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Desecularising Culture in Method: Five Theses on Syncretism

By Sebatián Eduardo Dávila [1]

This article is based on Sebastián Eduardo Dávila’s project presentation, held during the 5th Transregional Academy on Latin American Art “Contesting Objects: Sites, Narratives, Contexts” that took place at the Museo de Arte Lima ( 4 May – 12 May, 2024), in cooperation with the German Center for Art History Paris (DFK Paris), the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History and the Forum Transregionale Studien. The Academy was made possible with support from Getty through its Connecting Art Histories Initiative.

Born in the context of religion-politics during the European Reformation, and instrumental for the colonisation of the Americas, the concept of syncretism reappeared in the study of religion and culture in the late 19th century.[2] In the early 1990s, authors were already taking distance from syncretism when dealing with cultural practices, due to the term’s Catholic pedigree, its evocation of religious experience, and its limited understanding as the fusion of two distinguishable, self-contained religions or cultures that mix, inevitably flowing into one.[3] Consequently, anthropologists and related scholars have turned to terms like hybridity and creolization, stemming from zoology and botanics or linguistics, in order to describe juxtapositions, additions, or in-between spaces.[4] This development could be described as a subtle secularisation of culture in method. But what if we stick with religion, and specifically Catholicism, as historical horizon permeating lived experience today, particularly in the Americas? In this refusal to abandon religious terminology, what concept of syncretism do we need for the study of culture? I want to draft five theses to advance an understanding of syncretism not as fusion, but as layering of experience through centuries marked by colonisation, diaspora, and resistance across the hemisphere. The craft of (re-)drafting a concept is necessary if we want to do justice to processes of both imposition and survival, or the loss and transmission of saberes stemming from Indigenous and Afro-diasporic peoples, among others. Saberes means knowledge that is experienced, passed on through means of transmission, not transference.[5] Saberes do not reside in monuments that commemorate the past, but demand acts of remembrance in the present. Craft is a labour involving knowledge, skill, and a sheer amount of experience.

I. Syncretism is experienced

On a Friday evening last May, I was walking one last time through the Floral avenue in Puno, a city in the Southern Andes of Peru, on the shore of the Titicaca lake. The Alasitas market had taken over the street, on my left and right were stands with miniatures of houses, cars, university diplomas, construction carts, dollars and Peruvian soles, but also figurines and sculptures of toads, armadillos, dwarfs associated with St. Patrick’s day, and the lord of abundance or ekeko. These are all alasitas, crafted in different styles and sizes and sold for various prizes, afterwards subject to a ch’alla by the vendor herself. Ch’alla is a practice of blessing involving physical contact, in this case with incense smoke, yellow confetti and healing waters, sprayed onto the miniatures and the client’s right hand and head. I had already bought everything I needed: apartment houses, baby socks and construction carts for my siblings, parents, my partner and friends. Now I let myself be guided solely by the movement of people. The street was packed, we could barely move forward between the market stands and arcade games, intuitively forming lines that would stick together for a while before dissolving again. Music from different bands rumbled in the background, juxtaposed, their instruments amplified in the dance halls close to the shore, at the end of the avenue. We smelled the smoke from the food carts, in my mouth I still had a taste of coca leaves. It felt like we were being blessed through physical contact, forming a procession in which the individual merges into a collective, moving body. Aspiring odours, sensing liquids and flavours through the nose, the mouth, and the skin, we too were subject to a ch’alla.

Ch’alla on the Floral Avenue, Alasitas Celebration.
Photo by Sebatián Eduardo Dávila, Puno, Peru, May 2024.

II. Syncretism has a layered history

Of course, it was packed that Friday in Puno. It was 3 May, the main day of the Alasitas or Illas celebration, and of the celebration of the Crosses — three names for a complex set of practices gathering the entire city in the Buenavista neighbourhood every May since the 1940s at least.[6] But the history of alasitas goes way back in time. They are connected to apachetas, miniature constructions made of stones on paths and sacred sites, as well as illas,alreadypresent in the Pucará, Tiahanacu, and Inca societies prior to colonisation.[7] Illas made of stone capture the spirit of animals and other beings on which human life depends on. These practices have survived over centuries, adapting to the changing conditions and needs of Andean peoples, and under the imposition of Catholic religious praxis, morals, and temporality, for instance through the liturgic calendar. As an early measure of imposition, the colonial administration installed crosses on top of the stoney mountains surrounding the city, identifying them as places for worship to be redirected toward Catholicism. Becoming sites for pilgrimage housing irregular via crucis, these mountains nevertheless kept being apachetas or apus — spiritual or “earth beings” in Andean terms.[8] On 3 May, the crosses are also venerated in a Catholic celebration complicating the material and spiritual relation to these beings.

