Abstract

DEMERA, Juan Diego. Resistances and ritual survivals. Analogies and syncretic ambivalences among Misak protestants. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2022, vol.45, n.1, pp.173-196.  Epub Dec 28, 2023. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v45n1.89860.

The dynamics of religious belief in the Latin American indigenous universe are not restricted to the multiple variants and strategies of colonial Catholicism. The historical presence of large international Protestant missions in the various indigenous territories at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the recent pluralization of the Protestant offer and searches at the end of this same century, particularly around ethnic and rural Pentecostalism, convene again multiple interests, positions, strategies and local religious, symbolic and cultural adaptations.

This text addresses some of these variants of protestant belief among the Misak indigenous people of the department of Cauca, Colombia. From oral narratives and the analysis of their representations on identity/alterity, particularly of the Misak traditional healer and the Protestant believer, some of the processes of breaking the deep doctrinal, institutional and cosmogonically established polarizations between these diverse contemporary expressions of indigenous belief are reconstructed.

Undoubtedly, diverse offers of Protestant religiosity, linked both to the interdenominational missions of the early twentieth century and to the recent Pentecostal churches of the lowlands of the department of Cauca, brought to the Indigenous Reservation of Guambía, constitute referents that permanently confront the Misak mythical and ritual references. At the same time, particular ritual and social trajectories of this ethnic Protestantism, as well as a historical indigenous philosophy of contact, open, plural and syncretic, allow the construction of diverse ritual and ethnic religious resistances, and even symbolic bridges between the universe of Protestantism and ancestral shamanic practices.

These permanent processes of negotiation, escape, adaptation, fusion or complementarity between symbolic and religious referents in confrontation, permanently renew the interest of the different syncretic metaphors. In this text, in particular, the syncretic figures of analogy and ambivalence are analyzed within the processes of reconstruction of the traditional Misak belief, in the midst of the offers and ethnic transformations of Protestantism in the indigenous reservation of Guambía.

Keywords : Guambía; Misak; pentecostalism; protestantism; ritual; syncretism.

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