word for the 'Cretans,' kretoi; it literally meant 'the coming together of Cretans; a combination of Cretans" (1994, 3). They observe that "the practice of the Cretans, who, though they often quarreled with and warred against each other, made up their differences and united when outside enemies attacked; and this [is what] they called 'syncretism'" (1994, 2).

190 While Boff's essentialist criteria about how to discern between "true" or "false" kinds of syncretism is problematic, his prioritization of the reality of power asymmetries when examining syncretism is very important (1985, 99-107). Boff wrote, "[t]he value of syncretism depends on the viewpoint of the observer. If the observer sits in the privileged places of Catholicism... then he or she will consider syncretism to be threat... (1985, 89). Similarly, Robert Schreiter asked: "for whom is syncretism or a dual system a problem" (1985, 158)? If one is attentive to the history of power asymmetries, syncretic phenomena can be appreciated more as an expression of survival among subaltern groups than as a threat to doctrinal purity. I fully endorse the contention that "embracing a term [such as syncretism] which has acquired—in some quarters—pejorative meanings can lead to a more challenging critique of the assumptions on which those meanings are based than can its mere avoidance" (Shaw and Stewart 1994, 2). Parker forged a new understanding of syncretism that was not focused on a lack of evangelization, nor on a process of identity dissolution, nor on the threat of doctrinal contamination. In his view, these models are based on colonial-hegemonic assumptions about assimilation. Like Boff, Parker was more concerned with the reality of contestation among subaltern classes and the negotiation of power differences that occurs at the popular level, which is more interactive and fluid than the fixities imposed on the popular sectors within a colonial framework.17 Unlike Boff, however, Parker described syncretism as a form of religious and cultural necessity among subaltern peoples without focusing on its relation to orthodox

17

See Andre Droogers, "Syncretism: The Problem of Definition, the Definition of the Problem," for a valuable overview of the term in theological/religious discourses, and for an informed perspective on its relation to power and contestation. He writes, "[o]nly if relations of power are included in the analysis is this basic characteristic of syncretism uncovered" (1989,20).

theological discourses. Parker is a sociologist of religion concerned with a "critical review of our prejudices as 'enlightened' persons and stimulating a different, new way of looking at millions of our sisters and brothers who suffer, survive, produce, believe, and celebrate life... in the popular barrios and localities of the Latin American continent..." (1996, xii). Hence, Parker's reflections on the religious reality of subaltern peoples radically transform the doing of theology when approached with a more nuanced understanding of the reality of syncretism. For him the syncretic process is a response to the shock of conquest,19 created as a spontaneous survival strategy among the Indigenous peoples in a "period of transition" (1996, 12). Parker wrote that syncretism, then— not in the form of a crafty Indian strategy, but out of a sociocultural necessity—was the most useful process that could be invoked in order to resist the peril of an anomic disintegration that, as a matter of fact, in many cases did occur, leading thousands of natives to suicide (1996, 12-13).

According to Parker, Indigenous peoples did not "choose" syncretism as a survival strategy; it was a necessity that emerged out of the conquest. For Parker, syncretism can never be understood separately from the power asymmetries and colonial violence that gave birth to it as a survival strategy. To do so, as Morande as done with his notion of mestizqje, is to whitewash the brutal violence of the conquest. Parker further elaborated this definition of syncretism through the notion of "resemantization": namely, how a colonial ethnocentric significate is re-interpreted to become a popular ethnocentric significate (1996, 96).

Boff published his chapter on syncretism in 1981, twelve years before Parker's Otra Logic en America Latin. See Boff, Church: Charism and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church (1985, 89-107). But eleven years later, in his book New Evangelization: Good News to the Poor, syncretism is only mentioned a few times. The language of inculturation is dominant (1991, 3-59). The language of inculturation also dominated the CELAM documents at Santo Domingo (1992). For a powerful account of this process among the Aztec elite in the 16lh century, see Serge Gruzinski's The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (2002). Gruzinski is a French historian who has published many books on Latin America. This book was published in France under the title, Lapensee metisse (1999). It is an important contribution to the history of hybridity in the Americas.

192 Baptism and Resemantization Parker explained the notion of resemantization with reference to the practice of the sacrament of baptism. Baptism has almost entirely defined the coercive borders of the colonial order—all non-Christians (including the Indigenous nobility) in the Americas were considered 'idolaters' and therefore excluded form the dominant order. Yet, the sacrament was nonetheless reappropriated by Indigenous peoples as being one of their most important religious rituals. Parker observed that it has been unthinkable in the popular sectors, especially in those urban settlements of displaced rural folk, not to have one's child baptized. Among the Quechuan peoples of the Andes, living in urban Santiago de Chile, being unbaptized has meant being no better than a mountain chuncho (buzzard). Quechuan people, Parker argued, are baptized because they want to be "Christian" (1996, 96). What is meant by "Christian" for the Quechuan migrants, especially when one is reminded that the Spanish words conquista and conversion are semantically related? Sugirtharajah argues that conquista involves notably "the forcible occupation of territory but [it is] also the act of winning someone's voluntary submission..." (2002, 156). According to Sugirtharajah, baptism was first and foremost the ritual that signaled the spiritual conquest of subject peoples. This Quechuan claim to be "Christian" is a complex issue, and it is something that resonates deeply with my own family's southern Italian immigrant experience. All my life I heard my grandfather refer to the Italian men in his circle (mostly Calabrese men) as 'sto cristiano (questo Cristiano: that Christian). I knew that some of the men he called cristiano were not particularly religious, not even occasional Sunday churchgoers. One day I asked him why he used this term. My nonno explained to me that in his circle of

family and friends to be a cristiano was to be a human being with dignity, rather than being the sub-human or second-class brute that northerners projected onto southern Italians. While this identity mimicked northern claims to personhood, it was also a designation of dignity for a migrant man forced to eke out a living for himself and his family as a construction worker in Canada. This reference is featured in Carlo Levi's novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli. Carlo Levi was an antifascist physician and political activist who was exiled to the 'depths' of southern Italy in the 1930s under Mussolini, like many other radicals of the period. The poverty-stricken south was Mussolini's gulag in the 1930s. The more subversive activists were imprisoned, as was Antonio Gramsci, while others were exiled to peasant communities. This was Levi's situation. The novel is an account of his experience in the Calabria-Apuglia region. The title of the book refers to southerners belief that Christ had never made it to the south; he turned back at Eboli, which symbolically explained the belief among northerners that the south was a place of grinding poverty, dehumanizing 'backwardness,' and haunted by archaic superstitions. Northerners ascribed this reality to the geographical proximity of the south to northern Africa (hence the racist designation africano/a for a southern Italian to this day). While contexts and histories differ radically, the migrant Quechuan experience with baptism is similar to my grandfather's migrant southern Italian experience. Baptism was interpreted in manifold ways among Indigenous peoples, but it was also perceived as stripping Indigenous peoples of their cultural and religious identity, and ultimately, their dignity. Why did baptism become so important in the religious worldview of Quechuan and other peoples? Is it because Indigenous peoples have been colonized so thoroughly

that they can only think and act through Christian symbols? For Parker, that would be a crude analysis that promotes epistemic violence. Parker argued that the racist colonial framework, which identifies non-Christians as "Moor," "barbarian," and "idolater," and identifies Christians with those people who were members of official society, is resemanticized in the popular context as an affirmation of identity and social standing. There is, according to Parker, in this resemanticization, a "residue of a mentality of colonial Christendom" (1996,96). The posture of both appropriation (of a colonial significate that defines itself in opposition to the other) and contestation (of that same imposed alterity) is for Parker a kind of symbolic protest where identities mix and differentiate themselves from each other. According to Parker, those people living in the large cities of Latin America/Caribbean in the context of rural-urban migration, the identity of "Christian" takes on a meaning much more related to the experiences of homelessness and disorientation. This is one reason (among many) why evangelical and Pentecostal churches are popular among migrants from rural areas. Phillip Berryman observed that even the most "rigid" Pentecostal churches can secure the identity of the excluded in a chaotic urban environment; they offer "some poor people a mooring in a hostile and threatening world" (1996, 171). It is worth noting here that, unlike the Protestant reformers who tended to make scripture the center of worship and minimized ritual practice, some of the new Pentecostal churches reveal the imprint of the popular classes, incorporating syncretic practices into worship, those symbolic aspects "of the very popular religiosity that evangelical churches used to combat" (Berryman 1996, 41). These churches also offer a space where the uninvited have orchestrated (and continue to

195 orchestrate) a take-over20 that has not gone unnoticed by some members of the Latin American Catholic hierarchy. The syncretic take-and-resist posture described by Parker is very valuable for the Quechuan experience of migration into urban settlements. For example, Parker argued that because Quechuan migrants are no longer in contact with the cycles of the earth (or differently related to the earth), the recurring cycle that Quechuan folk must adjust to is no longer "planting + rain = harvest," but under neoliberal capitalism, the new cycle is "employment + unemployment = misery" (1996,74). In this sense, popular religious practices are important symbolic sites in the working out of survival strategies for the uninvited in the large sprawling cities of Latin America and the Caribbean. For Parker, the arrival of the uninvited migrant, as the title of this chapter indicates, constitutes a subaltern occupation of colonial spaces partly conceived on their own terms.

The Popular Classes of Modernity As in Matthew's wedding feast parable, these large settlements of migrant peoples are spaces where the uninvited have taken-over land. Invited by the powerful myth of urban success, invited by the desire to leave behind fear and death, these desplazados, who have suffered at the hands of the state armies, death squads, neoliberal development and agribusiness expansion, have found instead exclusion. These settlements have become the new terrain for cleansing campaigns. According to Pablo Richard, contaminated by the uninvited, large cities are being literally "cleansed" in some cities of 20

A good example is the training of pastors and leadership teams from among the popular classes. Writing about the "highly regimented" evangelical church, Deus e Amor, in Sao Paulo, Berryman noted that the "very features that keep middle-classes people away—the poverty of the adherents and the unschooled nature of the leadership - partially help to explain the church's success (together with the charismatic nature of the leader and the practices of divine healing and exorcism). Deus eAmor has five thousand churches in Brazil and throughout Latin America" (1996, 32-3).

196 contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean (1994, 250). Death squads maraud the streets nightly cleansing them of youth, sex trade workers, the unemployed, drug users, and other so-called "redundant" peoples. Richard has commented that the poor who live in the large cities live in a changed context: not one of exploitation, but of exclusion (1994,250). He wrote that "cities are cleansed of the poor and their bodies are disposed in remote gullies and garbage dumps. Furthermore, this "redundant population is considered dangerous. It is a threat..." (1994, 250). These excluded peoples are what Mark Lewis Taylor has called the "debris" or "social junk" of the pax Americana (2001, 57). However, the uninvited have also created their own spaces in cities. Indeed, Jose Comblin has remarked that if any liberation has occurred among the poor of Latin America and Caribbean in the last thirty years, it has been the liberation of building their own homes, neighborhoods and cities. Comblin argued that "liberation must be won on the terrain chosen by the people" (1998, 91), because "liberation is a matter of people building by themselves the conditions for their own achievement" (1998, 96). But unlike Comblin, who asserted that popular religion is "condemned to disappear with urbanization and modernization" (1998, 13), Parker has named the syncretic religious processes of the uninvited an otra logica. Comblin made no attempt to investigate the syncretism process that occurs in the everyday lives of people who must struggle to make sense of the globalized world in which they live, especially in the context of disorienting migrations. Comblin—who criticized secularization theories in the early 1970s,21 linked as they were to the developmentalism that liberationists were critiquing—has now embraced them in a new context of globalization. According to him,

See Comblin, "Critica de la teologfa de la secularizacfon" (1972).

television is the new culture that replaces popular religion in the city (1998, 166). However, for Parker, whose hermeneutical antenna is always receptive to syncretic processes, "television is the tribe's 'new sorcerer,' dissolving in the routine of the everyday the mystery that once upon a time manifested itself in powerful rites" (1996, 254). But this does not entail the disappearance of popular religion; it means something much more unpredictable, and ultimately much more creative. Parker's approach to popular culture differs from Comblin's approach. Comblin understood new global incursions into the local context as engendering hegemonic control over the people. Rather than portraying popular culture as a hegemonic imposition passively accepted, Parker focused on the agency of the people with respect to globalized incursions. He described the syncretism evident in these processes, which he found symbolically vibrant in popular religion, hemidernal, a clumsy neologism for the processes of modernity appropriated by subaltern peoples. For Parker, the hemidernal (from hemi+modern: half or semi-modern) "coexists and profits from the modern, but resists and criticizes the modern as well" (1996, 115). Parker wrote that popular culture and religion are both anti- and pro-modernistic. They are anti-modern when it comes to the alienating and dehumanizing component of modernity and its instrumentalizing rationality... But in another sense, popular culture and religion are pro-modern. They accept everything modernity has to offer in terms of an effective advance in living conditions and in opportunities for the satisfaction of the human person's authentic needs (1996, 115).

While subaltern processes are messier and not so discerning with respect to complex modalities of modernity, Parker's framework engaged subaltern knowledge systems that prioritize their own strategies of survival and resistance. According to Parker, syncretism is a space of resistance that has its own logic, its own rationality, its own religious framework; it is not a second-class hermeneutic or 'backward' epistemology, nor is it a contaminated theology slowly disappearing as rural folk migrate to the cities:

198 Syncretic thought is not a transitional aberration—a less evolved or inferior stage destined to disappear with progress. Syncretic thought is a different form of thought, with ties of kinship to mythic, religious, and scientific cognitions, but essentially distinct in the interplay of logical and symbolic rules. Latin American popular syncretic thought is modern, and yet its relationship with modernity, one of criticism and attraction, is ambiguous... Syncretic thought obeys a "different logic": it is hemidernal thought, coexisting with modernity, profiting from modernity, and at the same time rejecting and criticizing modernity (1996, 243).

Parker's work in the area of syncretism is an important contribution to the understanding of popular religion. But it does not stand on its own. Parker's ideas must also be understood within the context of emerging voices, especially from the continent's first peoples, who are also developing a place for popular religion in the creation of theology. In this respect, it is important to understand Parker's work on popular religion in conjunction with the emergence of Indigenous theologies. I will explore the Indigenous of theology of Eleazar Lopez Hernandez in the next chapter in order to frame Parker's work on syncretism and popular religion within the broader context of Indigenous experiences in Latin America. Cristian Parker's work on popular religion, as a form of symbolic protest with its own distinctly hybrid knowledge systems, has been crucial not only for understanding Latin American and the Caribbean popular religion; it has also played a significant role in the conjunction of theological voices, truly a theological Pentecost of tongues positing the importance of pluralism, the interreligious and the intercultural as primary for liberationist-inspired hermeneutics in the twenty-first century. In the next chapter, I will advance an appreciative critique of both Diego Irarrazaval and Cristian Parker from a liberationist-postcolonial perspective and offer a few suggestions about how liberationist reflections on popular religion have changed what theology looks like in Latin America and the Caribbean in the twenty-first century.

iaa

Images: Wallet sized prayer card of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe and pilgrimage by out-of-town parish to the Guadalupe shrine from la Ciudad de Mexico (Teyapec) Screen captures from video footage by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, from Mexico (2004) Venerated by Nahuatl indigenous peoples as Tonantzin (Our Mother, creator & destroyer) also as Dios Inninantzin (half-Spanish-half-Nahuatl expression meaning Mother of G*d)

200 CHAPTER FOUR

LIBERATION THEOLOGIES IN TIEMPOS MIXTOS: HYBRIDITY, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM

In Latin America, the past runs through the present in a different way than is pictured in the premodern European imaginary: not, that is, as the nostalgia for a golden age that is, or was, the continent of innocence. Among ourselves, the past is, or can be, a personal experience of the present, not its nostalgic recovery. Our past is not a lost innocence, but integrated wisdom, the unity of the tree of knowledge with the tree of life, that which the past defends in us as the basis for an alternative rationality against the instrumental rationalism that dominates our present. Here, rationality is not a disenchantment with the world, but rather the intelligibility of its totality. The real is rational only inasamuch as rationality does not exclude its magic. Anibal Quijano (Peru, 1995)

In this chapter, I will evaluate the liberationist research on popular religion that I have examined in the previous two chapters through a more pronounced application of postcolonial hermeneutics, especially as they are related to the notion of hybridity. I will critique the contention made by R.S. Sugirtharajah that liberationist and postcolonial perspectives are "rivals," and argue instead that the liberation theologians examined in the last two chapters have advanced a home-grown postcolonial perspective (though without calling it by that name) that is specific to the Latin American and Caribbean context. Furthermore, I will link Irarrazaval's notion of fiesta to the feminist notion of lo cotidiano as a way of highlighting the deep correlation between these perspectives. I will do the same with Parker's focus on syncretism and link it to the Indigenous theology of Zapoteca priest and theologian Eleazar Lopez Hernandez, whose work is deeply rooted in popular religion, especially the "guadelupean synthesis" of Nahuatl-speaking peoples. In the second section, I will critically evaluate the contributions of Irarrazaval and Parker in light of liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics and within the shifting context of

201 Latin America and the Caribbean—its burgeoning megacities, the growth of Pentecostalism, worsening exclusions engendered by neoliberalism, growing religious pluralism, and the emergence of the "new voices" in theology. I will show that these two authors have been vital in developing Latin American liberationist hermeneutics focused on the emerging theme of religious pluralism, which is replacing essentialist concepts such as the Catholic substrate. But I will also argue that while Irarrazaval and Parker have made pioneering contributions in the study of popular religion, their work shows unresolved tensions with respect to the colonizing and essentializing frameworks they have critiqued in the their own work.