            Such layering differs from the idea of fusion because unlike fusion, layers touch but do not dissolve into one. In their introduction to the compilation Syncretism/Antisyncretism, Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart discuss characterisations of religion both in analogy to rivers, and to sediments. Religions, on the one hand, are imagined as flowing, following a natural course, and on the other, as encompassing the sedimentation of religious experiences.[9] If the past gives way to the inevitable splitting or merging of rivers in the future, intentionality guides the excavation in search for sediments from the past that, in the words of the authors, “may be available for retrieval and rehabilitation at the right historical moment.”[10]

III. Syncretism is traversed by the diaspora

Mask from the morenada dance on the Azoguini hill.
Photo by Sebatián Eduardo Dávila, Puno, Peru, May 2024.

The next morning, in an attempt to visit one of the crosses on the Azoguini hill protecting the city, I came across a gigantic mask made of solid cardboard, its bulging eyes installed on painted car wheels. With blue eyes, thick lips, messy hair and beard, a hat and a tobacco pipe, an almost hallucinatory expression greeted my way up a couple of steps away from a small Catholic sanctuary. The famous pilgrimage to Azoguini takes place on Holy Friday, but the mask here speaks of a different presence and time, and another date from the liturgy: Candlemas or Candelaria.[11] During a period marked as sacred, and connected to agricultural practices since precolonial times, every year between January and February, the city of Puno gathers a days-long dance offered by numerous troupes of caporales, diabladas, and morenadas, among other dance traditions stemming from a history traversed by colonisation and enslavement. Dancers dress in colourful, luminous dresses and masks, prohibited or limited not only during the colony, but up until the early 20th century, and accused ofindecency and immorality. Masks such as the one I encountered became popular in the 20th century in Puno. They pertain to the morenada, the main dance in Candelaria. Somewhat translatable to Browns, morenos dance to an aesthetic that evokes slavery, testifying to the presence of African slaves in the Andes.[12] Figuring also in the Oruro carnival in Bolivia, the morenada’s masks and dresses find inspiration in forced labour activities in both highland mines and lowland plantations — in Potosí and the Yungas region in the case of Bolivia, in Huancavelica and the coast in Peru. The pollerín or long, layered skirt finds inspiration in wine jars in the Yungas for example, pearls are said to represent the price of slaves, and the weighty dresses evoke the hardship of slavery life through the usage of silver. The sound of matracas or rattles emulates the movement of slaves in chains following a cyclic rhythm that intensifies the sense of an arduous path. Masks exaggerating Black bodily features — bulging eyes and thick lips, are said to represent the slaves’ fatigue and their sickness in the heights. They strengthen the common belief that Blacks were incapable of surviving the heights and cold of the Andes, conditions responsible for their massive death during mining, and the reason for their later mobilisation to plantation work in the lowlands. However, they did work in the mines between the 16th and 18th century, in great numbers. Their historical presence contrasts with the invisibility of Afro-Peruvian dancers and musicians in the Andes today, evoked solely as suffering slaves from the past in the costumes and masks. This dynamic parallels the status of Afro-Peruvians in national discourse, localised in delimited areas or the nation’s colonial era. Their massive population decrease in the 19th century is often poorly explained as a process of migration or dissolution into mestizaje, ignoring socio-political factors like the strong mobilisation of Blacks during the independence wars, and the absence of social structures for survival after slavery was abolished in 1854.[13]

IV. Syncretism includes transmission and loss

The difficulty of encountering archival history poses a challenge for descendants of African slaves throughout the continent.[14] In diaspora studies, cultural practices and especially music have become critical, as sites of transmission, and as testimonies to the presence of Blacks since the early colony.[15] In contrast to textual heritage, music traditions undergo greater acts of borrowing, mixing, displacement, and reinscription that cannot be localised or traced fully, following instead what Paul Gilroy calls a “syncretic pattern”.[16] His influential project The Black Atlantic calls for a hermeneutics that does justice to breaks in tradition, to inaccessibility and loss as constitutive for transmission in the diaspora.

