Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800-1876 (review)

Through a study of religion as cultural field, social activity, and political practice, Terry Rugeley has revealed the cultural world of southeastern Mexico in the nineteenth century. Of Wonders and Wise Men might be described as geological in composition, consisting of field surveys and core samples of a topic as deep as it is broad. Four chapters provide panoramic views of the spiritual practices and beliefs of rural and urban populations, wealthy clerics and hacienda workers, and Spanish and Maya speakers. Here Rugeley begins with a chapter on the "unwritten almanac" of folk wisdom through which Yucatecans understood the world and their place in it. He proceeds with a chapter on the place of pious literature, organizations, and fiestas in urban bourgeois spirituality and another on the meaning and politics of popular icons in rural Yucatán. Finally, he explores the emergence of popular anticlericalism and spiritualism, from the mid– to late nineteenth century. Interspersed among these chapters, which comprise a broad survey of religious culture in Yucatecan society, Rugeley provides three "micro" studies of religion as a contested dimension of daily life. Here the reader will encounter cleric Raymundo Pérez, whose life spanned the period of colonial rule, independence, and the Caste War and its aftermath. Rugeley also visits the long-lived cofradÌa of Hacienda San Antonio Xocneceh and considers the bitter religious and political conflict that led to the transfer of the religious administration of the Petén from Yucatecan to Guatemalan control.

Historical in subject but anthropological in inspiration, Of Wonders and Wise Men provides the reader with an understanding of broad shifts and enduring continuities. The impacts of such events as the Bourbon reforms, national independence, the decline of conservatism, the institutional crisis and transformation of the church, and the rise of Mexican liberalism and anticlericalism are clearly marked. Here the life of Raymundo Pérez stands as an example of the deep changes that may take place beneath a veneer of enduring traditionalism; even this standard-bearer of conservative orthodoxy gradually adopted the practices and values of liberal capitalism in order to survive and succeed in changing times. Rugeley's discussion of such broad transitions serves, however, to throw underlying spiritual and cultural continuities into sharp relief. Despite the fall of an empire, the emergence of a new nation, and the onset of a destructive Caste War, the spiritual culture of southeastern Mexico did not undergo fundamental change over the course of the nineteenth century. The "unwritten almanac" of folk knowledge continued to grow, and cults dedicated to local religious icons remained at the center of rural spiritual life. While most cofradÌas were abolished or privatized, gremios and other popular voluntary religious associations emerged to take their place. At the end of the nineteenth century and even to the present—as Rugeley illustrates with contemporary ethnographic evidence—southeastern Mexico has continued to be a land of miracles, wonders, and wise men.

While Rugeley avoids extensive discussion of the Caste War, this study, like his earlier work, Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, sets that event in an entirely different light. Rugeley suggests, in striking difference from other analysts who have emphasized or assumed the autonomy of the cultural and spiritual world of the Maya, that the religious world of nineteenth-century Yucatán was one of shared and interrelated spiritual cultures. Icons, miracles, and apparitions governed the spiritual lives of urban Hispanic elites as much as they did those of Maya commoners, and religious institutions played a critical mediating role between distinct ethnic and social groups. Reconsidered in the cultural landscape presented in Of Wonders and Wise Men, the cult of the speaking cross that emerged among Mayan Caste War rebels appears as a hybrid phenomenon in keeping with...