In the fall of 2004,1 watched a popular calavera street performance in the heart of Mexico City. The play being presented depicted the history of U.S. imperialism in Mexico. By calavera here, I am referring to the Mexican tradition of skeletal lampooning during the Dias de los muertos festivities at the beginning of November. This syncretic holiday derives in part from Aztec religious practices based on the creation myth, recounted in Nahuatl, of how Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent and divine creator, journeyed to the Land of the Dead, called Miction, the deepest level of the Aztec underworld, to gather bones to create humankind. The myth recounts that upon leaving Mictlan, Quetzalcoatl stumbled and dropped the bones, which were preyed upon by quail. It is because of these damaged goods, the myth tells us, that humans are mortal. The damaged bones could only make damaged human beings cursed with mortality. Hence, the Dias de los muertos is in part a time to reflect on the vulnerable and transient nature of human life; it is a feast that evolved in part out of the traditions of funerary cults and

202

ancestral worship that pre-date the Aztecs, from the particular Aztec emphasis on how death determines the destiny of the soul, and from the Iberian pre-Tridentine veneration of relics. This feast constitutes what in this chapter I will call a "guadelupean methodology," namely the great tradition of Mexican mestizaje, a process that continues to shape and re-shape the popular religious practices of Indigenous peoples and mestizos to this day. However, the calavera tradition, as it was being performed in this square, was also related to the political lampooning of Jose Guadalupe Posada, who, in the latenineteenth to early twentieth century, revolutionized the Mexican art of the dead by portraying the dead in typically Mexican attire and situations, such as celebrating/iiesto,1 eating tamales and drinking tequila. Posada was a political satirist who spared no one from his biting etchings, from presidents to the popular classes. Posada's etchings have become the standard for calavera depictions in Mexico today. In fact, some argue that his 'modern' etchings capture the 'traditional' ethos of the Dias de los muertos better than any other depictions. My Mexican friend Gabriela, a feminist theologian who at that time was working toward a Master of Divinity at the DEI (Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones) in Costa Rica, invited me to attend a small conference on globalization in Mexico City coordinated by the MEC (Movimientos Estudiantiles Cristianos de Mexico), the Student Christian Movement of Mexico. As we watched the calavera performance, she turned to me and said, "look at the face of globalization as we experience it in Mexico." This "face of globalization" was a little girl walking through the square wearing a Halloween pumpkin head mask. It was of course the Dias de los muertos in Mexico and my friends

An important etching depicting fiesta by Jose Guadalupe Posada is entitled: Gran fandango yfrancachela de todas las Calaveras.

203

were, to my immense satisfaction, taking me around to visit the related festivities. The poster produced for the MEC conference on globalization featured a picture of the giant U.S. chain store Wal-Mart, perceived by my friends as the very tangible presence of economic globalization in their country. I asked if by the "face of globalization" they meant to signal that the little girl's mask had been bought at Wal-Mart. They responded that Wal-Mart not only represented the economic face of neoliberal globalization here, but also the cultural homogenization of Mexico, and the rest of Latin America, by U.S. culture. Their real fear, it turned out, was not directed at the mask as such, but at what it represented: the fear of losing their own traditional Mexican calavera festivities in the face of rising interest among Mexican youth in Halloween (the second most profitable U.S. holiday after Christmas). As we talked about this, the play that was being performed before us also featured an Uncle Sam calavera figure carrying a pumpkin as a suitcase. In the lampooning tradition of Posada, the pumpkin represented the power of U.S. hegemony on Mexico. Like subsidized U.S. corn sold on the Mexican market for prices that are unmatchable by local growers, Halloween was presented here as a commodified consumer product engulfing Mexico and killing the diversity of local culture. Fearing that I may be perceived as coming across as unsympathetic to the cause I was invited to Mexico to defend, I kept to myself questions I had regarding what I thought to be a somewhat economically deterministic perspective on globalization. I did, however, say something like this: "What I appreciate about these festivities is the meaningful bricolage that has occurred around the notion of death and human precarity, because it assumes as a starting point the importance of diversity, pluralism and heterogeneity in the face of globalizing homogeneity." We then walked over to look at

the regional ofrendas that had been set up in the square. I walked up to one from the state of Oaxaca, which had been designed by a group of four Indigenous women, and I recognized among the elements on the table, among the food and beverage offerings, a bottle of beer bearing the name La Maudite, from a Montreal-based micro-brewery! This specific bottle is designed in the typical Belgian style, which distinguishes the refermented beer making in Quebec from British ales. The beers from this brewery are especially striking because the narratives associated with each variety of beer (through illustrations and poetic retellings of legends on the labels) clearly come out of a very strong sense of Quebec nation-building.21 turned to the women who were presiding over the ofrenda and asked them where they had found this bottle. They responded that they did not know where it came from, but that they thought the imagery on it was beautiful. I explained to them that the name for this beer, which means the Damned One or the Devilish Brew, is based on a famous oral legend in Quebec about how lumberjacks made a deal with Satan to get them home on a snowy night in a flying canoe (La chassegalerie) in time for the New Year's reveillon? Satan forbade the lumberjacks to drink, to utter the name of G*d in the canoe, or to touch the crosses that topped the many churches they would encounter on their way. The lumberjacks returned to their village by flying 300 to 500 feet above the ground; it was an easy and swift ride. But on the way back, after a few hours of dancing, carousing, and drunk from partying, they forgot about the interdictions and crashed. I told the women that to this day, the canoe can still be seen 2

The company is called Unibroue and their website can be found at: http://www.unibroue.com/products/maudite.cfm (accessed December 16, 2006). Ironically, this very nationalistic micro-brewery was bought out by Ontario's Sleeman Breweries, which was recently bought out by the large Japanese conglomerate, Sapporo Breweries. 3

My retelling of this oral tale is based on a famous rendering in writing by Honore Beaugrand, who was a journalist and writer and later Mayor of Montreal in the late nineteenth century (2006, 175-188). For more tales of the fantastic from nineteenth century Quebec, see Aurelien Boivin, ed. Les meilleurs contes fantastiques quebecois du xixeme siecle (2006).

flying around in the areas starting from Gatineau to Deux-Montagnes, passing through Montreal and Repentigny onto Lavaltrie (the lumberjacks' journey in the flying canoe). I also told them that the canoe is an Indigenous invention that was appropriated by Europeans to navigate the waterways of North America and that the Hurons had myths about flying canoes. I explained to them that this myth was probably a French-Canadian twist on an much older Indigenous myth.4 I was particularly impressed to find this very Quebecois beer bottle, with its density of meaning, within a traditional Mexican ofrenda. The bottle's appropriation into an Indigenous ofrenda made sense somehow. While the Indigenous Mexicans seemed interested in the myth of the flying canoe, they also seemed rather nonchalant about the fact that this bottle was among their offerings. This comfortably hybrid ofrenda, with its accent on plural worlds, would be perceived in some quarters as religious kitsch. I saw it as an almost trivial embodiment of what Cristian Parker calls the otra logica of Indigenous ritual practice. My MEC friends didn't buy my otra logica explanation! They told me that the bottle was simply a haphazard coincidence; it was picked, they insisted, over other items because of its aesthetic beauty. This may be partly true, but the incident still spoke to me about larger processes at work in the cotidiano of people's lives that are not perceived as particularly important. More importantly, it also spoke to me about the very real agency of these Indigenous women revealed in the act of popular ritual creation. Was this not a symbol about the larger processes of globalization being transformed by local traditions into something of their own? Was this not an example of 4

There is much more to be said here on Quebecois nation-building through the symbols of Indigenous peoples with whom they have attempted to construct a relationship as victims of British colonialism. But this construction veils the ways in which the nation-building project in Quebec has been and continues to be a colonial project, framed in ways that have been oppressive to Indigenous peoples and damaging to their lands and resources, especially with respect to the context of what some have called the pax Hydro-Quebecus (the 'peace' of Quebec Hydro).

the agency with which some aspects of globalization are almost effortlessly re-shaped by Indigenous peoples? My MEC friends argued that the 'real' face of globalization could not be reduced to innocuous coincidences. The 'real' face of globalization in Mexico reveals a context of rising impoverishment and exclusion. This was more urgent than smaller processes of cultural hybridization. At this point in our conversation, I realized that we were well into a familiar polemic among progressives and activists that this thesis has documented: those who fear that an emphasis on culture obscures very real power asymmetries, and those who fear the legacy of economic determinism in the history of Marxist theorizing. As I have been arguing throughout this thesis, this is a false dichotomy that I have tried to methodologically avoid. However, it is a dichotomy that has a deep history, and one that has lead to rifts and schisms in social movements. I told my friends that I agreed with them, especially considering the vulnerable context in which Mexico finds itself being in such close proximity to the U.S. A few days later, I was invited to Gabriela mother's home to meet her family and to visit the nearby silver mining town of Taxco, a gorgeous colonial city on a mountain top about 150 km southwest of Mexico City. But for Gabriela, visiting Taxco was less important than having me taste her aunt's famous mole, which I ate with relish after a lengthy bus ride from the capital city. That night, Gabriela and I discussed some of our preoccupations about the analyses of globalization circulating among our MEC companeros. We discussed the ways in which certain progressive perspectives on economic globalization tend to view the local culture as passive vis-a-vis global incursions. She explained that her fears about cultural hegemony reside precisely in the commodification of Indigenous practices, such as the Dias de los muertos, rather than in

207

the fear of a foreign product being imposed on the local Mexican culture. For her, like many in Latin America and the Caribbean who are suspicious about so-called 'postmodern' perspectives, the danger of these "mixed times" lies in the homogenization of the pluralism already present among the pueblo. I asked her if she agreed with the distinction proposed by Arjun Appadurai between cultural imperialism and the globalization of culture, the former referring to her fears about Mexico and the latter to the ongoing production of local hybridities (1996, 16-18). She remained unconvinced by this distinction, and rejected its neat binominal division. We agreed that, while globalization was much greater than the economic realm, a political economic analysis was crucial in these times of neoliberal capitalist expansion. We also agreed that everyday acts of transgression may be the shape Utopia takes in these (mixed) times of hopelessness and despair, and that the so-called new movements that have irrupted all over Latin America and the Caribbean, as we have seen in Argentina since the crisis of 2001, offer hope for a new kind of politics in the region.

LlBERATIONISTS AND HYBRIDITY Those who are on the margins have no option but to occupy in-between spaces as a survival strategy. From this interstitial space any claims to cultural purity, stability, or autonomy are less important than the hybridized conditions of perpetual intercultural exchange, juxtaposition, interrogation, and transgression. R. S. Sugirtharajah (UK, 2002).

This chapter will focus on the notion of hybridity being developed in Latin America and the Caribbean through the work of liberationists on popular religion. I will begin by addressing the contention that Latin American liberation theologians have been dismissive of popular religion. I will examine in particular the critique leveled against liberationist hermeneutics by postcolonial critic R.S. Sugirtharajah in his book

Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (2002). In light of the material advanced so far, I will demonstrate that Sugirtharajah's analysis is reductive insofar as it silences the very important work liberationists have advanced in the area of popular religion, and polarizes liberation and postcolonial hermeneutics. Furthermore, I will argue that the phenomenon of popular religion examined in the works of Irarrazaval and Parker can help uncover the evolution of a distinctly Latin American and Caribbean postcolonial hermeneutic that has developed in the region focused on the issue of pluralism. The work on popular religion by these two authors allows us to understand liberation and hybridity, not as opposites, but as relational. Liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics have been constructed as rivals in recent scholarship, with the former falling into the camp of modernity (as if modernity were only one thing) with its Utopias of universal liberation, and the latter in the camp of postmodernity (again in a monolithic way) with its eternalizing of liberation into everyday hybrid processes.

Liberation or Postcolonial Hermeneutics In chapter four of his book, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (2002), R.S. Sugirtharajah lays out a critique of liberation theologies, mostly from Latin America, that unfortunately creates a binominal trajectory of competing views between liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics. I am very interested in Sugirtharajah's book because I believe it is an important contribution in the development of postcolonial

theologies, which are only now beginning to emerge. My interest resides in a hermeneutical reading of popular religion that deconstructs the notion that liberationist and postcolonial hermeneutics are "rival" or opposed claims. Hence, this approach takes seriously the history of organizations such as EATWOT, the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, who have forged theological methods based on mutual dialogue and criticism. These discussions gave space for the so-called "new voices" to emerge, at once coming out of the experiences of liberation hermeneutics and critiquing their limitations as well. Unfortunately, Sugirtharajah deploys his criticism in a vacuum of history by homogenizing the liberationist experiences and thus erasing the diversity of 'Third World' theological voices. As a biblical scholar, Sugirtharajah engages with postcolonial criticism in order to critique liberal biblical scholarship, which he characterizes "as largely confessional and pastoral in its tone and direction" (2002, 3). He also critiques liberationist readings for remaining enslaved to "some of the negative aspects of modernism," thus restricting "its influence and [thwarting] its further development" (2002,4). He defines postcolonialism as a critical theory and as a resistance discourse that has drawn "attention to the importance of and presence of minority and subjugated voices which have been lost, overlooked, or suppressed in histories and narratives" (2002,1). Sugirtharajah's work is important to this project, because like some of the theologians that I've been examining so far, he lays much emphasis on the often in-between and messy terrain of hybridity in the everyday of people's lives. Furthermore, like many postcolonial critics, Sugirtharajah approaches texts very cautiously, reminding his readers that what may appear in the form See for example, Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan, eds., Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse (2002), Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner and Mayra Rivera, eds., Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (2004), and Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (2005).

of liberation is sometimes the veiled face of colonialism or imperialism. Even if the biblical sources of the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faiths are instilled with a prophetic anti-systemic restlessness, what Rosemary Radford Ruether has called "essential resources"6 for liberation, and others have called a canon within the canon, sacred texts can still be appropriated to support oppressive campaigns, genocide, conquests, and pogroms. The opening line of Sugirtharajah's book is indicative of his postcolonial hermeneutic of suspicion. He writes, "[t]he trouble with texts, especially if they are ancient and sacred, is that they can be summoned and assigned meanings to prove or legitimize any cause, theory, or perspective" (2002, 1). From a postcolonial hermeneutic, notions such as Ruether's "essential resources," which ascribe an inherent prophetic core to the Bible, are approached with suspicion because they tend to mask the way these very same "prophetic" texts have been used to demonize and castigate. Postcolonial criticism, according to Sugirtharajah, tends to approach the Bible more cautiously than liberationist or liberationist-inspired hermeneutics. Hence, it is less likely to over-determine biblical interpretations as some liberationists have done in the past. Sugirtharajah reminds us that the "Bible continues to be an unsafe and problematic text. For every redeeming aspect of the narrative, there is an unredeeming feature linked to it" (2002, 100). For example, the Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior has written about how the biblical Exodus story of emancipation from slavery, cherished among some liberationists as a paradigmatic story of liberation, was a story of conquest for the Canaanites—those indigenous to the land who were defeated by

As this time Ruether was writing from a feminist/liberationist perspective (1981, 54-55). She wrote, "[o]n the one hand we must confront the fact that scripture and theology have contributed to these very evils that trouble us. They have functioned as sanctions of evil. Yet we discover within the prophetic traditions and the gospels essential resources to unmask these very failures of religion" (1981, 5).