V. Syncretism enables presence-making

After buying alasitas on Friday morning, some of the vendors who practiced the ch’alla insisted I should make the miniatures listen to the mass that day. The church was located in the heart of the Floral avenue, and when I arrived the mass had already started. I had to stay with a crowd outside, a crowd that grew bigger and bigger towards the end of the never-ending sermon. Some people had carefully wrapped their alasitas in Andean textiles or aguayos, others brought them in plastic bags, like me. We carried them in our arms like babies, making them participants of the mass. Some of us cued in front of the small chapel on the right side of the church, waiting our turn to burn candles for them. I had to hurry because someone behind me was desperate to burn their candles exactly at noon, the ideal moment to buy, bless, worship or raise alasitas to the air in order for them to receive the priest’s blessing with holy water. During mass, they were the ones listening — not us, really, becoming illas or spirits through that very act. Our carrying of them, their blessing by the vendors and later the priest, and their guarding of our wishes is what brought them to life. Relationality builds the condition for spiritual presence-making; for becoming alive as a spirit. And in this case, presence-making takes place in a Catholic space and register.

Alasitas wrapped in aguayos listening to the mass, Alasitas Celebration. Photo by Sebatián Eduardo Dávila, Puno, Peru, May 2024.
Blessing of alasitas with holy water, Alasitas Celebration.
Photo by Sebatián Eduardo Dávila, Puno, Peru, May 2024.

VI Syncretism is intentional

Those outside the church like me couldn’t hear the sermon at first, because the speakers were not functioning right. But even after they were fixed, the majority of attendees didn’t show much interest, nor did they seem to feel addressed by the priest’s words. Indeed, some of them reminded him that time was running, screaming “time!”, or “hurry up padresito, close the sermon!” They were worried that he would not bless their alasitas at noon. Others openly complained to him about having to stand under the sun in order to wait for his blessing, and a woman shouted: “we have no interest in your life!” The priest on the other hand did not seem to be worried about time, reminding us that also Jesus suffered in the cross for hours, and then proceeding to tell jokes. The conflict between his insistence on endurance and the crowd’s time counting speaks of a profound tension, constitutive of syncretism. Understood as the juxtaposition or adding of religion, and as the layering of religious experience, syncretism is marked by violent imposition. At the same time, it gives way to practices of excavation in search for past sediments. These practices commit to the survival of saberes through time. They do not pretend to fully know, but to evoke the past in the present. Saberes — knowledge that is experienced, are passed on through relationality and presence-making, led by the will to become subject to, and a subject of, transmission.


References

Brah, Avtar, and Annie E. Coombes. “Introduction. The Conundrum of ‘Mixing’.” In Hybridity and its Discontents. Politics, Science, Culture, edited by Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes. London, New York: Routledge, 2000.

De la Cadena, Marisol. Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Golte, Jürgen, and Doris León Gabriel. Alasitas. Discursos, Prácticas y Símbolos de un ‘Liberalismo Aymara Altiplánico’ entre la Población de Origen Migrante en Lima. Lima: Centro Bartolomé de las Casas et. al., 2014.

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

La Serna Salcedo, Juan Carlos. Dioses y Mercados de la Fortuna. Recorridos Históricos del Ekeko y las Alasitas en el Altiplano Peruano. Lima: Ministerio de Cultura, 2013.

Leopold, Anita Maria, and Jeppe Sinding Jensen. “Introduction to Part II.” In Syncretism in Religion. A Reader, edited by Anita Maria Leopold and Jeppe Sinding Jensen. London: Equinox Publishing, 2004.

Palacios, Rita M., and Paul M. Worley. Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge.: University of Arizona Press, 2019.

“Puno. Feligreses realizan Peregrinaje al Cerro Azoguini en Viernes Santo.” Andina. Agencia Peruana de Noticias, 2024. https://andina.pe/agencia/noticia-puno-feligreses-realizan-peregrinaje-al-cerro-azoguini-viernes-santo-980002.aspx. Accessed July 11, 2024.

Revollo Fernández, Antonio. Obra Maestra. Danzas del Carnaval de Oruro. Oruro: Latinas Editores, 2018.

Saraza Barriga, Rubén. Poder de las Wakas. Lenguaje de la Espiritualidad Andina. Puno: Jupiter Impresores, 2019.

Schmidt, Bettina E. “Afro-Peruvian Representations in and around Cusco. A Discussion about the Existence or Non-existence of an Afro-Andean Culture in Peru.” Indiana 24 (2007): 191-209.

Shaw, Rosalind, and Charles Stewart. “Introduction. Problematizing Syncretism.” In Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism. The Politics of Religious Synthesis, edited by Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart. London, New York: Routledge, 1994.

