ANTHROPOLOGISTS/JOURNALISTS/RESEARCHERS Juan Javier Rivera Andía Karen Kampwirth Luisa Elvira Belaunde Conrad L. Kanagy Philip Berryman Eduardo Kohn Joyce M. Bishop Ron Loewe Erica Bornstein Jose Antonio Lucero Dean Brackley Luise Margolies Steve Brouwer Daniel Miguez Michael F. Brown Pedro C. Moreno Andrew Canessa Laurie Occhipinti R. Andrew Chesnut Andrew Orta Christopher L. Chiappari Eric Patterson Beth A. Conklin Donald Pollack Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Gabriela Ramos Marjo de Theije Joan Rappaport Manuela Canton Delgado Susan D. Rose James W. Dow Steven Lee Rubenstein Eduardo Fernandez Thomas L. Schubeck Nancy Forand Timothy Samuel Shah Carolyn Gallagher Paul E. Sigmund Seth Garfield David A. Smilde Virginia Garrard-Burnett David Stoll Peter Gow William H. Swatos, Jr. Christian Gros Anne Christine Taylor Vanessa Elisa Grotti Aparecida Vilaça J. Bernardo Guerrero Kay B. Warren Anne Motley Hallum Johannes Wilbert Susan Hawley Robert D. Woodberry Janet Wall Hendricks Robin M. Wright Jean E. Jackson BOOKS Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. Latin American Religion in Motion. London: Routledge, 1999. Despite its title, this edited volume of collected studies contributed by some of the up-and-coming scholars of religion in Latin America is an outstanding work. It should be read -- immediately -- by anyone who is interested in religion and modern spirituality. The editors of this work, Christian Smith and Joshua Prokopy, are primarily interested in how religious behavior, if not necessarily faith, is shaped by the increasingly pluralized cultural and religious environment, and how religious decisions are made in such a fluid milieu. In a very strong early chapter with the clever title... Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem. University of Texas Press, 1999. Canton Delgado, Manuela. Bautizados en fuego: Protestantes, discursos de conversion y politica en Guatemala. Brown, Michael F. and Fernandez, Eduardo. War of Shadows: The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon. Guerrero, J. Bernardo. A Dios rogando... Los pentecostales en la sociedad aymara del norte grande de Chile. Kamsteeg, Franz. Prophetic Pentecostalism in Chile: A Case Study on Religion and Development Policy. Miguez, Daniel. Spiritual Bonfire in Argentina: Confronting Current Theories with an Ethnographic Account of Pentacostal Growth in a Buenos Aires Suburb. Amsterdam: ?, 1998. Orta, Andrew. Catechizing culture: missionaries, Aymaras, and the “New Evangelism. Smith, Brian H. Religious Politics in Latin America: Pentecostal vs. Catholic. Steigenga, Timothy J. The Politics of the Spirit: The Political Implications of Pentecostalized Religion in Costa Rica and Guatemala. Wilbert, Johannes. Mystic Endowment: Religious Ethnography of the Warao Indians. The Third Church in Latin America: Religion and Globalization in Contemporary Latin America. ARTICLES Berryman, Philip. (May-June, 1994). “The coming age of evangelical Protestantism.” NACLA Report on the Americas. 27(6), 6-10. Bishop, J.M. (2009). “Those who gather in: an indigenous ritual dance in the context of contemporary Mexican Transnationalism.” Journal of American Folklore.122(486), 391-413. For many generations, the Dance of the Cúrpites has been performed annually at Epiphany by young, unmarried men in the Purépecha (Tarascan) town of San Juan Nuevo Parangaricutiro, in the Mexican state of Michoacán. Ethnographic data suggest that the dance is an abstract representation of the biblical visit of the Magi, the underlying metaphor of which the dancers enact in order to express their masculinity and court their sweethearts. Examining possible reasons for the failure of the many dancers who are migrant workers to recreate the dance in California, the author contends that the context-specific meanings of the dance do not easily translate abroad. Nevertheless, upon returning home, young migrants embrace the dance as a way to reaffirm their membership in the community, thereby resolving, if only briefly, the ambiguities of their transnational lives. Bornstein, E. “Finding faith in development: religious non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Argentina and Zimbabwe.” Brackley, D.; Schubeck, T.L. (March 2002). “Moral theology in Latin America (notes on moral theology).” Theological Studies. 63(1), 123-161. Canessa, A. (February, 2000). “Contesting hybridity: evangelistas and kataristas in highland Bolivia.” Journal of Latin American Studies. 32(1), 115-144. Two of the most striking aspects of social change in recent decades in Latin America have been the rise of indigenist movements and the spread of evangelical Protestantism. To date they have been analysed separately, but this article shows that a comparison of the two in the context of Bolivia can prove highly productive. Although in many respects evangelismo and katarismo are diametrically opposed, there are some striking similarities. They draw their adherents from the same social base, undermine the notion of a homogeneous nation-state and also clearly reject the position of cultural mestizaje at the root of Bolivian state ideology. Thus, at a time when 'hybridised' cultural forms are supposed to be becoming more common in Latin America and around the world, these two social movements explicitly contest hybridity. Chesnut, A.R. (2005). “Witches, wailers, and welfare: the religious economy of funerary culture and witchcraft in Latin America.” Chiappari, C.L. (2007). “Culture, power, and identity: negotiating between Catholic orthodoxy and popular practice.” Latin American Research Review. 