211 the Israelites after their post-Exodus journey in the wilderness. In an article published in 1995, Warrior wrote that [m]ost of the liberation theologies that have emerged in the last twenty years are preoccupied with the Exodus story, using it as a fundamental model for liberation... As a member of the Osage nation of American Indians who stands in solidarity with other tribal peoples around the world, I read the Exodus stories with Canaanite eyes (1995, 278, 279).

According to Warrior, reading the story with "Canaanite eyes" means precisely that one must be mindful of not homogenizing the "poor," and over-determining biblical interpretations. Some liberationists have in the past advanced a homogenizing analogies in an attempt to ground their theologies in contemporary history. For example, in his book entitled Jesus the Liberator, Jon Sobrino argued that "[i]t is not being naive to agree with Leonardo Boff when he says that Latin America offers 'a structural similarity between the situations in Jesus' day and those in our own time'" (1993, 53). For Sugirtharajah, positing structural similarities7 can lead to "facile parallels between the present context and past texts," and therefore the occlusion of minority voices (2002, 111).8The challenge posed by postcolonial criticism, argues Sugirtharajah, is precisely to seek-out the fissures, gaps, and in-between spaces of the most vulnerable, even those within liberation-inspired frameworks. Texts are dangerous. The importance of postcolonial criticism for my project on popular religion is linked to a vigilance about such dangers. In the attempt to retrieve subaltern agency within practices deemed to be folk superstitions or distortions of Sugirtharajah defends Clodovis Boff s notion of "the correspondence of relationships," which is according to him "a much more finessed mode where the current political, social, and economic struggles of people are seen as the prism through which to look at similar political, social, and economical engagement depicted in biblical narratives" (2002, 111). Unfortunately, Sugirtharajah does not engage the history of Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians where minority voices have flourished and expanded the hermeneutical horizons of liberation theologies. The discussions that transpired among liberationists within EATWOT is a testament to how liberationists have expanded their hermeneutical lenses through dialogue. See Clodovis Boff, "Methodology of the Theology of Liberation," especially the section "Toward a Broadening of the Concept of the Poor" for an example of liberationist concern for minority voices (1996, 13-15).

official Catholicism within hegemonic discourses, I am reminded by Sugirtharajah that while popular religious practices can have subversive dimensions, they are also dangerous. As I mentioned already, the manipulation of these powerfully affective and symbolic forces cannot be dismissed: for example, the hegemonic instrumentalization of popular devotions, such as Our Lady of Lourdes, by the nineteenth century Catholic church as a bulwark against the perceived secularizing thereat of modernity. Yet as we have seen with the work of Irarrazaval and Parker, hegemonic control is not allencompassing. Hence, it is important to remember that a postcolonial commitment to subaltern strategies is alert to the fact that people live in the shadows of hegemony, in its cracks and gaps. Following Sugirtharajah's quote at the beginning of this section, subaltern peoples living "on the margins have no option but to occupy in-between spaces as a survival strategy" (2002,196). The defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990 and the reality of neoliberalism are examples of how Utopian strategies have been crushed in Latin America and the Caribbean, and how in-between spaces become primary places of survival. Yet Sugirtharajah suspects liberation theologians of having not yet shed their "modernist" framework, thus deploying over-arching strategies that may seem emancipatory, but are in fact oppressive. For example, he argues that the liberationist insistence on the "nonperson" as a starting point for doing theology "does not preclude reifying the poor, and it functions, within the Enlightenment paradigm of dichotomous thinking—rich/poor, oppressed/oppressor, and have/have-nots" (2002, 115). Sugirtharajah is making an important point here, but it is a point that surfaced among liberation theologians in discussions with the "new voices," especially with feminists and Black theologians, more

213 than twenty years ago.9 As I will show, Sugirtharajah's critical examination of Latin American liberation theologies shows evidence of replicating those same dichotomies he himself critiques, especially with respect to the supposed "disparagement of major and popular religions" by liberationists (2002, 103).

Liberationist Disparagement of Popular Religion? In the aftermath of the Vatican II reforms, Latin American liberation theologians, fashioned a contextual 'Third World' theology from the "underside of history" with an emphasis on a praxis of liberation. As we have seen, Gutierrez' early theology was also responding to the imposition of 'First World' developmental agendas in Latin America and the Caribbean, opting instead for dependency models of analysis, which have had a long and complex history in the region.10 In his Sao Paolo essay discussed earlier, Gutierrez clearly defined the "uninvited" people who are invited to the wedding feast in line with the main tenets of liberation theology: they are "the sectors of common people, the oppressed and believing people" (1981, 120). As we saw in chapter three, Raul Vidales, Tokihiro Kudo, Diego Irarrazaval, and Jose Luis Gonzalez,11 close collaborators with Gutierrez in Peru, were among the first wave of liberationists to research more deeply what Gutierrez meant by "believing people." Juan Carlos Scannone argued in retrospect that the early Peruvian experience represented an important liberationist perspective on popular religion. As I mentioned already, Scannone noted, "there appeared 9

See James Cone, "From Geneva to Sao Paulo: A Dialogue between Black Theology and Latin American Liberation Theology" (1981) and Virginia Fabella and Mercy Amba Oduyoye, eds., With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology (1988). See Ramon Grosfoguel, "Development, Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America" (2000), for a good history of this development. See Raul Vidales & Tokihiro Kudo, Prdctica religiosayproyecto historico (1975); Diego Irarrazaval, Religion del pobre y liberacidn en Chimbote (1978); Jose Luis Gonzalez, La religion popular en el Peni: Informe y diagnostico (1987).

214 in liberation theology, including its main current, an ever growing interest in popular religion, departing from the Marxist characterization of its being intrinsically the 'opium of the people"' (1998, 92). Philip Berryman has aptly described what Scannone meant by the 1970s "Marxist characterization" of popular religion.12 In an interview with a Brazilian priest, Luiz Carlos Marques, Berryman noted: "He recalled an earlier experience of celebrating mass on a traditional feast of St. John with a small base community, while ignoring the crowds of people lighting the 'fires of St. John' and celebrating outside" (1996, 52). According to Berryman, "[w]hile not denying the validity of their previous efforts, [Marques] said that it was now important to give more attention to Brazilian culture" (1996, 52). What Marques self-critically referred to as a small elite "going against the traffic" in an earlier context was later transformed to a pastoral stance that focused on a "wager on the unpredictability of the poor" (1996,52). While limited to the Brazilian context, some priests and pastoral workers interviewed in Berryman's study identified that there a was movement away from what they characterized as a posture of "heroic struggle" to one of accompaniment within the "unpredictability" of subaltern experience. However, "heroic struggle" was for some priests, pastoral workers, and the people not an easy option. As I mentioned earlier with the example of Peru in the 1980s, "heroic struggle" was an imposed reality during a time that was extremely violent. Nor were struggle and accompaniment mutually exclusive in some contexts. Crudely dichotomous as it may seem to contemporary observers, the contrast that Marques sketched was a tension that

12

The Canadian priest Richard Renshaw, a member of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, who was in Chimbote (Peru) at the same time as Diego Irarrazaval in the late 1970s, recounted to me that at that time he encountered vanguardist priests who attempted to cleanse their parishes of popular religion by literally destroying statues and images venerated by the people, because it was perceived to be "alienating and backward" (November 11,2006).

existed in some places between CEBs (Comunidades eclesiales de base) and popular religion in the 1970s and 1980s. As I already mentioned, Irarrazaval has noted, quoting Faustino Teixeia, who is an expert in Brazilian CEBs, that there existed in 1970s '"clear tensions' between base communities and popular religion" (1999a, 82)*. As we saw in chapter two in the discussion on the Senor de los Milagros, Irarrazaval was not "ignoring the crowds of people," but facing their shining devotional eyes—"[mjilliares de ojos, brillantes"—with a passion for the processional movement of subaltern religious practices (1992, 305). Using what Scannone identified as the "emergent class" perspective (see chapter one), Irarrazaval approached the people's religious processions in terms of a people moving forward in history (Scannone 1990, 163). Irarrazaval chose this perspective because it helped him to focus on 'the people' themselves, with their own fiestas, pilgrimages, and processions, as the bearers of historical transformation. This was a radical posture within liberationist CEBs at a time when the so-called alienated "ritualism" of popular religion was often contrasted to the liberative dimensions of biblical text and the consecrated bread. For Irarrazaval, to focus on popular feast was to focus on a G*d of accompaniment in the wilderness of daily survival: "The practitioners of the purple Christ have a firm and straightforward faith, conditioned in a form that helps them with their daily necessities" (1992, 305)*. As I have been arguing, although Irarrazaval is one voice among others who were beginning to focus on popular religion in this period, his emphasis on popular devotions as an expression of survival made manifest in fiesta and lo cotidiano expressed and symbolized a significant development in Latin American and Caribbean theologies.

My analysis of hberationist perspectives on popular religion has shown that Sugirtharajah's contention that "liberation theology" (note the use of the singular form) encourages the "disparagement" of popular religion (2002,103) is crudely ahistorical, and an oversimplification of the diversity and historical development of liberation theologies and their engagement with popular religious practices. While there is much to applaud in Sugirtharajah's postcolonial sensibilities, such as his elaboration of "diasporic hermeneutics" in the present context of globalization, his critique of liberation hermeneutics re-inscribes the colonial framework he seeks to avoid (2002, 191). It perpetuates 'First World' colonial readings of 'Third World' theologies by prioritizing those texts that have been translated into English as the representatives of liberation theologies. In other words, the dominance of the English language, perpetuated by empire, becomes the basis for speaking on behalf of a whole Latin American continent. All the material appropriated by Sugirtharajah to construct a history of liberation theologies is from English translations of mostly Latin American scholars (Gustavo Gutierrez, Elsa Tamez, Clodovis Boff and Leonardo Boff). This reductive homogenization of the diversity of liberation hermeneutics advanced through the language of empire involves, following postcolonial feminist critic Laura E. Donaldson, "epistemic violence" (from Gayatri Spivak), a privileging of hegemonic sources for the production of knowledge, which violates "the most fundamental way that a person or a people know themselves" (2002, 51). The politics of translation need to be developed further, but it is obvious here that the priorities of the 'First World' (and its capitalist market) have more impact on what gets translated into English than the priorities of the

Third World,' not to mention who becomes the spokesperson(s) for new theologies in the academic halls of 'First World' faculties and departments. For example, the more theoretical book by Jose Miranda, Marx and the Bible (Spanish: 1971), was translated into English in the mid-1970s, while Diego Irarrazaval's more localized study, Religion del pobre y liberacion en Chimbote (1978) was never translated. These authors represent two radically opposed readings of popular religion. It is no wonder, then, that Sugirtharajah writes, "Latin American liberation theology, undertaken at a grand-macro level, engages in a universal discourse of liberation" (2002, 104). More localized projects, such as Irarrazaval's book on popular religion in a small fishing community in northern Peru, did not fit the universalizing mold (both liberal and radical) of 'First World' systematic theology and its readership that understands little about the local cultures in Latin America. Why were no liberationist works on Latin American/Caribbean popular religion translated into English the 1980s, especially when one considers the high number of books on liberation theologies being translated at that time? I will not venture an answer here, but mention that a 1986 Concilium issue, entitled Popular Religion, was one of the only major theological works that offered at that time positive appraisals by Latin Americans liberationists (and others studying Latin America) of popular religion in English translation: such as Luis Maldonado (Spain), Cristian Parker (Chile), Virgil Elizondo (U.S.A./Mexico), Enrique Dussel (Argentina/Mexico), Stephen Judd (Peru), and Paulo Suess (Brazil).13 Sugirtharajah does not make reference to

13

See Norbert Greinacher and Norbert Mette, eds. Popular Religion (1986): Luis Maldonado, "Popular Religion: Its Dimensions, Levels, and Types"; Cristian Parker, "Popular Religion and Protest Against Religion: The Chilean Example"; Virgil Elizondo, "Popular Religion as a Support of Identity: A Pastoral-Psychological Case-Study Based on the Mexican-American Experience in the USA", Enrique Dussel, "Popular Religion as Oppression and Liberation: Hypotheses on its Past and Its Present in Latin America"; Stephen Judd, "Fashioning a Vital Synthesis: Popular Religion and the Evangelisation Project in Southern Peru"; Paulo Suess, "The Creative and Normative Role of Popular Religion in the Church."

218 that issue of Concilium in his critique of liberation theologies. Instead, he re-inscribes a colonial reading of liberation theologies by focusing on the hegemonic priorities of the 'First World' for the production of knowledge about the 'Third World.' Moreover, Sugirtharajah's main critiques of liberation hermeneutics, "homogenization of the poor, incessant biblicism, and hostility to religious pluralism," have all been major points of discussion within EATWOT for almost thirty years. These discussions transpired within a global community of committed 'Third World' scholars, who mutually critiqued each other on these very points and many others. Sugirtharajah's critique perpetuates another kind of "epistemic violence" by the wholesale erasure of a history of EATWOT dialogue and cooperation. Was it this kind of scholarship that precipitated Spivak to ask and answer in the negative, with reference to the epistemological erasure of women's voices: "Can the subaltern speak?" (originally published in 1988). Rather than positioning postcolonial criticism as a "rival" to liberation hermeneutics, which remain infected with the "vices of the modernistic project" (Sugirtharajah 2002,103), is it not more accurate to think of liberationists as dialogue partners, with their own messy history of dialogue that has critically engaged the complex realities of subaltern experiences through class, gender, race, culture, religion, imperialism/colonialism? Such an erasure of EATWOT diversity, and all the other occasions for dialogue outside of EATWOT, creates a reductionistic view of the history of liberation theologies, and it creates a false dichotomy between monolithic expressions of both liberation hermeneutics and postcolonial criticism. Sugirtharajah writes that postcolonialism "has helped us to go beyond thinking in contrasting pairs 'us' and 'them,' 'East' and 'West.' Such a duality reduces everyone to an undifferentiated entity"

219 (2002,40). If Sugirtharajah understands the colonizing ethos as one that sustains dualities and dichotomies, why does he re-inscribe these same dualities in his presentation of liberation hermeneutics? In the "epistemic violence" he perpetuates against liberation theologians, especially with respect to the work done on those popular religious practices he wishes to defend, he is only re-inscribing a colonial framework. As we have seen, Irarrazaval has been a prolific writer on popular religion. In the 1990s alone, he published seven books on issues related to popular religious practices, Indigenous theologies, inculturation, and religious pluralism.14 Of these, one of the books which claims to be a theology from "Latin America" (in the singular) was translated into English. In this book, Inculturation: New Dawn of the Church in Latin America (Spanish: 1998), he made links between the local Andean context in which he lived and worked, and the development of inculturation theologies since the San Domingo CELAM conference in 1992. In this sense, Sugirtharajah's critique of homogenization of the experiences of the poor is still a relevant critique of some contemporary Latin American theologies. But are all efforts that attempt a broader view homogenizing? Sugirtharajah suggests that "in Gutierrez' seminal work, Theology of Liberation [Spanish: 1971] his own country, Peru, is hardly mentioned" (2002,104). But he does not mention that as early as 1978, Irarrazaval was clearly focused on local issues in Chimbote even at a time when Latin American politics had a distinctly continental flavour. Even in his book Inculturation, in which he attempts to formulate a reign-centred view of inculturation on behalf of "Latin America," Irarrazaval's theology biases smaller particular traditions and places. However, through the wider spectrum of Irarrazaval's theological work, one is 14

Here are six of these titles: Tradition yporvenir Andino (1992); Ritoy pensar Cristiano (1993); Cultura yfe Lationomericanas (1994); La fiesta: simbolo de libertad (1998); Un Cristianismo Andino (1999); Teologia en lafe del pueblo (1999).

220 able to rescue from Sugirtharajah's dichotomous discourse, in the small cracks of hegemonic Western translation policies, the shining eyes of a people focused on their own hybrid versions of the divine in Peru as daily strategies of survival to exclusion in the changing magacities of the Latin American and Caribbean continent.

