Ritual Encounters: Otavalan Modern and Mythic Community (review)

More than 60 years after John Collier and Aníbal Buitrón’s The Awakening Valley (1949) first examined the impact of market-oriented economic and cultural changes in northern Ecuador, the Otavalo region’s remarkable confluence of indigenous cultural conservatism and transnational economic success continues to fascinate scholars and travelers. Hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists visit Otavalo’s “Indian market” every year, purchasing textiles and other crafts in the Plaza de Ponchos and turning the modest city into one of the most visited tourist destinations in South America. Recent decades have also witnessed a reverse migratory and cultural flow, as tens of thousands of Otavaleños have left Ecuador and ventured out into the world—to New York, Barcelona, Tokyo, and seemingly everywhere in between—to sell and market their wares, including, as readers of this journal are undoubtedly aware, their music. Cognizant of their distinctive look and sound, Otavaleños at home and abroad have proven adept merchants of their own identity, catering to transnational audiences’ fascination with Andean indigeneity through their commercial, musical, and even sartorial offerings.

The celebrated success of the Otavalo community in the transnational marketplace has made them a frequent subject of anthropological investigation, typically positioning Otavalo as a site of indigenous modernity and traveling culture(s), heavily impacted by processes of migration and globalization (e.g. Kyle 2000; Meisch 2002). Michelle Wibbelsman’s new monograph, Ritual Encounters: Otavalan Modern and Mythic Community, makes an important and nuanced contribution to this literature, acknowledging the impact of transnational migration and economic/social mobility on the Otavalan community, but returning our attention to the dynamics of the local and still quite vibrant ritual life of that community in the early 21st century. Through a series of chapter-length case studies, ranging from large scale civic-religious festivals to intimate family ceremonies, Wibbelsman positions ritual as a privileged realm where Otavalan modernity is itself negotiated and defined—a social space within which emergent conflicts over class, ethnicity, generation, and gender, often exacerbated by the experience of migration, are contested and worked out.

Though the ethnographic focus of Wibbelsman’s text is resolutely in the present, the clear goal throughout the book is to tie contemporary ritual practices to a more broadly conceived “mythic” realm that is both past and present, an “Andean time-space” traversed by Otavaleños in their daily and ritual lives (15–18). Defining and elaborating on this mythic realm in the opening two chapters of the book, Wibbelsman draws especially upon notions of Andean cosmology depicted in the work of Otavalan shaman and anthropologist Luis Enrique Cachiguango, which she reinforces here and in later chapters with frequent references to indigenous Andean practices from the early colonial period. The search for links between pre-Hispanic and contemporary cultural practices is, of course, an old one in Andeanist anthropology and ethnohistory, but Wibbelsman smartly moves beyond the mere search for survivals to examine how Otavalans find meaning in the continued re-creation and communal interpretation of a deeply rooted ritual life, positioning “ritual seasons and festival practices” as “reflexive performances through which people represent the world they live in to themselves in an effort to understand it” (40).

Wibbelsman begins in Chapter 2 with the Pawkar Raymi festival, a multi-day event that takes place annually during Carnival in the town of Peguche. Launched in the mid-1990s by young Pegucheños, first as a soccer tournament and later expanded to incorporate cultural performance, Pawkar Raymi is, in every sense, an invented tradition—a new event, self-consciously evoking Inca calendrical rites and implicitly drawing on past traditions in its internal organization, but externally focused on contemporary regional concerns and interests. Wibbelsman notes, for instance, that the festival is not organized within the historic Andean cargo system of ritual sponsorship, but that it nonetheless incurs similar voluntary mutual debts among the younger generation of returned migrants who collaborate in its organization...