Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes

Notes

Notes Chapter 1: The Salasca Runa 1. Attempts to define religion have led to contentious discussions that are beyond the scope of this book. I will rely on Edward B. Tylor’s definition of religion as “belief in spiritual beings” (Tylor 1965:11). Spiritual beings in this context include God, the devil, saints, souls, mountain spirits, and spirit masters of pathways and springs. 2. I found some colonial documents following a reference in Carrera Colin (1981). There is no mention of Salasaca as a place or a people in the writings of colonial chroniclers . It is not mentioned among the eighteen towns in the Ambato region that were settled (reducidos) by Antonio de Clavijo in 1584. Neither Juan de Velasco’s Historia del Reino de Quito (1998 [1788]) nor any of the reports contained in the Relaciones histórico-geográficas de la Audiencia de Quito (Ponce Leiva 1991) mention Salasaca. In his 1771 Descripción histórico-topográfica de la provincia de Quito the Jesuit priest Mario Cicala did mention Salasaca as an annex of the town of Pelileo: “In its district [Pelileo] has various annexes of Salasaca Indians with little churches or chapels such as Llumaqui, Panchanlica, Guambal ó, San Ildefonso, etc., by which the priest has in his charge around 900 souls” (Cicala 1994 [1771]:392). The area Cicala mentions is much more extensive than the modernday boundaries of Salasaca, and he seems to be subsuming various indigenous populations under the term “Salasaca Indians.” 3. The current estimate of the Salasacan population is twelve thousand, whereas estimates for the Saraguros number around twenty-two thousand (www.saraguro.org). The area of Salasaca today is approximately fourteen square kilometers (Carrasco A. 1982:21). 4. I use the term blanco-mestizo to refer to Ecuadorian whites and people of mixed heritage. Salasacans use the term cholos to refer collectively to Spanish-speaking Ecuadorians who do not wear indigenous ethnic attire. In Salasacan usage cholos is a complicated term that can also be translated as “whites” (see Weismantel 2001). I use chola here to refer to the non-Salasacan market women who come to the community to sell food. 5. See Rappaport (1994, 1998). In his analysis of indigenous religion in colonial Mexico , William Taylor (1996) emphasizes the importance of studying local religion and the role of individual priests. In order to understand rituals of the Bolivian Aymara, Thomas Abercrombie (1998b) combined extensive archival research with ethnographic fieldwork to show how rituals are a form of Andean memory. Peter Wogan’s book Magical Writing in Salasaca (2004) is the first study of Salasacan rituals to focus on indigenous responses to church and state policies. Barry Lyons’ 2006 book Remembering the Hacienda also 166   n o t e s combines archival research with ethnography and oral histories of indigenous people in Chimborazo Province, Ecuador. Although my research is based mainly on participantobservation and ethnographic interviews, I also make use of oral histories and archival documents, but the archival materials on Salasaca are scant. I could not find any church documents from either the colonial period or the early nation-building years. 6. Barbara Tedlock’s distinction between memoirs and narrative ethnographies is useful here. “In contrast to memoirs, narrative ethnographies focus not on the ethnographer herself, but rather on the character and process of the ethnographic dialogue or encounter” (1991:78). A narrative ethnography presents not only the author’s experiences, but also ethnographic data and cultural analysis. Also, whereas the anthropologist is the main character in a memoir, in an ethnographic narrative the anthropologist is a secondary character. Chapter 3: Textual Strategies and Ritual Control in Early Twentieth-Century Salasaca 1. Salasacan cargo holders are exclusively male, but among the Saraguros of the southern Ecuadorian Andes, women serve as festival sponsors in their own right, independently of their husbands. This may be a continuation of the Andean value of gender parallelism (Belote and Belote 1989). 2. Note that the grandfather’s last name was Masaquiza, and the petitioners’ last names were Jerez and Anancolla. By this time, civil authorities were recording indigenous people using the father’s last name, which suggests that these petitioners were claiming inheritance from their mother’s father. This is not certain, however, since we do not know how Salasacans were transmitting last names at this time, nor do we know whether civil authorities correctly recorded people’s last names. Chapter 4: Prayer and Placemaking in the Andes 1. Ideally, an alcalde should serve for two...