Lo Cotidiano and Feminism Before turning to my critique of Irarrazaval and Parker in the next section, I will briefly highlight the work of feminist and Indigenous scholars whose perspectives resonate with the work developed on popular religion by liberation theologians. I stress here that, while these theologies developed in conversation with liberationist hermeneutics, they also offer perspectives that critique and go beyond the perspectives developed by Irarrazaval and Parker. These theologies are deeply rooted in the experiences of poor women and Indigenous peoples, and offer perspectives that highlight the smaller, hidden, mundane, local, and everyday aspects of life. Within these perspectives, popular religion has been a central preoccupation and has been an important resource for the construction of theologies. I include this brief examination of lo cotidiano and Indigenous theologies in order to stress the dialogic and communitarian character of theology as a corrective to the often-assumed idea that theologies are devised by individuals cut-off from the grassroots communities that inform their work. Marian devotions are a primary everyday location for popular religious practices in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially among women. Feminist liberation theologians Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer remind us that "[i]n Latin America one cannot speak about the church of the poor or of pastoral work among popular classes

221 without dealing with the figure of this woman [Mary] who carried the Liberator of the poor in her womb and gave birth to him" (1989, 159). According to Gebara and Bingemer, there are literally thousands of Marian devotions in Latin America under over 150 different titles, with countless appearances, cures, and miracles, springing up everyday (1989,144). Some of the important Marian devotions include: the Virgin of Charity of Cobre (Cuba), Our Lady Most Pure (Nicaragua), the Virgin of la Tirana (Chile), the Virgin of Copacabana (Bolivia), the Virgin of Caacupe (Paraguay), the Virgin of Chiquinquira (Colombia), Our Lady of Itati (Argentina), Our Lady of Chalma (Mexico), Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Peru), Our Lady of Lujan (Argentina), Our Lady of Peace (El Salvador), Our Lady of the Rosary (Guatemala), Our Lady of Suyapa (Honduras), Our Lady of Zapopan (Mexico), Our Lady of Ocotlan (Mexico), as well as more recent apparitions, such as the Virgin of the Subway, in Mexico City. There are many hybrid or creole devotions, such as the Santeria-infused Our Lady of Regla (Cuba), which mixes with the orisha called Yemaya,15 or the Vodou-infused Our Lady of Perpetual Help (Haiti), which mixes with the Iwa named Ezili Freda16. Latina feminist theologian Maria Pilar Aquino highlights that while women are the main subjects of popular religion, they have had to contend with deeply embedded kyriarchal traditions. She writes that [d]ue to the blending of kyriarchal European religious colonization with the kyriarchal indigenous religious traditions, religious faith has contributed to deepen our oppression and exclusion. However, there is no doubt either that throughout our history, popular religion has provided the liberating principles of Christian faith to support and validate the grassroots people's struggles of resistance and emancipation. Grassroots women are both the majority and the primary carriers or subjects of popular religion, and their various movements speak of their articulation of a religious faith aimed at the transformation of kyriarchal domination. In this sense, the term 'popular' becomes an analytical category because it not only refers to the grassroots majorities, but also to

See Joseph M. Murphy, Santena: African Spirits in America (1993), pp. 39-43. See Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (1992), pp. 131-145.

socio-ecclesial groups that organize and mobilize themselves to change oppression and exclusion. (2002, 151-152)

As Aquino insists, while some elements of popular religion are rooted in a history of kyriarchal domination, women have also utilized these practices as a means of resisting these same kyriarchal traditions. As far back as 1987, Gebara and Bingemer argued that "the conquest was regarded as the work of the virgin" by the conquerors, but they also argue that she was also venerated by the conquered as a protector (1989,129). They wrote that "the conquerors always saw Mary on their side against the Indians whom they regarded as infidels" (1989, 130). However, they also insisted that through a very particular kind of syncretism, Mary was "a 'weapon' through which the Indians can reassert their worth despite the fact that the presence of the colonizers is a fait accompli" (1989,149). Here, it is important to note that the highly complex and divisive issue of syncretism as a tool of resistance to kyriarchal and colonial domination comes to the fore when introducing Marian devotions. Irarrazaval has claimed that Marian devotions among Aymaran and Quechuan peoples in the Andean mountains are among the most syncretic popular devotions, and referred to them as processes of "syncretic thinking" that imbue the Indigenous imagination (1998a, 187)*. Ten years earlier, Gebara and Bingemer identified the historically specific Nahuatl syncretism of Our Lady of Guadalupe between Mary and Tonantzin "as very promising for feminist reconstruction of popular Christian traditions, a work that must be undertaken courageously in Latin America" (1989, 150-151). As I will show below with the theologies of Indigenous peoples, the experience of syncretism is an important dimension of the everyday practices of subaltern peoples, especially as they refer to Marian devotions such as Our Lady of Guadalupe.

This impressive tapestry of Marian devotions impresses on any observer of religious phenomenon an appreciation of how tightly interwoven it is into the fabric of daily life. Ivone Gebara wrote that |w]hen we speak of religion, we speak of the tapestry of which we can only see the external design, the interwoven threads, and the material bulk that impresses our senses. But the interwoven threads conceal many hidden stories; their roots are fed by a variety of elements that are not clearly visible either to the outside observer or to the adherent who lives them out. Religious experience is usually an obscure tapestry, especially when we make the effort to understand it. This "obscure" character gives it an apparent opacity that suggests it cannot be analyzed in the same way other human activities can. More than in the case of any other kind of experience, we find ourselves faced with a deep mystery of the human person: his or her desires, and hopes (1999b, 256).

Gebera reminds us that the religious experience must be understood in the everyday, namely grounded in the concrete experiences of daily life, in child-rearing, cooking, cleaning, healing, laughing and crying. Whether focused on Jesus' suffering on the cross or on Marian syncretisms, popular religion is not abstract dogma (the Assumption of Mary for example), which tends to disconnect popular devotions from the earth and from the people to whom they belong. Popular religion is, for many Latin American and Caribbean women and men, everyday bread for survival and sustenance. For Gebara, it is in the everyday that poor and vulnerable women develop their own soteriologies. In her book, Out of the Depths: Women's Experience of Evil and Salvation (French: 1999), Gebara, painted a powerful picture of what a saving G*d looks like for poor women living in barrios. She wrote, [f]or Carolina Maria de Jesus in her daily struggle to gather paper, only the day at hand matters. Everyday she places a wager on life, a frightening proposition for those who do not live in such a situation. The God of poor women shows his17 face in the transitory and in the life at home. He is a God called upon to make life go on, especially in domestic matters. He is a God called upon in the red-light districts, when prostitutes are afraid of their clients or the police. Women call upon God to find food, to cure a baby, to bring up a child, to send a husband home, to get out of trouble, to have some little plot to plant, to get a house... God does not give answers to theoretical questions. 17

Gebara explained in a earlier endnote that "[e]ven though this is a feminist work, I use the male pronoun for God because this is how poor women think of God" (2002,193). Gebara has continuously shown respect for the traditions of poor women in Brazil, and does not attempt to impose theoretical constructs where they will notfit.Like Irarrazaval, she is deeply mindful of the ways in which the traditions of the people do not always match neat theoretical categories.

God simply sustains life, is in life, in us at every moment. Besides, one does not have the time to pose complicated questions to him! (2002,149).

The 'this-worldliness' of the religion of the poor, as described by Gebara, has been often ridiculed by the liberal and vanguardist elites as the wish fantasies of ignorant people, self-centered on themselves and their families instead of larger development or revolutionary projects. But as Irarrazaval and Gebara have argued, the world of the poor is always a completely different place from the abstract world of the poor imagined by the elite in the theoretical frameworks. The world of the poor is a very harsh place that demands concrete solutions. A theology of lo cotidiano18 is about creating concrete solutions for problems that poor women face in their everyday lives. Within the prosaic, mundane, this-worldly cotidiano of the poor lives and breathes the everyday milagro (miracle). Paradoxical in its proximity to the prosaic and everyday, and non-dualistic in its inclusion of both, the milagro has often been contrasted to the foreign and colonizing forces of modernity. In the "magic realism" of the 1960s19 for example, some authors, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, often attempted to contrast two planes: the everyday reality of Latin American peoples and the non-rational reality of the "real marvelous" (the early name of proto-magic realism in the 1940s), where Indigenous and African myths and other beliefs mixed with dreams, the extraordinary, the unusual, the other-worldly, and the supernatural (Larrain 2000, 130). With the world of "magic

Lo cotidiano was developed as a locus theologicus in the mujerista theology of Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz: "We have insisted on the capacity of Latinas to reflect on their everyday life and the struggle to survive against very difficult obstacles. When in mujerista theology we talk about liberative daily experience, about Hispanic women's experience of struggling every day, we are referencing lo cotidiano" (1996, 66). Key for this study of popular religion, Isasi-Diaz also links the lo cotidiano framework to everyday popular religious pluralism: "These key figures [of everyday worship] are not only those of Christianity, Jesus and Mary his mother, but also those more exclusively Catholic like the saints, and those of popular religion, such as the orishas of the different African religions and the deities of different Amerindian religions" (1996,67). See also, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, "Lo Cotidiano: A Key Element of Mujerista Theology" (2002). 19

A few of the most well-known works include, Mario Vargas Llosa's La ciudady losperros (1963), and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Cien anos de soledad (1967). See Larrain for more on the Latin American novel "boom" of the 1960s (2000, 129-132).

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realism," which was obviously also deeply inspired by Latin America's popular religious fresco, the authors created worlds of the extraordinary and miraculous as a way of criticizing the dehumanizing aspects of modern rationality on Latin America. The "magic realism" of Latin American literature that irrupted in the 1960s sprung up at a time of deeply felt social transformation, a time when developmentalistas, cepalistas, dependentistas, marxistas, and socialistas had radical projects for transforming the horizon, frameworks, and possibilities of a quickly changing Latin American continent. The highlighting of the milagro de lo cotidiano in feminist theology is an attempt to locate everyday hope as a center of theological reflection. Gebera's quote above, "God does not give answers to theoretical questions. God simply sustains life, is in life, in us at every moment," situates lo cotidiano as central to feminist theologies. In other words, miracles happen all the time if one's eyes are mindful of the everyday and if one is attuned to the ways of the excluded and marginalized, especially the lives of women. Miracles happen when a mother finds food for her children, or when a husband uses his pay cheque to buy the family food instead of alcohol. Lo cotidiano is about all of life, not simply about the so-called domestic realm, nor about larger social structures. In their earliest incarnation, liberation theologies tended to prioritize political structures over daily life. As Gutierrez has pointed out, liberation theology is "a critical reflection on Christian praxis in light of the word of God," and "this liberating praxis endeavors to transform history in light of the reign of God" (1988, xxix-xxx). As he later acknowledged, this praxis has often privileged political structures (the public domain), especially the economic aspects of poverty, at the expense of the daily life (the private

226 sphere) (1988, xxii).20 As Gutierrez implicitly acknowledged, this constitutes a reductionism in terms of who is truly represented in the category of the poor or oppressed (and thus who is silenced), but it also has a negative impact by reinforcing the kyriarchal split that divides the labour between men and women, which privileges the public domain as the superior domain (the male domain), over the traditionally women-centered private domain. Reflecting on the significant critiques of liberation theologies by Latin American and Caribbean women, Gutierrez wrote that at first "it was difficult to grasp its true character [of the conditions in which women live] in its hiddenness, for it has become something habitual, part of everyday life and cultural traditions" (1988, xxii). A feminist attention to lo cotidiano is central in the work of any theology focused on popular religion. Feminist Latina theologian, Maria Pilar Aquino argued that a concern for the everyday, or "daily life," in feminist theology is a concern for "the whole of life, with the public and the private" (1993, 39). In other words, lo cotidiano cannot be reduced to the private or domestic realm; it is all of life. There is no dualism between the private and public realm in lo cotidiano; it is the microcosm of life that reflects the larger macrocosm. Because popular religion is defined as a religious phenomenon predominantly occupied by women,21 the analytical category of lo cotidinao is important

In the new preface to A Theology of Liberation, Gutierrez wrote, "the turbulent situation in Latin America has caused many to place an almost exclusive emphasis on the social and economic aspect of poverty (this was a departure from the original insight)" (1988, xxi). For a feminist critique of liberation theologies, what Ghanaian theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye famously called at the 1981 EATWOT conference in New Delhi "an irruption within an irruption," see her paper, "Reflections from A Third World Perspective: Women's Experience and Liberation Theologies" in Virginia Fabella & Sergio Torres, eds. Irruption of the Third World: Challenge to Theology (1983). Oduyoye was referring to the liberationist emphasis on the irruption of the poor in history, namely the new presence in history of the "absent ones" (Gutierrez 1988, xx). For more on feminist theologies from the Third World, see Virginia Fabella & Mercy Amba Oduyoye, eds. With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology (1988), and Ursula King, ed. Feminist Theology from the Third World: A Reader (1994). 21

This does not mean that sexism and kyriarchal values are non-existent in the world of popular religion. One need only look at the leadership of so-called "fraternities" for example, or see who has access to the sacred images in public processions, who carries them, to see sexism alive and well within some of these practices. Moreover, the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe may be a model of mestizo syncretism that challenges the colonial forms of Christianity, but as

227 for understanding the world of popular religion. In the Introduction, one of the descriptions that I used to describe popular religion was that it is a crossroads for both the private and public, a place where both domestic and communal practices interact, a space where the 'official' and 'popular' are not always discernable and distinct. The understanding of lo cotidiano developed in feminist theologies also blurs the kyriarchal emphasis on dual spheres. Aquino argued that [w]e have no other place but lo cotidiano to welcome the living Word of God or to respond to it in faith. The faith of the people, as lived and expressed in popular Catholicism, happens within the dynamics of daily existence... Lo cotidiano is present there as the context within which occur all experiences of evil and hope, of grace and sin, of salvation and condemnation (1999, 39).

Irarrazaval does not have a strongly developed theology of the everyday in his work, especially compared to feminist theologies. This is why I appeal to feminist voices in discussing his work. But his work in the area of popular religion did move him to appreciate the importance of the everyday as a place where one encounters culture in all its complexity. This has put him in dialogue with the so-called "new voices," such as U.S. Latino theologies, who have been developing the themes of popular religion, fiesta, lo cotidiano, as essential elements in their theological methodology since the early 1990s.22

Orlando Espin argued, it has also taught Latin American women that they "must endure 'like Juan Diego,' the abuse, the assaults, and the violence" that he endured (1999, 131). 22

For an important early anthology, see Allan Figueroa Deck, ed. Frontiers of Hispanic Theology in the United States (1992). Also see Justo Gonzalez, Mariana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (1990); Roberto Goizueta, We Are a People!: Initiatives in Hispanic American Theology (1992) and Caminemos con Jesus: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (1995); Orlando Espin, The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (1997). Most of Espin's articles published in this book were published in the early 1990s. It is important to also mention the theological work that predates these authors. These authors paved the way for contemporary Latino/Hispanic theology: the pioneering work of mujerista theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Dfaz (1988), the mestizo Mexican-American theology of Virgilio Elizondo (1983), and the Chicano theology of Andres Gonzales Guerrero (1986).

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Indigenous Theologies: Eleazar Lopez Hernandez I will finish this section with a brief examination of the emergence of "new voices" in theology that resonate deeply with the work Parker developed around popular religion and syncretism. Here too we will find important resources for recognizing the place of syncretism as an important subaltern strategy in the theologies of Indigenous peoples. I will briefly examine the theology of Eleazar Lopez Hernandez, a Zapoteca priest from Mexico, as an example of conflictive anti-colonial theology, which is linked to a liberationist hermeneutic, but with its own distinctive flavour. As with feminist hermeneutics above, I examine this author, not because he was directly influenced by Parker's work, but because the "new voices," including Indigenous theologies, emerged in conversation with liberationist hermeneutics and reveal a rich tapestry of theological voices that are engaging with popular religion and syncretism in the history of their own peoples. These emerging theologies show a radical grounding in the theologians' own cultures and religious systems that coincide with the ways Parker has sought to understand popular religion. As Parker argued, this is specifically because syncretism was a mode of engagement that enabled many Indigenous peoples to survive the conquest and popular religion the living expression of this same syncretism. Reflecting this, Leonardo Boff wrote that [official] Christianity on the new continent was no novelty vis-a-vis European Roman Catholicism. It was a duplication of the latter. The novelty was to be in another enterprise, launched far from official control, in Latin American popular Catholicism, which was comprised of medieval elements—devotions to patron saints, vows, pilgrimages, shrines, confraternities, leagues—and elements assimilated from native and Afro-American religions (1991, 97).

