Performing Religion in the Americas: Media, Politics, and Devotional Practices of the 21st Century
Edited by Alyshia Gálvez.
Berg Publishers

1. Introduction

Alyshia Gálvez, New York University, US
Bio: Alyshia Gálvez is faculty fellow/assistant professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from New York University. She is currently working on a book manuscript of her research with Mexican immigrant organizations dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe in New York City and beginning a new medical anthropology project, an ethnographic study of the epidemiological paradox of high birthweight babies born to Mexican immigrant women.

PART ONE

2. “Re-defining Andean Sacred Landscapes and Identities: Authenticity, Migration, and Visual Reproduction in Andean Religious Rituals”

Gisela Canepa-Koch, PUCP, Péru
Bio: Gisela Canepa-Koch is a Professor of Anthropology in the Social Studies Department at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú where she also co-chairs the Taller de Antropologia Visual (Visual Anthropology Workshop). She received her Master's in Anthropology at the Pontificia Católica and her doctorate studies at the University of Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of Máscara, Transformación e Identidad en los Andes (Mask, Transformation and Identity in the Andes; Lima: PUC, 1998) and has edited Identidades Representadas: performance, experiencia y memoria en Los Andes (Acted Identities: performance, experience and memory in the Andes; Lima:PUC, 2001). She has is also a documentary filmmaker.

Abstract: Cánepa-Koch discusses the use of videography among confraternal dance troupes in Peru and describes how late capitalist technologies which can be as easily seen as the proliferation of globalization can also be creatively reappropriated for the purpose of engaging in debates about tradition and authenticity

3. “The Celebration of Iemanja, New Year's Eve in Rio De Janeiro: Tradition, Negotiation, and the Transformation Of An African Goddess”

Zeca Ligiéro, UNI-RIO, Brazil
Bio: Zeca Ligiéro is a Brazilian artist, author, theater director, and professor/scholar specializing in Afro-Brazilian culture. He teaches at the University of Rio de Janeiro where he founded the Graduate Theatre Department, and has been a visiting fellow at Yale and New York University. He has written several books, many articles, and produced many plays in Brazil and U.S., and he also lectures widely.

Abstract: Ligiéro describes the diffusion of the cult to Iemenjá in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro states in Brazil and the ways in which it is practiced today. He shows how the efforts by Rio’s municipal authorities to coopt and control the festival, eliding the figure of Iemenjá altogether in the effort to make it palatable and comprehensible to tourists, are as much a reflection of notions of race and the cultural legacy of slavery, as they are a struggle between commercialism and tradition or orthodoxy and popular religiosity.

4. “The Pilgrimage of Zapopan: Popular Fervor or Festivity?”

Lourdes Celina Vázquez Parada, Universidad  de Guadalajara, México
Translated by Alyshia Gálvez
Bio: Dr. Lourdes Celina Vázquez Parada is a scholar of literature, politics and a sociologist. She is a Researcher and Professor at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, and member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (National System of Research Workers of CONACYT). She directs the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Guadalajara. She has published on cultural identity, the history of religion, historical consciousness related to the Christero War in Mexico and religious beliefs in Mexico, including Identidad, cultura, y religión en el sur de Jalisco (1993), Testimonios sobre la revolución cristera (2001),and Protagonistas y testigos de la guerra cristera with Federico Munguía(2002).

Abstract: Vázquez relates the contingent resolution of federalism and centralism in the devotion to La Virgen de Zapopan. Contesting the dominance of the capital and the predominant national devotion toOur Lady of Guadalupe, this is a local practice, a regional festival par excellence, having emerged in the particular local history of the War of the Mixtón, and the Franciscan evangelization in Jalisco. She further gracefully describes the simultaneity of official and popular celebrations, in which an overall air of festivity masks the spatial separation of simultaneous clerical and popular performances of faith.

5. “The Drama of Death: Popular Religion and Performing the Good Death in Oaxaca”

Kristin Norget, McGill University, Canada
Bio: Kristin Norget  is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Her research focuses on religious practices, discourses and identity in Oaxaca and Mexico, including the Catholic Church and social movements. More recently, she has begun research on political violence in Oaxaca. She is author of Days of Death, Days of Life: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca (Columbia University Press, 2006).

Abstract: Norget contributes a richly ethnographic discussion of funerary practices in a marginal neighborhood of the city of Oaxaca. Rather than a struggle between orthodoxy and popular religiosity or a description of a spectacular festival performance, as in other essays in this volume, Norget takes us into the intimate realm of local community life and the ways people deal with the always expected, and yet unexpected breach that a death represents. She describes the tensions between popular notions of what constitutes a “good death” and the economic pressures which limit people’s ability bring it to pass.