42(3), 282-296. Conklin, Beth A. (February, 1995). “Thus are our bodies, thus was our custom: mortuary cannibalism in an Amazonian society.” American Ethnologist. 22(1), 75-101. This article examines the cultural logic of mortuary cannibalism practiced, until the 1960s, by the Wari' (Pakaa Nova) of western Brazil. Wari' practices are inadequately explained by the materialist, psychogenic, and symbolic interpretations prominent in recent cannibalism theories. This analysis emphasizes indigenous understandings of the relation of cannibalism to experiences of mourning. Concepts of the human body's social significance made its destruction important to the working out of grief and the attenuation of memories of the dead. In a social process of mourning concerned with transforming mourners' images of the dead, cannibalism appeared as a key element that affirmed ideas of human-animal regeneration and reciprocity expressed in Wari' myth, cosmology, and eschatology. [cannibalism, body concepts, ritual, death and mourning, Amazonian Indians] Conklin, B.A. “Consuming grief: compassionate cannibalism in Amazonian society.” Dow, J. (2005). “The expansion of Protestantism in Mexico: an anthropological view.” Anthropological Quarterly. 78(4), 827-850. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, many people in Mexico and Central America turned to Protestantism as a new religion. The greatest increase has been in rural and Indians areas. This article shows that Protestantism in these areas is not a reaction against the Catholic Church as much as it is a reaction against traditional Indian cargo systems generating political and economic power. These people are farmers who live in tight-knitted, closed communities that dominate their lives. It has been difficult for scholars of religion to understand these cultures because the communities are closed to outsiders and many of the people speak Indian languages. Anthropologists have been more successful than historians at finding the data and discovering why the people are converting. Dow, J. “Holy saints and fiery preachers: the anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America.” Forand, N. (Summer/Fall 2002). “The language ideologies of courtship ritual: Maya Pentacostals and folk Catholics.” Journal of American Folklore. 115(457/458), 332-377. Gallagher, C. (January 2007). “The role of Protestant missionaries in Mexico’s indigenous awakening.” Bulletin of Latin American Research. 26(1), 88-111. Garfield, S. (2000). “Recent works on Amazonian Indians.” Ethnohistory.47(3),755-766. Gros, C. (April, 1999). “Evangelical Protestantism and indigenous populations.” Bulletin of Latin American Research. 18(2), 175-197. Hallum, A.M. (2003). “Taking stock and building bridges: feminism, women’s movements, and Pentecostalism in Latin America.” Latin American Research Review. 38(1), 169-186. As one moves from the social science literature of religion and politics to the literature of women's movements in Latin America, the "silence is deafening" regarding the phenomenon of Pentecostalism, a movement primarily made up of women. This article argues that Pentecostalism does fit into the newer analyses of feminism and women's movements in the region in a much-needed interdisciplinary approach. The research is a literature review reinforced by field study in Central America. Pentecostalism provides an arena where women help each other and can learn civic skills to participate in fledgling democracies in Latin America. Hawley, S. (February, 1997). “Protestantism and indigenous mobilization: the Moravian church among the Miskitu Indians of Nicaragua.” Journal of Latin American Studies. 29(1), 111-129. This article examines the role of the Protestant Moravian Church in the politicisation of Miskitu ethnic identity, and on the mobilisation of the Miskitu against the Sandinistas during the 1980s. It argues that changes in the institution of the Church during the 1960s and 70s, as a result of state policy, socio-economic context and internal conflicts within Miskitu society, led to Moravianism becoming a cultural marker of Miskitu ethnicity. At the same time, the encounter with and appropriation of the pastoral tactics of a Catholic priest resulted in a radicalisation of Miskitu Moravian pastors on indigenous issues. When the Miskitu came to mobilise against the Sandinistas, the Moravian Church was the expressive vehicle and the institutional means through which the mobilisation took place. The article reveals how politicised ethnic identities find their expression in religious institutions. Hendricks, J.W. (May, 1988). “Power and knowledge: discourse and ideological transformation among the Shuar.” American Ethnologist. 