Boff s reformulation of popular religion as a "novelty" in the Americas is important. Indigenous peoples were architects of this "novelty," which was fashioned in the Americas within a context of disorientation and in-betweenness, what was termed nepantla in Nahuatl. This constituted a hopeful history of resistance to the tyranny of purity and the brutality of Manichean constructs. Eleazar Lopez Hernandez notes that in Latin America "indigenous theology is a recent phenomenon" (2000b, 108). He suggests that at the 1997 meeting of EATWOT (Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians) in Bolivia, which happened in conjunction with the third Encuentro Latinoamerica.no de la Teologia India,74 the Indigenous members of the association delineated three key features of Indigenous theology: l)"there are as many indigenous theologies as there are indigenous peoples and communities"; 2) the theologies are "communitarian rather than focused on the individual"; 3) Indigenous theologies are "orientated toward spatial categories rather than temporal ones, so the land is the beginning point..." (2000b, 109). When Lopez Hernandez says that Indigenous theologies are a "recent phenomenon," he means theology at the professional level with its conferences, associations, and publications. For him, Indigenous theologies began to take shape in a more global sense with the

In a discussion about the Franciscan Sahagun's 16lh century history of the Americas, entitled Historia Grande, Serge Gruzinski argued that in Sahagun's account of Our Lady of Guadalupe it is the priests who are denounced for assimilating the Virgin with the goddess Tonantzin. Gruzinski wrote, "[i]n other words, it was the Church's priests who were responsible for confusing the Virgin with the former goddess, just as they were responsible for confusing Saint John with Tezcatlipoca and Saint Anne with the goddess Toci" (2002, 190). Gruzinski used the verb "to confuse" in order to duplicate the tone of Sahagun's account. Gruzinski argued that Indigenous artists and intellectuals often pointed out to missionaries that if the Patristic theologians could express Christian ideas through Greek myth why could they not express Christian ideas through their own myths. Gruzinski wrote, "[s]teeped in Latin and the classic authors, literate Nahuas might become uncontrollable [in the eyes of the Church]" (2002, 189). 24

The second meeting occurred in Panama in 1993, and the first one in Mexico in 1990. See Encuentro de la Teologia India. Sabiduria indigena, fuente de esperanza: Tercer encuentro latinoamericano (1997); Teologia India II: Segundo encuentro latinoamericano (1994); Teologia India: Primer encuentro latinoamericana (1991).

230 collaboration of Indigenous theologians "from Africa, Asia and the Americas," where emerging common traits began to be singled out and discussed (2000b, 109). As I hinted in my descriptions of popular religion in the Introduction, "indigenous theologies" at the grassroots level have been around for more than five hundred years in the Americas. In other words, if one understands theology as a discourse about G*d, and if one approaches this definition in Gramsci's "common sense" understanding that everyone is a philosopher (or theologian), even the most humble and formally uneducated person, then Indigenous theologies have been alive at the grassroots level since the beginnings of the theological encounters with Christianity.25 In this sense, theology includes drama, worship, prayer, art, processions, and other ways of expressing the divine, or talking about G*d, in terms learned from one's cultural inheritance. This is an important aspect of popular religion that is often overlooked by theologians who tend to utilize excessively logocentric frameworks. This was what Paulo Suess claimed when he described popular religious practices through a Nahuatl saying, calling them '"flowers and songs,' 'true words of wisdom' rising from the ruins of the Conquest..." (1986, 122). Moreover, Indigenous theologies are the product of many years of grassroots organizing in Indigenous areas. Lopez Hernandez paraphrases an important prophet, bishop Leonidas Proafia, who worked tirelessly with Quechuan communities until the end of his life in Riobamba, Ecuador, in 1988: the indigenous peoples have started to open their eyes, have begun to see, have commenced to break from our language, have commenced to appropriate our word, have commenced to speak it with courage, have commenced to stand up, have commenced to walk, have commenced to organize, to realize actions that can transform themselves into of actions of transcendent importance for us, for the countries of America, for many countries of the world (2005,1)*.

I am speaking here only of Christian Indigenous theologies. Indigenous religious systems tout court have obviously developed in the Americas for thousands of years.

231 Proana is not the only bishop who supported the cause of Indigenous peoples. He stands in a long trajectory of prophetic Indigenous voices and defenders of indigenous peoples, such as Gauman Poma and Bartolome de Las Casas. The Mexican bishop, Samuel Ruiz Garcia, worked for over thirty years in the diocese of San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas—originally founded in 1539 and which saw the brief tenure in 1544 of the bishop Bartolome de Las Casas26—where he helped to develop grassroots Indigenous communities after the Medellfn council in 1968. As Ruiz Garcia has subsequently explained, "after Vatican II, and especially after Medellfn, the questions concerning our pastoral work with indigenous peoples became concrete" (1999,10). As a member of the Department of Missions with CELAM (Latin American Bishops' Conference) in the early seventies and in conjunction with CENAMI in Mexico (El Centro National de Ayuda a las Misiones Indigenas), Ruiz Garcia helped coordinate the 1974 Indigenous Congress (El Primer Congreso Indigena de Chiapas) in his own diocese, which was, among other things, a celebration of the life of Bartolome de Las Casa, who was still unknown to many Indigenous peoples (1999, 12). The Congress was, according to Ruiz Garcia, an attempt to organize various Indigenous communities already working on issues that concerned them to come together and "provide an opportunity for them to collaborate" (1999, 11). Hence, the irruption of liberationist hermeneutics, which was an irruption of the poor in history, went hand-in-hand with the irruption of grassroots Indigenous communities. In an article on popular religion published in 1991, Ruiz Garcia wrote that the spread of "autochthonous churches" in Chiapas, namely churches that Las Casas formally resigned as bishop of Chiapas in 1550, but Samuel Ruiz reminds us that he only spent "a total of less than six months" in the actual diocese (1999,12). In 1552, Las Casas courageously published The Devastation of the Indies without clearance from the Inquisition. The book is an unrelenting attack on the cruelties of the Spanish on indigenous peoples in the Americas. Soon after its publication, Las Casas was accused of treason in Spain, but the book gained notoriety in the rest of Europe and was quickly translated in English, French, and Dutch. See de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies (1992).

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emerged from within Indigenous cultures, helped to develop a stunning "seven thousand indigenous catechists whose formation is arranged from within the community" (1991, 116). It is within the context of this rich history of grassroots Indigenous organizing that the work of Lopez Hernandez must be considered. In fact, his theological training was pursued in close collaboration with CENAMI and the organizing mentioned above in the diocese of bishop Ruiz. Lopez Hernandez attended CENAMI meetings, including the Primer Encuentro Pastoral Indigena in 1970, and participated in other important courses and training being developed within Indigenous communities throughout the 1970s. Ordained in 1974, Lopez Hernandez writes that he was "integrated in a full-time position at CENAMI in January of 1976, where he was assigned to the Department of Formation" (2001, 330)*. Lopez Hernandez' training with CENAMI and as an Indigenous pastor and theologian brought him into close contact with the popular religious practices of Indigenous peoples. He affirms that popular religion "occupies a privileged place. The processions and pilgrimages are a kind of ritual dance, which activates popular faith" (2000a, 100)*. Similar to the work elaborated by Diego Irarrazaval, Lopez Hernandez argues that fiestas are indispensable for the life of Indigenous peoples. He writes that [i]n the living togetherness that fiestas favour, we find the transformation of everyday problems and sufferings into laughter, dancing and food. This enlivens us to maintain hope in a new world very similar to what was dreamed and left to us by our grandparents, our ancestors. In the indigenous fiestas, the hills and the earth which are eroded, where there is an abundance of rocks, coal, thorns, nopales and mezquites (weeds from the area of Mexico), will be converted with our work, in Xochitlalpan, or garden with every kind of fine flowers, where the rocks and cliffs look like precious emeralds and the earth shines like a resplendent rainbow (2000a, 131)*.

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Lopez Hernandez is relating the importance of fiesta in Indigenous communities through the poetic language27 about the earth's beauty. This vision of the fiesta is a reigncentered vision, as in liberationist hermeneutics, but it is imbued with a sensibility that comes from an experience of the earth that is distinctly Indigenous. The priority of Indigenous intellectual history, such as the Mean Mopohua (the Indigenous story of the Apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe, written in Nahuatl, by the Indigenous intellectual Antonio Valeriano in the mid-sixteenth century), is evoked in order to place Indigenous methods and experience at the center of Lopez Hernandez' theology. He is relating a way of hoping that is deeply rooted within the trajectory of ancestral practices and through a pronounced sense of space and/or land. In Lopez Hernandez' framework, the coming reign is not simply set within a temporal frame, but it co-mingles with a spatial dimension that is unlike most liberationist perspectives, which are basically temporally-based Utopias. Even when Lopez Hernandez examines popular religion in the history texts of his Indigenous ancestors, the spatial dimensions are front and center. In a poetic language that brings together an Indigenous perspective with biblical images, Lopez Hernandez writes that in order to tune into and understand with depth a text of popular religiosity, such as the Nican Mopohua, one must take off one's shoes like Moses in the Horeb in order to tread barefoot on the sacred earth of the poor, of the nomadic peoples of the desert. A theological text cannot be understood with the cool head of a rationalist. One needs to immerse oneself in the river of faith of the people who produced the text. By reading the Nican Mopohua, we can begin to experience the profound Mexico that we have within and listen to the voice of a guadalupean people, which lives within us (2000a, 175)*.

The evocation of a sacred space, where one is called to take off one's shoes and tread barefoot on the earth, and the image of a people's faith as a flowing river, are both deeply

27

The reference here, especially to nopales y mezquites, is inspired by the Nican Mopohua, or the Apparitions of the Miracle of Guadalupe. See an English translation of this text here: http://www.sancta.org/nican.html (accessed on November 29, 2006).

biblical and deeply Indigenous ways of talking about how to approach a religious text. It is interesting also that Lopez Hernandez refers to the Nican Mopohua as a theological text, because in the eyes of cool rationalists, it is reduced either to a devotional text or to a legend. But here it is a theological well from which Lopez Hernandez' own theology bursts forth. Apart from some U.S.-based Latino/a theologies,28 few theologians posit what is often described as a popular religious devotional text as a resource for the construction of contextual theology. In the hands of Lopez Hernandez, texts that pertain to popular religious practices, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, remind us that Indigenous theologies have lived at the grassroots of Indigenous communities for over five hundred years. Furthermore, that which Lopez Hernandez calls Mexico profundo is the other Mexico, the one that challenges the claims of a Utopian modernity that seeks to establish a monocultural nation of lay people without Indigenous people and without religion. For Lopez Hernandez, the roots of this Mexico profundo are perceived in the presence of the Virgin of Guadalupe. He writes, "[a]s a vital synthesis of the past and the present, the Virgin of Guadalupe makes possible the continuity of indigenous Utopias in the moment of the colonial society, when all hope was lost" (2000a, 183)*. The overarching presence of the syncretic Virgin of Guadalupe in the theology of Lopez Hernandez does not indicate a once-and-for-all mix frozen in the past, but an appreciation of the evenchanging syncretic process that underlies Indigenous history in the Americas. Lopez Hernandez does not take up the category of syncretism as such in his work. Like Irarrazaval, he writes about this reality in the language of inculturation and synthesis, and

See Orlando O. Espin, The Faith of the People (1997), pp. 39-40.

235 frames his theology from within the Catholic tradition. Lopez Hernandez writes about the visit to Mexico by cardinal Ratzinger in 1996, then the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where the cardinal accused "Indian theology" of relativism because of its focus on so-called 'pre-Christian' traditions.29 Lopez Hernandez wrote that the visit by the cardinal hindered the development of Indigenous theologies in Latin America and sent a chill to theologians working from within Indigenous theologies. He writes, "basically they maintain that the Teologia India [Indigenous theology] is not theological truth... but only popular wisdom or simply primary material for theology" (2000a, 139)*. In his response to the cardinal, Lopez Hernandez is adamant to root his Indigenous christology in the religious systems of Indigenous peoples. He writes, [t]he stereotypes and prejudices which they use to observe indigenous theology have made incomprehensible the real direction of its theological production. The indigenous do not have a problem with the Christian God... Neither do we have a problem with Jesus Christ; since for us He is the tangible historical presence of the invisible God of Yohualli-Ehecatl; which is what we express in the figure Quetzalcoatl, the synthesis of the human and divine, of the cosmos and the earth, of man and woman" (2000a, 140)*.

Moreover, Lopez Hernandez clearly situates his Indigenous christology within the traditional Patristic notion of universal salvation: the "seeds of the word or logoi spermatikoi of our peoples" (2001, 335)*. This perspective is usually attributed to the writings of Justin Martyr, and was later developed by others who held pre-Christian philosophers and poets, such as Socrates and Homer, in high esteem. Justin did so through his Logos theology, syncretized with Stoic and Platonic elements. In this sense, Socrates and Homer are what many call "Christians before Christ"—even if not yet fully 29

See Bill and Patty Coleman, "Ratzinger Pays Surprise Visit to Mexico; Tells Mexico Press Meeting is Chance for 'Adjustment'," in National Catholic Reporter, May 24, 1996. http://www.findarticles.eom/p/articles/ mi_ml 141/is_n30_v32/ai_18341632 (accessed November 29,2006). Enrique Dussel is quoted as saying that "Ratzinger is more concerned with condemning heretics than with the pastoral work of the church" (Coleman 1996, 1).

236 (Chadwick 1967,76). Jacques Dupuis made a similar point when he wrote, "[i]t took place before the incarnation of the Word, among the Jews and the Greeks; everywhere there are people who lived by the Word and deserve to be called Christian" (2001, 57). The examples of Socrates and Homer exemplify Justin's cosmological understanding of revelation. While heavily focused on John's Logos theology, Justin also utilized Matthew's parable of the sower (13:3) to express that the Word was already active among the Greeks before the incarnation. Chrys Saldanha refered to Justin's emphasis as "Logos Spermatikos," namely, the process by which the Logos-sower sows seeds in all people, yet they are only seeds, which will grow to full fruition in Christ. In Second Apology (XIII), Justin wrote this: I am proud to say that I strove with all my might to be known as a Christian, not because the teachings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but because they are not in every way similar; neither are those of other writers, the Stoics, the poets, and the historians. For each one of them, seeing, through his participation of the seminal Divine Word, what was related to it, spoke very well (Saldanha 1984,133).

All of the workings of the cosmos, all of G*d's creative work in the world are thus attributed to the Logos. According to Justin, Greek philosophy, poetry, and history are not to be despised; they are gifts from G*d—even if they maybe incomplete and contradictory. Lopez Hernandez thus uses a similar framework to defend Indigenous religious systems against centuries of ecclesial demonization and charges of idolatry, arguing as Justin did that the "seeds of the Word" were present among Indigenous cultures long before the conquest. In the meeting between Indigenous peoples and Christians, Lopez Hernandez argues that a religious synthesis occurred, as evidenced in popular religion, especially in Marian devotions such as Aparecida in Brazil, Caacupe in Paraguay, Copacabana in Bolivia, all of which show evidence of a guadalupean methodology. This

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synthesis, he argues, "circulated first of all in the sphere of the so-called 'popular religiosity,' as much indigenous as mestizo" (2000a, 56)*. Lopez Hernandez' theology differs radically from the mestizo synthesis of Pedro Morande. Lopez Hernandez does not posit a notion of the Catholic substrate, nor does he downplay the effects of asymmetrical power relations. Lopez Hernandez writes, "Guadalupe is the theological expression of a people vanquished by the force of arms, but a people that does not resign itself to die and that resists valorously in maintaining, against wind and tide, ancestral hopes and Utopias" (2000a, 171)*. Even if he never names it as such, Lopez Hernandez' "guadalupean synthesis" is shaped by a process of religious syncretism from below, similar to Parker's otra logica; it is a methodology that is unique to the way Indigenous peoples actually do theology—and have been doing theology for hundreds of years. Unlike Parker however, Lopez Hernandez does not only describe this method as a strategy of survival within a context of nepantla, or as a kind of bricolage in these times of globalization, but as a deeply-rooted starting point for the development of Indigenous theology in the twentyfirst century. Lopez Hernandez argues that a close attention to Indigenous theology, firmly rooted in the history and method of religious synthesis that occurred in the popular religion of the people, is already transforming the church, "where we have seen it gestate considerable changes: attitudes of intolerance and suspicion [towards the religious systems of Indigenous peoples] to attitudes of respect and valorization for intercultural and interreligious dialogue" (2000a, 58)*. For Lopez Hernandez, Indigenous theology cannot simply be about its own development, but about the transformation of the church of Christendom toward a guadalupean church. While Lopez Hernandez does not use this

238 designation, I use it here to refer to the knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples described by him for the creation of a Latin American and Caribbean church that contests elite colonial frameworks. This does simply mean a sprinkling here and there of Indigenous elements in Catholic ritual; it means a complete reformulation of ritual and ecclesiology that would re-define the church in dialogue with the popular religious expressions of lay peoples; it means the reformulation of christology that would prioritize the experience of the Christ in the myths and narratives of Indigenous peoples; it means the reformulation of theology towards a more incarnational theology, that is embodied in the fiestas, dances, processions, and pilgrimages in the everyday lives of subaltern peoples.

