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Syncretic Subjects and Body Politics: Doubleness, Personhood, and Aymara Catechists
Author(s) -
Orta Andrew
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1999.26.4.864
Subject(s) - personhood , syncretism (linguistics) , anthropology , ethnography , identity (music) , politics , sociology , colonialism , gender studies , history , aesthetics , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology , archaeology , political science , law
Missionaries describe the Aymara catechists with whom they work as "divided in two"—part "Aymara" and part "Christian." This characterization of partial cultural merging links a dualizing paradigm of embodiment with a dualizing approach to conjunctural settings familiar from much of the Andean ethnographic literature and casts Aymara as passive indices of colonial and postcolonial history. Drawing upon contrasting approaches to embodiment and identity, and illustrating these with data from the Aymara case, I examine the positioned practices by which catechists realize such composite settings as coherent lived worlds. [Aymara, Bolivia, embodiment, identity, missionization, personhood, syncretism]