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c h a p t e r 8 Narrating the Sacred Landscape Religious Ethnographies of the Particular Atuntaqui, 1792 Having gone [to the mountain Imbabura] to gather firewood, because she was curious she arrived where there were voices, and Christian prayers and songs, to a spot where more than a hundred souls were gathered, to complain about the drought they were experiencing, my wife got mixed up in it, which was the cause of this rigorous punishment [one hundred public lashings]. Salasaca, 1998 I remember it like this. There in Quinchi Urcu, when it hadn’t rained for a while, they held a fiesta. The people went carrying water in puños and in pondos [types of ceramic vessels] to pour it there, so that it would rain. We poured it in the achupalla plants on Quinchi Urcu. There had just been sun, day after day. The old ones said, “Let’s go! It hasn’t rained. Let’s all go to pour water in the achupalla. It’s just been sunny every day.” Everyone went, saying “Let’s go” and carried water. [They went] to pour the water. . . . They poured the water there, and one or two days later it just rained. Upon putting the water there it rained. . . . God made it rain. Upon seeing the water placed in the mountain he made it rain. The people placed the water there saying, “Please make it rain, it hasn’t rained at all. We can’t sow any crops. There is nothing.” In this way, asking God, we put the water and it just rained. Since long ago the old ones would have fiestas there so that it would rain, and it would just rain. Putting water there it rains, that’s what the old ones would say. Having heard that, we also said “Let’s go put water there” when it didn’t rain, we went too. 142   c h a p t e r 8 In 1792 a native of Atuntaqui, in northern Ecuador, filed a formal complaint against his parish priest. The priest had publicly punished the man’s wife for practicing “idolatry” on the mountain Imbabura. According to the petitioner, Juan Paulino Carlosama, his wife got mixed up with a large group of people who had gathered on the mountain to pray because of a drought, and the parish priest punished his wife unjustly (cited in Moreno Yánez 1991:535–36). In contemporary Salasaca, older people recall experiencing a severe drought, which ended after they gathered to pray on Quinchi Urcu. Although Marta indicated that people no longer pray collectively on the mountain, many people continue to go on an individual basis to petition Mama Quinchi for favors. Furthermore, narratives of the collective rainmaking ritual serve as a basis for individual decisions to leave a mountain offering. Such individual religious practices are the subject of this chapter, and the actions of modern Salasacans show the form that Andean mountain worship takes today. Narrative Ethnographies of the Particular In her essay “Writing against Culture,” Lila Abu-Lughod advocates writing “ethnographies of the particular” in the form of narrative life histories as a way to overcome generalization and “Othering.” Ethnographies of the particular also have the benefit of showing how larger national and transnational processes and cultural institutions are lived out by real individuals : “the effects of extralocal and long-term processes are only manifested locally and specifically, produced in the actions of individuals living their particular lives, inscribed in their bodies and in their words” (Abu-Lughod 1991:150). In order to understand what “Andean religion” means, it is necessary to understand how this religion is lived and experienced by real individuals. Although I do not present complete biographies, I do present the narratives of men and women, young and old, literate and nonliterate people. An analysis of the narrative expressions of such experiences allows us to move beyond an essentialized paradigm of Andean symbol systems to understand the meanings of such symbols at the level of individual belief and experience. The anecdotes I present here show that sacred geography, as an important aspect of Andean cosmology, is not just a pre-Columbian survival but a part of lived experience that is continuously re-created by Narrating the Sacred Landscape    143 human agents. I especially focus on the role of individual experience in maintaining, re-creating, and questioning beliefs about the efficacy of sacred places. Salasacans recognize and accept a multiplicity of personal experiences with the...

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