15(2), 216-238. Language is constitutive of social reality through the constant articulation and reinforcement of significant linguistic concepts, which give meaning to social relations. Among the Shuar of southeastern Ecuador, discourses on power and knowledge validate the traditional ideological structure and create a new ideological structure through the mobilization of meaning in political speech that legitimates relations of domination. Ideological transformation is assisted by a cultural predisposition to seek non-Shuar sources of technical and symbolic knowledge in the acquisition of power. [Shuar, political change, discourse, ideology, power] Kampwirth, K. (2006). “Resisting the feminist threat: antifeminist politics in post-Sandinista Nicaragua.” NWSA Journal. 18(2), 73-100. In this article I note that one important result of the last several decades of social upheaval in Nicaragua has been the emergence of active feminist and antifeminist movements. Since there has been significant analysis of feminist organizing, and very little on antifeminist organizing, the focus of this paper is antifeminism. I argue that the emergence of this backlash movement can be explained in terms of both domestic and global politics. From a domestic perspective, the movement can be seen as a reaction against the Sandinista revolution and its aftermath. From a global perspective, it is a response to what antifeminists see as the challenges of globalization such as feminist successes in international development agencies and the loss of sovereignty due to neoliberalism. It is also a response to the opportunities provided by globalization such as the emergence of a global antifeminist movement with strong links to like-minded organizations in other countries. This article analyzes the historical roots of the movement and then considers the worldviews of the participants in the movement. Kanagy, C.L. (Summer, 1990). “The formation and development of a Protestant conversion movement among the highland Quichua of Ecuador.” Sociological Analysis. 51(2), 205-217. This paper illustrates factors related to a recent Protestant conversion movement among the Quichua Indians of Chimborazo province, Ecuador. The subordinate status of the peasants within the traditional social order and the subsequent transformation of that order resulted in a situation of economic privation as well as normative and value disorientation. The Protestant missionaries and other Protestant development agencies provided the Quichua with educational and economic resources to improve their wellbeing. The relations and new values of Protestant converts provided personal and social stability. The establishment of the Indigenous Evangelical Association of Chimborazo to represent the religious interests of the Protestants strengthened the movement's viability. The institutionalization of this organization has transformed its goals to include a strong emphasis on the social and economic development of the peasants. The future suggests possible effects of nominalism and secularization on the Protestant Church. Kohn, E. (2002). “Infidels, virgins, and the black-robed priest: a backwoods history of Ecuador’s Montana region.” Ethnohistory. 49(3), 545-582. In this article I compare the Quichua oral history of Oyacachi—one of the last autochthonous settlements of the cloud forest of Amazonian Ecuador—with written and iconographic ecclesiastical traditions regarding colonial-era events. This offers a unique opportunity to understand momentous political, economic, and religious change and how it is experienced locally. It also reveals the ways in which different histories are constructed out of shared memories, events, and spaces. Rather than viewing native histories as present-day constructions, I try to see how oral traditions make history meaningful in ways that do not necessarily obviate their fundamental connection to the past. Loewe, R. (2003). “Yucatan’s dancing pig’s head (cuch): icon, carnival, and commodity.” Journal of American Folklore. 116(462), 420-443. As a central feature of the annual fiesta, the Maya cuch ceremony and its various transformations have been a staple of ethnographic description for more than fifty years. Through this investiture ceremony, responsibility for organizing the fiesta is passed from one religious confraternity to another. Although descriptions of the cuch abound, the ethnography of performance remains fragmented. Ethnographies tend to privilege or essentialize particular performances and ignore variants that violate the ethnographer's notion of authenticity. Indeed, the multiplicity of labels in Spanish and Maya used to describe the cuch and its transformations—cuch, k'ub pol, okostah pol, baile del cochino, etc.—leaves the impression that different enactments or performances bear little or no relation to one another. In contrast, the present article demonstrates the dialogical relations between various transformations of the cuch— pious, satirical, and folkloric—as an aid to interpreting more heterodox performances. In particular, following Bakhtin, the author argues that the rich parody which permeates the k'ub pol—a transformation of the cuch performed on some former henequén plantations—is invariably lost, or reduced to an innocent burlesque, if one fails to recognize its relationship to more sober, "Catholic" interpretations of the cuch. Lucero, J.A. (2006). “Representing ‘real Indians: the challenges of indigenous authenticity and strategic constructivism in Ecuador and Bolivia.” Latin American Research Review. 