TOWARD A LIBERATIONIST-POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE As postcolonialism is not a theory in the strict sense of the term, but a collection of critical and conceptual attitudes, an apt description would be to term it criticism. Criticism is not an exact science, but the undertaking of social and political commitment which should not be reduced to or solidified into a dogma. It is always oppositional. Edward Said sees criticism 'as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interest of human freedom.' Put at its simplest, criticism is always contextual; it is paradoxical, secular, and always open to its own contradictions and shortcomings. R.S. Sugirtharajah (UK, 2002)

In the previous section, I showed how Sugirtharajah's critical engagement with liberationist hermeneutics does not live up to his own definition of criticism as a contextual undertaking. In fact, I showed that his critique of liberationist hermeneutics reinscribes colonial dynamics rather than critiques them. But as he himself acknowledges above, all criticism is open to shortcomings and contradictions. In this last section, I will engage the idea that liberation theologies have experienced an "axial shift" in the 1990s. I will then critically probe the limits, gaps, and contradictions in the works of Irarrazaval

239 and Parker. I have demonstrated throughout this thesis that to argue that liberation theologians experienced an "axial shift" from economic categories to cultural ones is to disregard the fact that theologians like Irarrazaval and Parker expanded their discourses to include both cultural and economics issues since the early 1980s. I have avoided discussing "culture" in opposition to "economic" categories because doing so betrays a 'First World' or Eurocentric imposition on Latin American and Caribbean perspectives. As I have been arguing, the work of Irarrazaval and Parker falls outside these reductionistic dichotomies; it is for this reason that I used terms like "unitive" and "conflictive" to characterize the perspectives discussed so far. While these terms are also dichotomous, I used them to avoid the separation between culture and economics. Both encompass within themselves the categories of culture and economics to varying degrees. There have been many shifts in liberationist perspectives, but the one that interests this thesis research has been from a shift from notions of a Catholic continent, or substrate, to perspectives focussing on religious pluralism and the inter-cultural. In their accompaniment of popular religion, Irarrazaval and Parker developed a postcolonial perspective through liberationist categories: hence, my use of the hyphen to link words the words liberationist-postcolonial.

Modernity and Latin American/Caribbean Identity In 1987, Bolivian sociologist Fernando Calderon prophetically asked the question: "how is it that in Latin America, millions of campesinos and artisans co-exist and are expanding together with hundreds of thousands of factories, along with thousands of computers and electronic equipment, as well as a few nuclear power plants" (1988,

240 225)*? "Perhaps," he continued, "because we live in culturally truncated and mixed times of premodernity, modernity, and postmoderaity" (188,225)*. Calderon argued almost twenty years ago that modernity and "being [traditionally] Bolivian" were not antithetical. In fact, he argued that Latin American and the Caribbean has always experienced modernity in a mixed way. Furthermore, in 1989, the Mexican social scientist, Nestor Garcia Canclini, argued that Latin America was hybrid, in-between tradition and modernity, with its own "strategies for entering and leaving modernity" (1995, 1). With the term hybridity, he argued against the Gramscian distinction between hegemony and subalternity, which, according to Canclini, presupposes a traditional/modern dichotomy. Canclini argued instead that in Latin America, hegemonic/subaltern, modern/traditional, and indeed elite/popular forms of culture are mixed (1995, 145). For Canclini, hybridity best expresses the mixed sociocultural forms of the Latin American experience, a concept which deconstructs the tendency to equate subalternity with the premodern and hegemony with the modern. These two social scientists have captured something very important about the complex and multifaceted identity(s) of Latin America and Caribbean in these "mixed times." But I also question how these notions operate differently from Pedro Morande's notion of mestizaje discussed in the first chapter. John Beverley, who belonged to the Latin American Subaltern Studies group in the 1990s, argues that fi]f in the earlier Latinamericanist idea of mestizaje or transculturation there was an explicit teleological narrative of adaptation of the people to the postcolonial state (and vice versa), a similar, but now postnational (and unacknowledged), teleology operates in the concept of hybridity/hybridization, since it designates a dialectical process—seen as both inevitable and providential—of the "overcoming" of antinomies that are rooted in the immediate cultural and historical past, including the past of modernity itself (2001, 55).

241 Beverley is critical of perspectives that attempt to transplant the essentialist version of mestizaje, the one-time freezing of synthesis during the colonial era, only to re-inscribe them in a contemporary postnational context. Beverley is concerned with how Canclini's discussion of hybridity tends to veil power asymmetries. In other words, the binominal distinction between subaltern and hegemonic cannot be so easily dismissed insofar as the realities of exclusion, poverty, racial discrimination, gender inequality, and ecological plundering continue to create haves and have-nots. Hence, following Beverley, the terms "mixed times" and hybridity are crucial as over-arching categories that have emerged in conversations in Latin America and the Caribbean about its relation to modernity, but one must not lose sight of the liberationist option for the poor and excluded. This bringing together of the postcolonial concern for hybridity with the liberationist option for the poor and excluded is precisely what Irarrazaval and Parker have advanced in their work on popular religion. In their work on popular religion, Irarrazaval and Parker showed a commitment to working through questions of Latin American/Caribbean identity. Their scholarly research showed evidence of an important engagement with cultural identity within a liberationist framework for more than thirty years. In other words, their work on popular religion pointed to an important feature of this cultural identity: namely, the question of the reception of modernity(s) in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is precisely because, as we saw in Parker's work, popular religious practices often bring together traditional culture with aspects of modernity in a hybrid manner. As we have seen above, the perspective of some religious vanguards, in the example of the Brazilian priest Marques, tended to discard some aspects of the cultural identity of the uninvited, with

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their fiestas and processions, for a socio-political identity based on a dualist struggle against oppression. For some, this struggle meant radically modernizing (historical change) what were believed to be oppressive elements of tradition (divinely sanctioned and unchangeable) in popular religion that belonged to the age of colonial Christendom. Yet were the traditional aspects of popular religion simply archaic pre-modern remnants? Or were the traditional aspects of popular religion in some respects also a "construction of tradition" by a modern nineteenth century Roman Catholicism? This is an important question because it points to the multi-faceted critiques deployed by liberationists in the seventies and eighties. It is important to remember that liberationists in Latin America/Caribbean critiqued two modern frameworks in the same instance: the colonial church of Christendom with its very modern nineteenth century 'anti-modern' posturing,30 which was alive and well in the religious institutions up until the mid-1960s, and the modern liberal perspectives, which dominated the discourses of the elites in the region, and which underscored the implementation of developmentalism. Latin American liberation theologies critiqued the 'official' Catholic church for its 'anti-modern' framework and the Latin American elite for its modern liberalism. The liberationist critique is rooted in a radical modern perspective, in dialogue with dependency and Marxist theories from the social sciences, which critiqued some aspects of both (modern) anti-modernism and modern liberalism. Hence, the critiques of religious oppression by liberation theologians were always linked to questions of modernity and identity, especially when examining popular religion. 30

Joseph A. Komonchak argued convincingly that "at the very same time that the Catholic Church was defining itself in anti-modern terms, its own response to the challenge it faced reflected and embodied essential features of the modernization of western society" (1991, 37).

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What some have called the ambiguity of popular religion, as in Galilea's perspective for example, was for liberationists not focused on expunging its pre-modern roots, although this sort of critique still exists in some places, but a question of critiquing certain versions of Catholic modernity that instrumentalized popular religion. When Roman Catholic officials organized the 'official' chuch as a "counter-cultural" antimodern church in the ninetheeth century, they shaped the 'official' church in ways that mirrored the construction of modem institutions. According to Joseph Komonchak, no longer able to rely on state protection, the nineteenth Catholic officials re-organized the church through a number of important restructuring processes. This modern reorganization was not a single coherent plan of action, but a trajectory that developed slowly. Komonchak noted that Catholic officials idealized a certain version of the Middle Ages as a model of the church's own political and religious project; they constructed a counter-revolutionary mysticism based on "popular piety," especially Marian devotions such as Our Lady of Lourdes (1858), and the devotions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus; they built Catholic associations to meet the challenges of secular ones; they centralized and sought control of the intellectual life of the Church through the restoration of a specific reading of Thomism and by putting emphasis on Papal encyclicals; and they instituted the Vatican I Council in order to entrench these aspects into the life of the church and support a Roman Catholic sub-culture with its own identity (1991, 11-41). The 'official' sectors of the church in Latin America and the Caribbean attempted to incorporate these changes, especially the "counter-cultural mysticism based of popular piety," into the pueblo's popular religious practices, but this was not always successful, since important local feasts were already well established in strong lay-centered contexts.

244 Suess argued that in the colonial church of Latin America and the Caribbean, which predates the Tridentine reforms, "lay people played a major role and religious practices therefore enjoyed a large measure of autonomy" (1986, 122). Suess wrote that [t]he faith of the people, living a long way from the churches and from the clerical ministrations, revolved round devotion to saints of the homestead or locality; it showed itself in vows, processions, and festivals. With the saints, the crucified Christ is still the inspiration for great pilgrimages. The function of the clergy in this colonial Christendom, who saw themselves as representatives of true Catholicism—traditional Iberian Catholicism, that is—in the face of these 'outlandish customs,' was reduced to saying mass and administering the sacraments (1986,122).

Suess noted that a deep split between the 'official' church and popular feasts developed for decades in the colonial church of Latin America/Caribbean, and "[smarting only in the in the middle of the nineteenth century, 'reforming' bishops struggled to implant the reforms of Trent, control of the clergy and popular, and independence from State control and patronage" (1986, 122-123). But the (modern) anti-modern European perspective did shape a certain self-understanding of the 'official' church in region. Larrain noted that "in the recently acquired stability of the mid-nineteenth century [in post-revolutionary Latin America/Caribbean], the church, reconstituted with many foreign priests, became very vocal and combative in its advocacy of a social order retaining numerous elements of Christendom..." (2000, 80). It is important to remember that what critics like Larrain call tradition or Christendom was a self-constructed modern Catholic identity, which asserted its identity as counter-cultural to modern liberalism and in continuity with a constructed idealized past (the Middle Ages). So-called European modernity is many things and encompasses many trajectories, but as we saw with Parker's work, the peripheral modernities of the 'Third World' are constituted by plural and hybrid expressions. The liberationist critique of (modern) anti-modernism and modern liberalism, what Gutierrez called "conservative groups in society, or the elitist and intellectual view

245 from the modernizing sectors," was a double-edged critique of the ways in which these groups or sectors imposed essentialist readings on popular religion (1978,7)*. In the prologue to Irarrazaval's 1978 study of popular religion, Gutierrez argued that a liberationist interpretation of popular religion must depart from the way the phenomenon is characterized by both these groups: instrumentalized to promote an anti-modern Catholicism or an anti-modern element that prevents development. Hence, liberationists in Peru were already in the 1970s attempting to carve-out a place for popular religion as part of the religious identity of Latin America, but distinct from the essentializing views of the 'official' church and of the liberal elite. The liberationists in Peru viewed popular religion as part of the religious identity of the pueblo (culture), but one that defined pueblo in a conflictive manner with liberative dimensions and potentials. As Otto Maduro has insisted, this affirmation of the pueblo as a cultural agent is part of the "desacralization" of Marxism (1988, 371). By this Maduro meant that the "free, almost haphazard plundering of the Marxist traditions" by liberation theologians undermined the all-encompassing and "sacred" aura of Marxism (1988, 374). One of these "sacred" aspects is the tendency of Marxists to deny the cultural production of oppressed peoples and to paint hegemony as all-powerful and all-encompassing, leaving the oppressed to struggle with a false consciousness. Because some liberation theologians have used some Marxist concepts and deployed a critique of religious oppression, it is often incorrectly assumed by those who argue for a 1990s "axial shift" from economics to culture, that liberationists did not address culture in their theologies. But as Maduro insisted: My contention would be, in fact, that through LALT [Latin America liberation theology] what is being articulated—among several other things—is the effort (and the interest) of many oppressed groups to affirm themselves as valid, legitimate, and cultural agents. Or, to put it in different

246 words, LALT is one among many channels through which subaltern classes from Latin America attempt to express, communicate, interrelate, develop, strengthen, and consolidate a culture of their own: a dynamic, living system of values, symbols, norms and relations, from which they can revaluate and criticize their past (including their otherwise despised cultural traditions), confront present oppression, and enhance their leverage on the decisions concerning the future (1988, 379).

One of the ways some liberationists attempted to strengthen a subaltern culture of their own has been through the critical engagement of popular religion. This reflection was also constituted by a double-edged critical reflection of the ways the church of Christendom and liberal elites have attempted to impose essentialistic readings on the religious identity of the pueblo, or have dismissed the pueblo's cultural production as primitive superstition.

Axial Shifts and Culture Some theologians have argued that the changing context of 1990s in Latin America and the Caribbean saw a paradigm shift in liberationist discourses, or an "axial shift" from a socio-political framework toward a cultural one. Pablo Richard and his collegues advanced the notion of an "axial shift" {desplazamiento de eje) in this way in an article published in the early 1990s.31 There is no question that the post-Soviet context, symbolized by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990, the U.S. invasion of Panama and the assassination of the Jesuits and their friends in San Salvador in 1989, the "Special Period" in Cuba, the so-called triumph of neoliberal capitalism, and the advent of globalization(s) were extremely important markers of transformation for the world and Latin America and the Caribbean more specifically. Richard interpreted these changes as a kairos—a. time when decisive historical changes radically transformed the trajectory of liberation theologies. For 31

Richard talks about a double displacement "from the political to civil society and from political and military confrontation to cultural, ethical, and religious confrontation" (Richard and Team 1994, 251).

247 example, questions began to surface about role of the state in the new globalized neoliberal economy. What role does the state play in a world where actual budgetary decisions are made by the IMF and the World Bank? The Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas, which exploded on the first day of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) in 1994, questioned the role of the state in this way, by committing to anti-state resistance without the goal of taking state control. There are still no clear answers about how this resistance will be sustained. Since the kairos changes mentioned above, those who seek a different world than the world of exclusionary neoliberal capitalism have been living with more questions than answers. John Holloway's controversial book, entitled Change the World Without Taking Power (2002), reflects debates on the role of the state for social transformation. Holloway's perspective has been shaped by close contact with Zapatista communities. In an interview with Marina Sitrin, Holloway argues this: we have to start admitting that we don't have answers. The fact that we think that taking state power is the wrong way to go does not mean that we know the right way. Probably, we have to think of advancing through experiments and questions: "preguntando caminamos" ["walking we ask questions"], as the Zapatistas put it. To think of moving forward through questions rather than answers means a different sort of politics, a different sort of organization. If nobody has the answers, then we have to think not in hierarchical structures of leadership, but horizontal structures that involve everyone as much as possible (2004,1)

Offering a different perspective from Holloway's more open-ended framework, Richard and his team of researchers also expressed doubts about the role of the state, writing that "at this juncture [early 1990s] neo-liberalism is attempting to dismantle the State in order to impose its own totalitarian market economy" (1994, 252). For him, "the State must play a positive role in civil society, in economic planning, and in protecting nature" (1994,251). According to Richard and team, questions about the role of the state (especially the welfare state, which was deemed by some commentators to be powerless

in a neohberal context), the murdering of socialist Utopias, the emergence of triumphant globalized neoliberal capitalism, the continued presence of empire, and the absence of new alternatives for transforming the Latin America/Caribbean continent created space for a more pronounced framework on identity and culture. Richard and team wrote that "[o]n its own turf, the Empire is invincible. For this reason, the Empire must be confronted on a different battlefield, at the point where the Third World is strongest, in particular, at the level of culture, ethics, and spirituality" (1994, 251). Furthermore, the advent of globalization with its transnationalized incursions into the local culture awakened some to the postcolonial reality of hybridity. Scannone cited Richard appreciatively on the appearance of an "axial shift" with respect to liberationist hermeneutics and culture. Scannone wrote that [t]he axial shift in liberation theology is intimately related to the change in the cultural imaginario referred to, which is currently taking place among people of Latin America, especially among the poor. Theology bears this in mind with the help of cultural analysis, when it reflects on today's signs of the times. However, it does not forget that this alternative imaginario takes shape in an alternative social phenomenon: basic neocommunitarianism. Hence, it does not give up social analysis either, even if overly rigid approaches inspired by Marxism have been abandoned. Faced with globalization, structural unemployment and the crisis of the Welfare State—socialist, social democratic or populist—and faced with the failure of the self-regulated market to adequately answer the demands of human dignity and justice, a new event is occurring in all parts of the world: the emergence of civil society, as different from the State as well as from the market... In the religious sphere, we are no longer referring merely to basic ecclesial communities, as was the case for Puebla, but also to all kinds of religious groups that are not vertically structured (1998, 98-99).