Vignolo Huamaní, Gisella, et. al. Los Afrodescendientes en el Perú. Una Aproximación a su Realidad y al Ejercicio de sus Derechos. Lima: Defensoría del Pueblo, 2011.


Footnotes

[1] I thank all members of the 5th. Transregional Academy on Latin American Art (Lima, May 2024), and especially my group, for listening attentively and commenting the first ideas for this text.

[2] Anita Maria Leopold and Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Introduction to Part II,” in Syncretism in Religion. A Reader, ed. Anita Maria Leopold and Jeppe Sinding Jensen (London: Equinox Publishing, 2004), 14 ff.

[3] Compare: Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart, “Introduction. Problematizing Syncretism,” in Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism. The Politics of Religious Synthesis, ed. Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), 2 ff.

[4] See also: Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes, “Introduction. The Conundrum of ‘Mixing’,” in Hybridity and its Discontents. Politics, Science, Culture, ed. Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes (London, New York: Routledge, 2000).

[5] Compare: Rita M. Palacios and Paul M. Worley, Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge. (University of Arizona Press, 2019), 73.

[6] Juan Carlos La Serna Salcedo, Dioses y Mercados de la Fortuna. Recorridos Históricos del Ekeko y las Alasitas en el Altiplano Peruano (Lima: Ministerio de Cultura, 2013), 81 ff.

[7] In what follows, I will refer to La Serna Salcedo, Dioses y Mercados de la Fortuna. Recorridos Históricos del Ekeko y las Alasitas en el Altiplano Peruano, 63 ff; Jürgen Golte and Doris León Gabriel, Alasitas. Discursos, Prácticas y Símbolos de un „Liberalismo Aymara Altiplánico“ entre la Población de Origen Migrante en Lima (Lima: Centro Bartolomé de las Casas et. al., 2014), 76 ff; Rubén Saraza Barriga, Poder de las Wak’as. Lenguaje de la Espiritualidad Andina (Puno: Jupiter Impresores, 2019), 75.

[8] On earth-beings, see: Marisol De la Cadena, Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 24-28.

[9] Shaw and Stewart, “Introduction. Problematizing Syncretism,” 15-18. The authors do address human intervention and agency when dealing with the rivers-metaphor.

[10] Here they reference Mariane Ferme’s approach to the composite origins of religious synthesis, in: Ibid., 16.

[11] “Puno. Feligreses realizan Peregrinaje al Cerro Azoguini en Viernes Santo,” Andina. Agencia Peruana de Noticias 2024, accessed July 11, 2024, https://andina.pe/agencia/noticia-puno-feligreses-realizan-peregrinaje-al-cerro-azoguini-viernes-santo-980002.aspx. In what follows, I will refer to: La Serna Salcedo, Dioses y Mercados de la Fortuna. Recorridos Históricos del Ekeko y las Alasitas en el Altiplano Peruano, 11 ff., 36 ff., 75 ff.

[12] In what follows, I will refer to: Bettina E. Schmidt, “Afro-Peruvian Representations in and around Cusco. A Discussion about the Existence or Non-existence of an Afro-Andean Culture in Peru,” Indiana 24 (2007); Antonio Revollo Fernández, Obra Maestra. Danzas del Carnaval de Oruro (Oruro: Latinas Editores, 2018), 77 ff., 163.

[13] See also: Gisella Vignolo Huamaní, et. al., Los Afrodescendientes en el Perú. Una Aproximación a su Realidad y al Ejercicio de sus Derechos (Lima: Defensoría del Pueblo, 2011), 37-40.

[14] For a profound, situated exploration of this challenge, see: Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

[15] See: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1 ff., 72 ff.

[16] Ibid., 3.


About the Author

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila’s current research focuses on the relation between syncretism and contemporary art throughout the Americas. His dissertation deals with art practices from post-war Guatemala, and his publications include questions of materiality, topography, Indigeneity, and violence. He studied art history and film studies in Jena, Berlin, and Mexico City, and formed part of the research training group “Cultures of Critique” at the Leuphana University (Lüneburg). In 2023, he was a Visiting Student Researcher at Stanford University, and is currently a fellow at the research network “Cambridge Visual Culture”. He is part of the political group “VOCES de Guatemala en Berlín”.


Citation: Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Desecularising Culture in Method: Five Theses on Syncretism, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 18.07.2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/121h7


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Forum Transregionale Studien (18. Juli 2024). Desecularising Culture in Method: Five Theses on Syncretism. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Abgerufen am 10. November 2024 von https://doi.org/10.58079/121h7


Forum Transregionale Studien

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

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