Output details

Holy Week in the Andes

This ethnographic film forms part of a broader social-anthropological project on concepts and practices around the ritual embodiment of Christian divinities in the Andean Callejón de Huaylas (Peru), from 1900 to the present. The primary focus is on the socio-cosmological life of Ancashino ritual objects with a special focus on their material, sensory and aesthetic properties. Andean ritual objects are active characters in all ritual contexts, where music, dance and drama activate their miraculous properties as fully as food consumption, pilgrimage, sacrifice and gift donation. Ritual performance has been captured in a film narrative that focuses on the interplay between the collective production of rituals, the life around the shrine and temples, and the biographical dimension of religious experience.

The second research dimension is the ethnography of the contestation of the mystic powers of Andean images by Pentecostal missions and converts. For Pentecostal communities the overwhelming presence of Andean religious symbols and images in “Peruvian culture” is an issue to be confronted through avoidance and denial. While conversion involves abandoning of holy images and disengaging from Andean historical sacred places, Pentecostal doctrine itself is gradual, unstable and unpredictable, particularly in its appropriation and invention of sacred spaces. Unlike the precision of the Andean cosmological map, the Pentecostal one is a work in progress, with its borders constantly shifting.

Within this broad context, the film has a special focus on a group of processional images known as Jewish and Roman soldiers of Holy Week, which were miraculously saved from destruction in the devastating 1970 earthquake. Considered saints by their owners and devotees, these soldiers are at the core of a tense dialogue between folk and orthodox forms of Catholicism in the region.