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Hesukristo superstar: Entrusted agency and passion rituals in the Roman Catholic Philippines
Author(s) -
Bautista Julius
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the australian journal of anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1757-6547
pISSN - 1035-8811
DOI - 10.1111/taja.12231
Subject(s) - passion , ethnography , agency (philosophy) , context (archaeology) , pledge , embodied cognition , aesthetics , indigenous , sociology , anthropology , art , history , philosophy , law , political science , psychology , archaeology , social science , epistemology , social psychology , ecology , biology
In this article I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2013 in San Pedro Cutud, a village located in the Philippine province of Pampanga. The focus is on the performance of the Via Crucis y Passion y Muerte , a passion play held there every year on Good Friday. Central to the play is the individual pursuit of panata , or divine pledge, by the cast of around forty actors, and particularly by the play's main protagonist: the Kristo, who is nailed to a cross in front of tens of thousands of spectators. In the first part, I describe how the cast engages in the production of a particular theatrical aesthetic that is coterminous with the embodied pursuit of their respective appeals for divine intervention. In the latter portion, I focus on the act of nailing as a context for the formation of intersubjective bonds of trust, or tiuala ya lub , between the Kristo, and his ritual associates. By describing how rituals of pain are premised upon the shareability and entrustedness of ritual agency, I situate the ethnographic data on passion rituals in relation to wider discussions about the anthropological turn to affect.