41(2), 31-56. Asking who "really" speaks and acts for indigenous people is an increasingly important political question in Latin America. This article explores how an "unlikely" Evangelical Protestant Indian organization (FEINE, the Ecuadorian Evangelical Indigenous Federation) and a seemingly more "authentic" Bolivian indigenous federation of communities claiming pre-Columbian authority structures (CONAMAQ, the National Council of Markas and Ayllus of Qollasuyo) have grown in representational strength, or the ability to convince others that they speak for specific constituencies. Through this historically and ethnographically based comparative political study, I argue that indigenous representation is produced across scales, both from "below" (as communities and leaders organize and mobilize) as well as from "above" (as elites and opportunity structures favor some groups over others). FEINE and CONAMAQ present mirror images of the ways in which indigenous people negotiate local-global networks and discourses: FEINE Indianized Protestant Evangelicalism while CONAMAQ transnationalized local ayllu authority structures. This multi-scale analysis suggests that how Indians are spoken about transnationally shapes who gets to speak for Indians locally. Margolies, L. (April, 2006). “Notes from the field: missionaries, the Warao, and populist tendencies in Venezuela.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology. 11(1), 154-172. Occhipinti, L.A. “Acting on faith: religious development organizations in Northwestern Argentina.” Orta, A. (2002). “Living the past another way: reinstumentalized missionary selves in Aymara mission fields.” Anthropological Quarterly. 75(4), 707-743. This article examines Catholic missionaries in the Bolivian highlands. I focus on missionary conversion accounts—narratives of selftransformation in the face of their local mission fields—taking these as an analytic opportunity to address the positions of such global agents as component subjects of Aymara locality. Negotiating preexisting expectations of Catholicism and its representatives as necessary for the reproduction of local Aymara social life as well as emerging pastoral ideologies with their own expectations of indigenous locality, the self-transformation experienced by missionaries in the field asserts a reinstrumentalized missionary self as a plausible translocal subject. Patterson, E. (2005). “Religious activity and political participation: the Brazilian and Chilean cases.” Latin American Politics and Society. 47(1), 1-29. Scholars debate whether the recent conversion of millions of Latin Americans to evangelical Protestantism bodes well for democratic participation or reinforces authoritarian culture and practices. Using a resource model, this study examines the link between participation in religious organizations, political engagement, and political participation in Brazil and Chile. Survey data indicate that religious organizations, particularly Protestant ones, can provide skills that members can transfer to political activity; and that different religions can result in different politics. Rose, S.D.; Brouwer, S. (Fall,1990). “The export of Fundamentalist Americanism: U.S. evangelical education in Guatemala.” American Perspectives. 17(4), 42-56. Rubenstin, S.L. (August, 2007). “Circulation, accumulation, and the power of Shuar shrunken heads.” Cultural Anthropolgy. 22(3), 357-399. In this article, I discuss the changing meanings of tsantsas, the shrunken heads of enemies slain in war, for Shuar, a group indigenous to the Ecuadorian Amazon. By the time Ecuadorian authorities put an end to warfare in the 1950s, Shuar had exchanged all of their tsantsas with European and Euro-American collectors in return for trade goods. I focus on the continuing significance for Shuar of tsantsas, despite their absence, and the impact of the repatriation in 1995 of several heads by the National Museum of the American Indian. I suggest that, prior to colonization and missionization, Shuar headhunting was part of a larger system characterized by the circulation of powers that took multiple and changing forms. I further argue that as shrunken heads themselves began to circulate until they came to rest in Western collections and museums, their meaning was subordinated to a system in which power rests on the accumulation of values. After their long sojourn abroad, the heads now represent distance: the distance of contemporary Shuar from their past, and the distance between Shuar leaders and their constituents. The circulation of tsantsas over the past hundred years thus reveals transnational dimensions of power while simultaneously confounding simple distinctions between savagery and civilization. Shah, T.S. (2004). “The bible and the ballot box: evangelicals and democracy in the ‘global south.’” SAIS Review. 