Culture, Power, and Identity: Negotiating between Catholic Orthodoxy and Popular Practice

Religious practice involves both religious institutions and individual actors, as well as one or more official and popular versions within particular traditions. In reflecting on trends in religious research, one obviously looks to changes in how religion is practiced in the context of a complex set of historical and political circumstances, and how it sheds light on the dynamic of cultural identity and the power relations between institutions and social actors. Perhaps the most significant recent sea change in Latin American scholarship on religion began in 1990, with the publication of David Stoll's and David Martin's books on the growth of Protestantism and its potential implications for the region.¹ Given the extensive and ongoing research on this topic, this trend in scholarship was significant for reasons beyond the actual growth of Protestantism itself, which in Guatemala had already leveled off at about 10 percent a year by the mid-1980s (Garrard-Burnett 1998, 162), decreasing further and perhaps even becoming negative by the year these books were published (Gooren 2001, 190). In any case, Protestantism has become an established part of Latin American studies, and deservedly so. Of course other changes in the religious landscape have been taking place in recent decades, probably the most significant of which are the growth of the Catholic Church and of indigenous religions—as well as syntheses of these—in Guatemala (Garrard-Burnett 1998, 168–169) and elsewhere, as Orta's and Lester's books illustrate.²

While the works here address diverse topics, several themes link them together. Foremost, perhaps, is the absolutely central importance of popular understandings and appropriations of official religious doctrine and practice, for religious, political, social, and cultural reasons. Related to this is the extent to which the Catholic Church has always had to adapt to local contexts and popular practice, even when attempting to eliminate the latter. A third theme is the link between religion and various types of identity, and how these interact with and confront the antinomies of modernity. Finally, reflecting the institutionalization of Protestantism within academic research on Latin America, and the resurgence of Catholicism in the region, the institutional religious backdrop, if not central actor, in all of the works reviewed here is the Catholic Church, with Protestantism only mentioned here and there as part of the background.

Daniel Reff's Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New is a fascinating study of the parallels between the rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire and in colonial Mexico. While these are two very different historical and cultural settings, they share two important features: both saw the significant growth and spread of Christianity where it had not existed before, and this happened in the context of dramatic social, cultural, political and demographic change. The book thus implicitly answers the question, What accounted for the tremendous growth...