Writing four years later than Richard, Scannone nuanced his perspective, insisting that the so-called "axial shift" toward a "cultural imaginarid'1 is not something entirely new, but is tied to a more holistic perspective of the Latin America and Caribbean experience. This perspective does not divide culture from political economics, but understands them as interdependent. Critiquing the economic materialism of orthodox Marxism, Scannone wrote, "the cultural shift has a social, and even economic base, even if it does not limit itself to this" (1998,102). However, Scannone does not downplay the importance of

249 political economy. Following Richard and team's contention that neoliberalism has produced a new class of poor, an "excluded" class of people completely outside of the system, Scannone insisted that the "preferential option for the poor, the foundation of liberation theology, is more vigorous than ever because the structural poor to whose ranks have been added the 'new poor,' or the impoverished middle classes, are facing the threat no longer of exploitation, but of exclusion..." (1998,101). Scannone's statements have since been somewhat verified, for example, by the International Monetary Fund-intensified Argentinean crisis of 2001, where not only did the middle class collapse almost overnight, but the solidarity among the excluded has created a network of community organizing among civil society that has inspired hope for many struggling for justice in the region. In her recent book Horizontalism, Sitrin has documented the new social movements in Argentina, which appeared since the popular rebellion of 2001. These new social movements have taken the shape of occupied and recuperated factories, arts and independent media collectives, Indigenous communities, neighborhood assemblies, feminist and unemployed workers movements. Sitrin writes that the autonomous social movements in Argentina, over the past five years specifically, have begun to articulate a new revolutionary politics. This politics is seen in various new practices, and in the expressions they use to describe these practices. Some say that they are not political, or that they are anti-political. Often this is related to their experiences in "old" ways of doing politics, with the use of hierarchy and political parties to make decisions for people, taking away their agency. They are engaged in the politics of everyday life [italics mine] (2006,4-5).

Sitrin alerts us to the way social movements are organizing themselves in Argentina since 2001, but, as she also notes, this is happening all over Latin America and the Caribbean: the autonomous Zapatista communities; Indigenous organizing to safeguard their water supply in Cochabamba, Bolivia; massive organizing in rural Brazil where the landless

250 movement (Movimento Sent Terra) is reclaiming land, etc. As we have seen in Venezuela and Bolivia, some of these autonomous social movements have strategically supported progressive candidates in elections, mixing together autonomous anti-state resistance with electoral strategies. This new climate of social change in Latin America/Caribbean is unprecedented and exciting. Latin America and the Caribbean are in a special conjuncture of resistance to neoliberal globalization linking diverse strategies that were very divisive in earlier times. These new voices of dissent in Argentina, described in terms of horizontalidad by Sitrin, that have irrupted in the landscape of civil society, resonate with the horizontal cotidiano of popular religion. Like popular religion in the discourses of some vanguardist priests and theologians in the early 1970s, these new social movements, these new ways of constituting politics, as Sitrin suggests, are also being accused by the "old" guard of being "anti-political." Within a vanguardist and patriarchal framework, the everyday tends to be perceived as freezing dehumanizing social structures without proposing actual change. As we have seen earlier, this tends to be translated as a critique of the "eternal everyday" that does not produce 'real' social change. Hence, the private domain, which is predominantly represented by women, is constructed as less 'political' that the public domain—where 'real' activism happens. Similarly, the cotidiano of popular religion is reduced to a private experience that does not have any bearing on the larger processes at work in the region. The Mexican sociologist Roberto J. Blancarte sees the predominantly lay character of popular religion as an important influence on the construction a new kind of civil society in Latin America and the Caribbean with a different religious landscape. Blancarte argues that "the development of this 'lay' or 'aclerical' Catholicism will be an

251 influence in centuries to come, for the consolidation of a new popular piety, which constituted the foundation of secularized political movements in independent nations" (2000, 599). In this respect, the work by liberationists on the liberative dimensions of popular religion, its everyday subversions of hegemony through fiesta and/or through an otra logica, constitutes an important contribution towards understanding the changing context of Latin America and the Caribbean. However, to call the changes experienced in Latin America and the Caribbean an "axial shift," even in Scannone's more nuanced argument, is to veil the way some liberationists have been talking about these realities since the early 1980s—especially with respect to popular religion. Scannone would agree with this critique, but quite probably also argue that this was one perspective among others that became more pronounced at the start of the 1990s. He has argued that theologians like Irarrazaval offered a perspective that has always been mindful of culture: "Diego Irarrazaval proposed a theology starting from the popular wisdom of Latin America, and others, like Victor Codina,32 gave primacy to symbolic reason over modern, enlightened reason" (1998, 96). Scannone attempted a careful critique of some forms of liberation theology that he believed to be heavily invested in a narrow Marxist framework, but he did not overlook those theologians who argued for a conflictual method while also being mindful of culture. While I have not encountered writings by Scannone on Parker's work on popular religion, the former's notion of "sapiential wisdom" corresponds with the latter's notion of otra logica. Parker wrote appreciatively about Scannone's "sapiential wisdom," arguing that it is a hermeneutical effort that attempts to think through the specific

See for example, Victor Codina, "Sacraments" (1996).

252 'synthesis' of Latin American and Caribbean culture, with its "religious syncretism and cultural hybridization," that has never been entirely Western nor entirely Indigenous (1996,236). Parker argued that Scannone's notion of "sapiential wisdom" is a way to think out a hemidemal, non-Western American worldview that is shot through semantically with Western cultural categories and influences, that harvests pre-Columbian ancestral traditions, and that insists on being thought out in categories of its own still in gestation, still the object of search (and therefore indebted to categorical structures that come from Western tradition) (1996, 236).

Scannone, Irarrazaval, and Parker were crucial in setting a direction on the importance culture in the doing of theology before the 1990s.33 This direction can now be more clearly witnessed in the theologies of the "new(er) voices" and the plurality of tongues that make-up the contemporary landscape of theologies in Latin America and the Caribbean. If there was an "axial shift" that occurred in the 1990s, it should not be constructed through the false dichotomies that posit economic perspectives against cultural ones or even vanguardist perspectives against popular ones. I have shown that for these theologians economic and cultural perspectives were deeply intertwined and a part of the agenda since the early to mid-1980s. There have been "shifts" in Latin America/Caribbean and this can be witnessed in the plurality of theological tongues that have developed since that time: namely, Indigenous, Afro-American, feminist, mestizo, ecological, popular cultures, etc. This context of pluralism contests and disrupts essentialist notions of Latin America and Caribbean as a Catholic continent. In their work on popular religion, both Irarrazaval and Parker have demonstrated a perspective that resonates with the postcolonial focus on hybrity that is embedded in liberationist concerns.

In an interview about the area of theology and culture, Irarrazaval highlighted the work of Scannone as being foundational for the development of culture within liberation theologies (See Appendix 1,325).

253 Irarrazaval, Liberation, and Inculturation As I mentioned in chapter two, one of the most important aspects of Irarrazaval's work on popular religion has been his emphasis on fiesta. I linked this notion to the notion of lo cotidiano in Latin American feminist theologies as a way of highlighting the dialogic and interrelational reality of theologies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Irarrazaval's emphasis on fiesta within Indigenous communities must be understood in terms of his over-arching concern for the process of inculturation. As we have seen, Irarrazaval's definition of inculturation is also interrelational: it is "a mutual relationship between the human ('cultural') journey of a people on the one hand, and evangelizing action on the other (carried out by the Christian community through its sense of faith, ministries, and charisms) on the other" (2000a, ix). Unlike the widespread linking of the inculturation process to the incarnation in much contemporary theology and mis'siology,34 Irarrazaval expanded his definition to cover a broader Christian experience, which includes the Paschal mystery and the Pentecost as well. Thus, he speaks of the incarnation as only one part of a tripartite process of inculturation: "Incarnation can be understood as 'condition,' the paschal event as the background of the inculturation 'process,' and Pentecost as its 'driving force'" (2000a, 26). In other words, the incarnational process of creating a local church cannot be separated from the experience of the Crucified One and his proximity to the excluded, and from the experience of the Holy Spirit, which encompasses the plurality of cultures and religions in a local context (2000a, 29-34). Irarrazaval's inculturation paradigm is deeply rooted in a liberationist "option for the poor" (Crucified One) and in an option for cultural and religious pluralism

See Peter Schineller, A Handbook on Inculturation: "Jesus Christ, for example, the model of incarnation and inculturation, became incarnated in a particular time and place" (1990,7).

upheld by the Pentecost. Irarrazaval fears that limiting the definition to the analogy of the incarnation restricts an understanding of G*d's work in history and the mission of the church. This can be witnessed in definitions that reduce the inculturation process to a model of "implanting" the church in different contexts. For Irarrazaval, evangelization cannot simply come from the top down as in the "implanting" model; rather it involves a process of mutual engagement with local cultures. In other words, for Irarrazaval, the process of inculturation is not only mutually transformative, but also always ongoing on the journey of the pueblo. Years before Irarrazaval, David J. Bosch described this process well: [ijnculturation remains a tentative and ongoing process because cultures are not static and also because the church may be led to discover previously unknown mysteries of the faith. The relationship between the Christian message and culture is a creative and dynamic one, and full of surprises. There is no eternal theology, no theologia perennis which may play the referee over "local theologies" (1991,455-456).

Bosch's proposal resonates with the liberationist inculturation perspective developed by Irarrazaval. I quote him in order to highlight how some inculturation perspectives do propose mutual transformation as central: where the local context can radically transform "Christian content." Furthermore, as we have already seen, the process of inculturation must also involve desculturacion according to Irarrazaval: namely, the process by which communities come to critique dehumanizing yet sometimes uncritically accepted aspects of culture, such as, the neoliberal impulse of globalization, with its emphasis on individualism, success, and free market ideology. Following Suess, Irarrazaval argues that inculturation and liberation have the same goal35: "Paulo Suess proposes that inculturation should have a liberating goal and that evangelization should be carried out from within cultures and 'historic projects" 35

Similarly, Aloysius Pieris argued that inculturation and liberation cannot be distinct: "they are two names for the same process" (1986, 85).

255 (2000a, 5). The liberationist goal overlaps with the inculturationist aspiration for a church rooted in local culture. It is when a local church is immersed in the struggles of the people—a church of the people rather than a church for the people in Sobrino's terms36—that a locally-rooted theology of liberation emerges. While liberation and inculturation tend to be developed as distinct processes in 'First World,' in the 'Third World' they reveal their constitutive interdependency. Yet, as I have shown, Irarrazaval's liberationist concerns are also rooted in the local traditions of Aymaran and Quechuan peoples, which are focused on fiesta and lo cotidiano. This Indigenous framework helped Irarrazaval draw out everyday perspectives on liberation that relativized hasty views of historical transformation. As I mentioned earlier with respect to the Canaanite experience of conquest, many liberationists looked to the Exodus as a biblical model for historical liberation.37 Clodovis Boff, in his essay on the "Methodology of the Theology of Liberation," called the Book of Exodus one of the preferred books of the Bible for liberationists because it "develops the politico-religious deed of liberation of a mass of slaves who become, by virtue of a divine covenant, a people of God" (1996, 17). This is one preferred biblical source among others, which include, according to Boff, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and Revelation (1996,17). Some theologians attempted to temper the Exodus focus on the "promised land" by drawing on the Exilic (Deuteronomy, Psalms, etc) texts of the Bible and reminding us that the poor and dispossessed of Latin America and the Caribbean are aliens living on a foreign land. Gutierrez' meditation on a spirituality of liberation from 1983, aptly entitled

See Sobrino, The Church and the Poor (1984, 91-5). 37

See George V. Pixley, On Exodus: A Liberation Perspective (1987; Spanish 1983) for a more substantial hermeneutical reading of the Exodus account from a liberationist perspective.

Beber en su propio pozo: En el itinerario espiritual de un pueblo, drew on the exile as a wilderness experience the poor and dispossessed understand all too well. Reflecting on a letter he received from Haiti, the poorest country of the Americas, Gutierrez argued that the vast majorities are dispossessed and therefore are compelled to live as strangers in their own land. For this reason die breakthrough of the poor into Latin American history and the Latin American church is based on a new and profound grasp of this experience of estrangement. The exploited and marginalized are today becoming increasingly conscious of living in a foreign land that is hostile to them, a land of death, a land that has no concern for their most legitimate interests and serves only as a tool for their oppressors, a land that is alien to their hopes and is owned by those who seek to terrorize them (1984,11).

The experience of estrangement that Gutierrez is describing is a kind of reality check for a hasty liberation framework that sought the "promised land" without any regard for the experience of the wilderness. And while most liberationists were mindful of the "eschatological proviso,"39 in places such as in revolutionary Nicaragua, some theologians extended the connection between a hoped-for socialism and the "promised land" in very tangible ways. Certainly, the writings of Ernesto Cardenal show an eagerness to do this at a time when revolutionary change was more palpable in Nicaragua than anywhere else in Latin America and the Caribbean. In his poetry, Cardenal made allusions to "the human species/and its culmination/in communism (Chase 1985, 256)*.40 The historical contexts of the Latin American and Caribbean continent varied enormously from place to place in the early 1980s: for example, Gutierrez' designation of Peru with the Quechuan word Ayacucho {un rincon para los muertos) with its "dirty war" that

The English translation is entitled We Drink from our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People (1984). 39

Also called the eschatological reserve, the eschatological proviso is the idea that one cannot conflate the last things (eschaton) of the reign (in its fullness) with actual historical events. Liberationists were often characterized as forgetting the transcendent aspect of the proviso. Sobrino responded to these critiques in this way: "the so-called 'eschatological reserve' can be, and sometimes is, used casually by some first world theologies in order to safeguard the truth of eschatology: nothing existing on this earth is yet the fullness of the Kingdom of God. But reading this from the Third World, it has a sarcastic ring, because here the not-yet is blindingly obvious and what obviously needs stressing is the certainly-not" (1993, 107). 40

See Cardenals's poems in Alfonso Chase, Las Armas de la luz: Antologia de lapoesia contempordnea de la America central (1985,252-258).

257 caused over 69,000 deaths (mostly vulnerable Indigenous peoples) vs. the revolutionary imaginario of Nicaragua with its Sandinista priests after the defeat of the Somoza dictatorship—the first revolutionary government to take power in Latin America and the Caribbean since the Cuban revolution. In Andean context of the 1980s, revolutionary optimism was not as palpable as in Nicaragua. It was a different context with very different prospects for historical change. Hence, Irarrazaval's research highlighted the people's own daily Utopias, such as the fiesta. In this articulation of the fiesta, as a daily Utopia for a people experiencing what Gutierrez called "estrangement," Irarrazaval was revealing a model of accompaniment that offered a different trajectory than an Exodus framework. Irarrazaval did not critique the Exodus framework in his writings, but focused his theology instead on a reigncentered vision of everyday liberation. This had the effect of relativizing the more immediately optimistic liberationist perspectives that did not make sense in his Andean context. With the murdering of Utopias in Latin America and the Caribbean, the so-called death of socialist alternatives, "Fujishock," and other important shifts, optimism turned into despair over the future. Yet lo cotidiano has survived as an important framework of survival and liberation for poor women, Indigenous peoples, Afro-Americans, and other excluded peoples. And while despair over the future impressed itself on many communities envisioning larger transformations in the Latin American/Caribbean region, Irarrazaval defined the pueblo's fiesta as an everyday resurrection—une vida Pascual. In his book La fiesta, Irarrazaval wrote that [i]n general terms, the protagonists of the fiestas analyzed [in 1979-1980] understood them as a transformation of the everyday, in continuity and in rupture with it. It is a transformation from the existence of suffering to pleasure, from segregation to the communal, from material privation to

258 abundance, from routine to the new. In the faithful wisdom of the people, all of this is directed toward a trajectory that is implicitly Paschal; it is a process of rupture with daily death in order to embrace life as God has designed it (1998,239)*.