24(2), 117-132. Is the evangelical God a democrat? Are his half a billion worshipers in the "global South" missionaries for democracy—or an illiberal "new Christendom"? Despite both exaggerated fears and inflated hopes, evangelical Christians in the global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) are unlikely to bring dramatic political change—whether in a democratic or authoritarian direction—to their unsettled societies. Though evangelicals are assumed to be agents of the American religious right and purveyors of militant "fundamentalism," their lower socioeconomic status often leads them to consider economics at least as important as "morality" and consequently to align with left-wing political movements perceived to be pro-poor. Furthermore, their inherent voluntarism, pluralism, and fissiparousness constrict their unity and capacity to promote any coherent political program, whether that of a new Christendom or democratic reformism. But these same factors also arguably foster a culture of vigilant dissent and active citizenship among otherwise quiescent and marginalized groups and in the long run equip evangelicals to play a democratizing role in the global South. Smilde, D. (Spring 2004). “Contradiction without paradox: evangelical culture in the 1998 Venezuelan elections.” Latin American Politics & Society. 46(1), 75-102. Venezuelan Evangelicals' responses to candidates in that country's 1998 presidential election seem to confirm the view that their political culture is inconsistent, contradictory, and paradoxical. Not only were they just as likely to support nationalist ex-coup leader Hugo Chávez as was the larger population, they also rejected Venezuela's one Evangelical party when it made a clientelist pact with the infamous candidate of Venezuela's discredited Social Democratic party. This article uses concepts from recent cultural theory to analyze qualitative data from these two cases and make sense of the contradictory nature of Evangelical politics. Stoll, David. (Winter-Spring, 1990). “Evangelical awakening.” Hemisphere.2(2), 34-37. Taylor, A.C. (June, 1996). “The soul’s body and its states: an Amazonian perspective on the nature of being human.” The Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute. 2(2), 201-215. This article begins by exploring some of the premisses concerning personhood, sociality and mortality underlying the experience and representation of self in Jivaroan Achuar culture. Although inexplicit and seemingly contradictory, these assumptions combine to produce an intricate though unspoken theory of what is implied in being a true, live human. Jivaroan sense of self is rooted in the progressive fusion of a generic, given bodily form and of attributed perception of this same bodily form; the initially anonymous body image is thus progressively singularized by the memory of the affective moods experienced in daily social interaction. Achuar selfhood is therefore susceptible to states of weakness and uncertainty, categorized as induced illness, as well as to states of enhancement brought on by communication with a certain category of spirits. The interactive basis of the set of representations concerning selfhood leads the author to discuss traditional anthropological ways of dealing with indigenous ideas, and to suggest an approach more attentive to the contextualization of knowledge. Theije, M.; Mariz, C.L. (2008). “Localizing and globalizing processes in Brazilian Catholicism: comparing interculturation in liberationist and charismatic Catholic cultures.” Latin American Research Review. 43(1), 33-54. The authors discuss the various ways in which liberationist Catholicism and the Catholic charismatic movement in Brazil take positions in the overall globalizing and homogenizing cultural forces in universal Catholicism and wider society. They argue that in their discourses and practices, these two contemporary Catholic movements refer to notions of both local and global and identify with specific parts of global Catholicism by confronting processes of syncretism, acculturation, and inculturation. Through an analysis of the meaning of tradition and roots, the use of music, and the practice of pilgrimage, the authors show how both movements manage the construction of distinctive religious cultures and forms of inculturation in the context of tension between the local and the global. Woodberry, R.D.; Shah, T.S. (2004). “The pioneering Protestants.” Journal of Democracy.15(2), 47-61. According to cross-national research, Protestantism has significantly contributed to global democratization. While Protestantism does not inevitably cause democratization, it often generates social dynamics that favor it. Some of the most important of these are: 1) the rise of religious pluralism; 2) the development of democratic theory and practice; 3) the development of civil society; 4) the spread of mass education; 5) printing and the origins of a public sphere; 6) the reduction of corruption; and 7) economic development. The article explores how Protestant groups, including Protestant missionaries, have promoted these dynamics in the past. It also argues that contemporary Protestant movements—particularly Pentecostalism—are continuing to do so in the present, though with less dramatic results.