6.  “Performing Imperialist Fundamentalism(s)”

Linda Kintz, University of Oregon, US
Bio: Linda Kintz is Professor of English at the University of Oregon and is also affiliated with the Comparative Literature and Theatre Departments. Her books include The Subject's Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama (Michigan); Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (Duke); and, with Julia Lesage, Media, Culture, and the Religious Right (Minnesota).

Abstract: Kintz describes how with the consolidation of a fundamentalist interpretation of the United States’ Christian religious heritage by the Religious Right that the idioms and practices of faith begin to wield currency in other discursive realms.She outlines how the post-September 11 Telethon for Heroes “laid out the framework of popular vagueness within a Christian symbolic field”, and while a performance by Wyclef Jean of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” indexed the return to religion in American popular discourse it also involved quite explicit, if “insider”, references to symbolism drawn from African diasporic liberation movements from Rastafarianism to Garveyism, and personified in Jean’s own Haitian nationalism, even within a hyper-patriotic “American” context.

7. “She Made Us Human": The Virgin of Guadalupe, Popular Religiosity and Activism in Mexican Devotional Organizations in New York City

Alyshia Gálvez, New York University, US

Bio: See above

Abstract: . In this piece, Gálvez explores popular devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe and her role in the initiatives of Mexican migrants in New York City in order to examine how she has come to be so utterly powerful and crucial to their agendas. This involves, first, tracing the history of Guadalupan devotion and then examining the meaning of contemporary practices of Guadalupan devotion.  

PART TWO

8. “The Second Coming. Religion as Entertainment”

Jean Franco, Columbia University, US
Bio: Jean Franco is the winner of the PEN 1996 award for lifetime contribution to the dissemination of Latin American literature in English and has been recognized by the Chilean and Venezuelan governments for advanced scholarship on Latin American literature in the United States. She has served as president of the Latin American Studies Association in Great Britain and of the Latin American Studies Association in the US. She is currently Professor Emerita at Columbia University. Her most recent books include: Critical Passions: Selected Essays, edited by Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman (1999) and The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Latin America and the Cold War (2002).   

Abstract: Everywhere secularism is in retreat. Not only are fundamentalists on the rise but also many competing brands of spirituality are now widely disseminated through media, film, best selling fiction and television. While most orthodox religions have always used ritual and performance, telecommunications and televisual effects are transforming religion into religiosity. Can we detect a transition from religion to religiosity as the 'mysteries' of religion- God, angels, miracles- begin to invade entertainment media at all levels from rock to television series, from cinema to everyday language? Does this mean that religion has been democratized as Carlos Monsiváis (perhaps ironically) suggests or does the pervasive religiosity shift attention from other questions that might account for the return of religion- the future viewed as decline, the bankruptcy of the political, the end of secular utopias?.

 9. “Performances of Spiral Time”

Leda Martins, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Bio: Leda Martins is a Poet and a Professor of Dramatic Arts and Literature at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and at the Graduate Arts program at FALE/UFMG. In 2000, she completed a Post-Doctorate in Performance Theories at New York University. In 1991, she finished her doctorate in Comparative Literature at UFMG and, in 1981, the Master of Arts at Indiana University. She is the author of several books and has published essays and poems in the United States, France and England and also several papers and articles in Brazil. Among her books we can highlight: O moderno teatro de Corpo santo, UFMG Publishers/1991; A cena em sombras, Perspectiva Publishers/1995; Afrografias da memória, Perspectiva Publishers/1997; Dias Anônimos, Sette Letras Publishers/1999. Currently, she is preparing Performances do tempo espiralar, to be published this year.

Abstract: Africa prints her marks, traces and styles on the American territories, inscribing herself on the palimpsests that, by means of countless processes of cognition, assertion and metamorphosis, both conceptual and formal, transcreate and perform her presence and heritage. The arts and cultural creations colored by the African knowledge ostensibly reveal the ingenious and arduous means of survival of the African memory transplanted to the Americas by the diasporic Atlantic slave-trade and by other transcultural and transnational routes. Leda Martins is Professor of Literature, Arts and Sciences at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. A major theorist of Afro-Brazilian religious performance, she has done extensive work on 'congados' and other forms ofdiasporic worship that participate in the transmission of Afro-Brazilian memory and identity.

10. Afterword: Place-a-luiah!! Reverend Billy Claims a Democratic Public Space

Diana Taylor, New York University
Bio: Diana Taylor is professor of Performance Studies and Spanish and Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. Her publications include: The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War" (Duke), Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (University Press of Kentucky).

Abstract: Diana Taylor celebrates performance artist Reverend Billy (Bill Talen) and his evocation of place, “Place-a-luiah!” In spite of the many layers of humor reached by this raging, charismatic televangelist, Reverend Billy’s performance works within and against the logic of transnational capitalism, tourism, and religious fundamentalism.