From the Altiplano context in which he worked and lived, Irarrazaval was drawing out of a liberationist framework of everyday resurrection and everyday hope that has helped sustain the Andean pueblo through the death of Utopias and in their search for new alternatives. One theological outcome of this theology of everyday hope is to provoke interest in the Spirit. An under-appreciated aspect of theology, which is usually subsumed under ecclesiology, pneumatology is, according to Irarrazaval, a way into understanding the faith of the people. Irarrazaval argues that "[a]ll this is ecclesial work, and ultimately it is activity of the Spirit" (2000a, 12). Irarrazaval sees the work of the Spirit present in the healings traditions of Indigenous peoples, especially Indigenous women, and defines inculturation through a Pentecost perspective that is Spirit focused: The Spirit-filled presence in the activity of women is also obvious; their orientation to relationship, their work, the way they give life and celebrate it by inculturation. When one carefully observes the behavior and spiritual journeying of people who are not Christian, one admires the deep presence of the Spirit of God (which does not allow itself to be enclosed in one religious tradition or another). In general, it can be said that these things sprout and grow due to the power of the Spirit and to human cooperation with that growth. That is, Pentecost is palpable and real today through many languages, cultures, colors, flavors, melodies, and movements. This Pentecostal basis of inculturation makes it dynamic and many-sided (2000a, 34). This is a wonderful description of the plural flavour of Latin America and the Caribbean,

with its Pentecostal and evangelical churches, its Santeria, its Candomble, its Vodou, its plural Indigenous traditions, and its many faceted popular religious traditions that stretch across all the religions in the region. I want to argue, however, that Irarrazaval's theology was for a long time too invested in an inculturation framework to take the Holy Spirit seriously. By this I mean that even if Irarrazaval attempts to broaden the concept of inculturation to refer beyond its incaraational framework and to include the Paschal mystery and the Pentecost, his

definition continues to be ecclesial-centered. Is not the Pentecostal context that is being experienced in Latin America and the Caribbean much larger and complex than the ecclesial realm? These are questions Irarrazaval and others, such as Jon Sobrino, are grappling with in our present times. Sobrino argues for an understanding of the Holy Spirit that is reign-centered, or focused on the following of Jesus. In Christ the Liberator, Sobrino insists that [t]oday, the proliferation of movements relying on the Spirit (more as an expression of the marvelous and esoteric than as the reality that inspires following Jesus), in which—will all due respect—the Spirit sometimes seems to be invoked as a deus ex machina rather than the Spirit of God of Jesus Christ, it is incumbent on us to stick to the thesis: the Spirit gives us strength to follow... In other words, the Spirit is made present not only in the subjectivity of those who follow Jesus but also in the object of their following (2001, 328).

Sobrino's liberationist "following Jesus" pneumatology has promising implications that reach beyond the ecclesial realm, such as in the new social movements mentioned above.41 Responding to the interest in the Holy Spirit in Pentecostal, evangelical, and Catholic Charismatic Renewal communities, Sobrino remains decidedly critical of ahistorical versions of Spirit theology that talk about the Spirit (capital S: the third person of the Trinity) but are not filled with the spirit (lower case s: its manifestation in history) of Jesus. He argues instead that [f]or Jesus, in effect, as for many human beings, "being spiritual" is determined not by speaking about the Spirit but in being and speaking in the Spirit and with spirit: "a power went forth from him." And when this happens, God's power can be present "even to move mountains" not, though, as falling back on esoteric powers but as the ultimate choice to do good (2001, 330).

Sobrino's emphasis on following Jesus "with spirit," which is "always actualized by 'the Spirit of God'" in history (2001, 330) is an important move away from his earlier

Lee Cormie argues this in an article entitled "Movements of the Spirit in History": "This is not the much heralded "post-modern" end of over-arching metanarratives, fragmentation, relativism, and paralysis. For in the midst of this exploding diversity, there are also multiplying points of convergence, broadening solidarity, increasing collaboration in action—there is a strong if unarticulated, experience of the Spirit" (2004, 252).

christology where an under-developed Holy Spirit remained ecclesial-centered. The present context of increasing awareness of religious pluralism in Latin America and the Caribbean has moved some liberationists like Sobrino to draw-out the implications of a more developed pneumatology outside the ecclesial realm. However, Irarrazaval's ecclesial-centered discussion of inculturation shows traces of patterns of colonization when he writes that it is "ecclesial work from the grassroots in which the message is in dialogue with every culture" (2000a, 42). The question I would ask here is: whose message and from where does it originate? From G*d? Scripture? 'Official' teachings? Irarrazaval offers a serious attempt at transforming the inculturation paradigm into a "mutual witnessing" framework, but it is rooted nonetheless in a process of "pouring out," with its kenotic implications, which posits a giver and receiver (Espin 2004,15). I agree with Espin when he argues that, while there are good examples of inculturation theology (he notes Irarrazaval), the term still "includes the possibility (and perhaps the reality) of colonization" (2004, 16).43 For him, the inculturation paradigm presupposes a '"canonical something' which exists independent of culture and which can be 'poured' or 'transmitted' into other cultures" (2004, 15). Even if it is the poor and marginalized who are the so-called 'authentic' agents of inculturation, Espin argues, it nonetheless implies "the acceptance of some else's proclamation," and has "little to do with a truth which is discovered and convinces" (2004, 16). Espin argues instead for an understanding of interculturality, which enables "mutual witnessing, contrasting dialogue, and non-colonizing reflection" (2004, 16). It insists that truth is both a cultural 42

The index of Sobrino's book Christology at the Crossroads reveals that the Holy Spirit is mentioned only twice. In one instance, he wrote that the "Spirit is God interiorized in the believer, more precisely in the community of believers" (1978,269). See Orlando O. Espin, from a recent unpublished paper, entitled "Toward the Construction of an Intercultural Theology of Tradition."

261 and intercultural phenomenon. No one culture can be the source of all truth. Truth can be approximated by "contrasting" one culture's truth to another. I will return to the notion of interculturality in Irarrazaval's most recent work and in Latino/a theologies in the conclusion.

Cristian Parker and Essentialism In his book Otra logica en America Latina Parker argued that the "central motivation that guides our study and our proposal for reinterpreting that 'different logic'" is developing a new epistemology with respect to the peoples' own knowledge systems (1996,22). Parker argued against the notion put forward by Morande, that both North American liberal and Marxist sociology construct religion in the same manner: as belonging to the stage of pre-awareness, or of pre-Enlightenment, namely as pre-modern (1996,22). Parker argued for a historically-situated critical Marxist-influenced approach that "obeys a multiplicity of factors," but that "depends on a class-influenced sociological conditioning" (1996,23). Within this framework, Parker argued against the classical Marxist construct of pre-modern religion by highlighting his notion of otra logica as embodying a process of "resacralization" (1996,253). Parker wrote that "[i]n the religious field, this dialectic of secularization/sacralization is actually fostered by the culture industry. In other words, a sort of 'resacralization' of certain spaces of functionality is occurring—a phenomenon introduced by technological scientific rationality itself (1996, 253). For Parker, theories of secularization are false when they posit a progress narrative that dissolves the sense of G*d among the people, or when they identify religion as "the authentic essence of culture" (1996,256). Modernization is not

262 only, according to Parker, "an unfolding of the new logos: it is also a new form of ritual and mythology" (1996, 256). As Parker reminded us, before its displacement in the late 1960s, the predominant Weberian developmental thesis among liberal elites argued that Catholicism was a traditional factor that impeded the modernization process within Latin America and the Caribbean. In this framework, religion was held responsible for fueling a traditional passive anti-modern ethos. In this framework, religion was "discounted, and the Weberian and neo-Weberian theses were criticized by Marxists and dependentistas for adopting reactionary postures that missed the real explanations of the structural cause of underdevelopment..." (Parker 1996, 25). According to Parker, two radically opposing perspectives surfaced over the next decade: one embraced by some revolutionary Christians in the 1960s (but quickly abandoned) that understood popular religion as a form of alienation that impeded the revolutionary potential of ethical and praxis-based religion; and one that saw popular religion as the essence of Latin American culture and as a form of resistance to the instrumentalizing ethos of modernity. As we have already seen, this view is called the Catholic substrate perspective, and was championed by Morande and central to the bishops' documents at the CELAM conference in Puebla, Mexico (1979). Parker argued that both the dependency approaches and Catholic substrate approaches, which were fairly widespread in the 1960s and 1970s, offered reductionistic and essentialistic perspectives on popular religion. Parker maintained that dependency theories argued for an external factor as decisive for development. According to him, while Weberian and neo-Weberain theories were criticized, "religion, in [the] analytical

263 framework of [dependency theories] was discounted" (1996, 25). "To some eyes," insisted Parker, "the phenomenon of religion is behind the times, given the inevitable process of secularization" (1996,25). Moreover, Parker also explicitly opposed Morande's notion of mestizaje for its essentializing perspective on Latin American and Caribbean history and culture. As I have mentioned already, the syncretism at the heart of the otra logica is for Parker much more than a once-and-for-all religious and cultural mixing, but a symbolic production of bricolage, "or 'tinkering' type, [which] is rather far removed from the rational, formal, planned, systematic, and sometimes standardized production of representations and concepts..." (1996, 232-233). Hence, this kind of bricolage is never proposed as a one-time synthesis, or one-time mestizaje that decisively shaped Latin American and Caribbean identity for good, but as a process that is ongoing in the everyday of people's lives. With respect to the notion of everyday "resacralization," Parker wrote that the "most advanced products of technological science are actually used and represented by the vast majority of the public with an attitude analogous to that with which it regards sacred objects of a magical character" (1996, 253). As we saw in chapter three, this means for Parker that the expressions of modernization are appropriated by the pueblo and "resacralized": "Televison is the tribe's new sorcerer" (1996, 254). Unlike Morande's essentialist definition of cultural mestizaje, Parker evoked the process of bricolage as a historically situated category, which is mindful of power asymmetries and connected to an ongoing mixing and "resacralization" of diverse elements of contemporary culture. As Parker wrote, "culture has no 'essence,' or even 'spirit'" (1996,256). For him, it is re-created everyday, in multiple ways, and by multiple actors.

For Parker, Morande's work and the Catholic substrate notions more generally speak of Latin America as 'one' culture and self-identity despite the great diversity that exists. In Otra logica en America Latina, Parker described contemporary Latin American culture in this way: Today the Latin American cultural mosaic seems to have been pulverized. Not only do we distinguish a dominant culture, an imperfect copy of the North Atlantic culture, but that dominant culture itself has become diversified, without mentioning the multiplication of expressions of emerging indigenous and popular cultures—subjugated millenary cultures that are slowly waking from their lethargy; cultures of poor and oppressed classes that are partially shaking off the cultural alienation in which they were living and solving their basic problems of subsistence. The cultural range of the continent has become kaleidoscopic. A blaze of colours is today enlivening the cultural panorama of brown America. Beneath this cultural dynamism are processes leading to structural heterogeneity that make it possible. Its main impetus, however, comes from the characteristic of the cultural producer and his or her mentality: the Latin American popular subject. There is an inexhaustible vitality at the heart of his or her culture that resists domination (1996,250).

Parker rejected notions that construct Latin America as homogenous with one-time mestizo processes happening in the past, and opted instead for the ongoing bricolage that arises in the cultural production of the subaltern classes. The importance here lies precisely in seeing that subaltern peoples are producers of cultures, hence, active creators of Latin American/Caribbean identities. Unlike some earlier conflictive models that constructed the poor and oppressed as objects of oppression, Parker upheld a notion of the popular classes as those who construct the plural, multifaceted, kaleidoscopic identities of Latin American/Caribbean. For Parker, this cultural production can be clearly perceived in the peoples' popular religion. Yet, despite this description of the plural, multi-faceted, and hybrid cultural production of the popular classes, Parker argued that there exists a "meaning-core" that is central: "it is possible to discern the dynamism of the Christian faith, not in exclusive form, but nevertheless in decisive form" (1996, 251). After referencing the syncretic nature of the subaltern classes as the producers of Latin America/Carribbean's kaleidoscopic plural identity, Parker anchored this syncretic

265 process to its Christian aspect as decisive. Parker argued that "religion" is a vital factor in the cultural fabric of Latin America/Caribbean, but highlighted his claim with the words "especially Christianity" (1996, 252). There is no question that Christianity is an especially vital factor in the cultural fabric of Latin America and the Caribbean. But is Parker re-inscribing the Catholic substrate in a more gentle form here? Is he invoking Morande's work by positing popular religion as the essential form of this decisive Christian meaning-core? Parker challenged reductionist and essentialist critiques of popular religion, but is he re-inscribing these same elements by positing subaltern classes as producers of syncretic thought only insofar as Christianity is the nucleus of this process? Parker never posited Christianity as the only factor, but as one decisive factor among others. While nobody can deny that Christianity has been especially influential in the last five hundred years, the religious traditions of Indigenous peoples have been influential for a much longer period. To dispute this claim is to re-inscribe 'official' perspectives on religious history that obfuscates the "little traditions" of subaltern peoples—those popular traditions that I have been arguing on behalf of throughout this thesis. In re-framing his argument through a Christian "meaning-core," Parker tends to obscure those "other" logics in the syncretic processes he described. This can be witnessed semantically by the choice of words Parker used to describe popular religion in his last chapter: he is no longer utilizing the expression popular religion, but switched to talk about "popular Christianity" as an alternative to "fatigued modern reason" (1996, 258). The last chapter reads very differently from the rest of the book. Parker's conclusions are ambiguous and do not live up to the exciting

arguments he advanced in the previous chapters. Parker rightfully argued that "Christianity is both a root and a horizon of the new Latin American culture—not the sole root and or sole horizon, but surely a powerful and undeniable one" (1996,264). But he also ambiguously ended his book with this line: "popular Christianity, understood as a vital synthesis, is a dynamizing germ of new relations to be struck by human beings among themselves, with nature, and with the transcendent" (1996, 264). Parker was careful to not essentialize Latin American identity by reducing it to 'one' culture, but he nonetheless upheld one cultural expression as "decisive." The last chapter of Parker's Otra logica en America Latina has the effect of subtly veiling the religious histories Indigenous and Afro-American peoples and re-inscribing a colonial perspective on the production of hybrid cultures. Again in a later work, entitled Religion y postmodernidad, published in 1997, Parker wrote this: there is no one univocal and monolithic Latin American identity, however certainly in the framework of these extraordinarily multiple facets, where are mixed the colours, music, arts, tastes, ideas, and religious beliefs, mestizo processes summarize for themselves all of the complexity of Latin American culture... and in the framework of the central trajectory of these mestizo processes, the religious syncretism of the Latin American people with its diverse expressions and forms the background of its Christian roots (1997,78)*.

I am sympathetic to Parker's attempt at trying to uphold polyphonic Latin American identities through the religious systems of subaltern peoples. But to argue that religious syncretism is dependent on a Christian roots tends to re-inscribe the idea that Latin American identity is rooted in a predominant Christian ethos. Is Parker subtly reinscribing early liberationist positions from the 1980s that defined the Latin American context as a "Catholic continent" with a two-fold character: oppressed (or poor) and believing? "Believing" in the early-1980s was understood to mean "the character of the

people as believing Christians" (Gutierrez 1981, 113). Parker's work is focused on the hybrid character of the Latin American continent in ways that have challenged some essentialist perspectives on religious pluralism as far back as the mid-1980s. Hence, this kind of discourse in the late-1990s is inconsistent with his larger agenda. Following the work begun by Canclini, Parker himself argues that part of the problem lies with trying to talk about "hybridity" within a continent that still perceives itself as "Catholic." In Religion y postmodernidad, Parker wrote, "in Latin America the boom of Pentecostal churches, of Afro-American worship, of new religious movements, forces us to face a totally unknown situation in the framework of a continent that traditionally considers itself 'Catholic'" (1997, 20)*. Some theologians have attempted to establish new frameworks for examining the plural identities of Latin America and the Caribbean. As I have argued, Irarrazaval and Parker's work on popular religion has had an important impact on the development of liberationist hermeneutics. However, I have also pointed out that some aspects of their work references Christianity in ways that essentialize it as a core principle. Is this not appropriate for Catholic theologians? I conclude by listening to Catholic liberationist voices in Latin American and the Caribbean, including more recent work by Irarrazaval, that are shifting to a more pronounced pluralist perspective. If Parker is right that the processes of modernity have been appropriated and transformed within the ongoing everyday bricolage of subaltern peoples, then what we are witnessing is not, as some have argued, the end of religion in Latin America and the Caribbean, but rather the reconfiguration and diversification of narrow Catholic substrate notions for a focus on religious pluralism. Irarrazaval and Parker helped develop a trajectory for the emergence

of pluralism as an important liberationist perspective in Latin American and the Caribbean through their willingness to accompany the pueblo on their own religious journeys, processions, and pilgrimages. They have shown that the religion of the pueblo is a complex tapestry of beliefs and practices that is ever-changing.

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