Abstract

The article presents an anthropological problematization of the celebrations of indigenous church anniversaries in the Argentinean Chaco. It analyzes the ways in which processes of cultural change converge and performances social reputation and ethno-religious belonging. The study observes these celebrations as native cultural institutions transformed in their historical path and dynamizing forms of sociability, collective effervescence, competition and management of spiritual and/or political power. The study underlines the contemporary vitality of the anniversaries in the key of performances political and aesthetic to reflect on its disruptive and instituting dimensions.

Keywords: cultural change, Gran Chaco, indigenous peoples

social performance and historical transformation in the anniversary celebrations at indigenous churches in argentina's gran chaco regionThis article develops an anthropological inquiry into the anniversary celebrations of Indigenous churches in Argentina's Gran Chaco region. It examines how cultural transformation intersects with social performances that stage both reputation and ethnic-religious identity. The analysis approaches these celebrations as native cultural institutions historically reshaped over time and as dynamic arenas for sociability, heightened shared affect, competition, and the negotiation of spiritual and political authority. Framed as both political and aesthetic performances, these anniversaries are shown to be vital in the present, underscoring their disruptive and world-making dimensions.

Keywords: indigenous, Gran Chaco, cultural change, religious celebrations.

Introduction

In the light of anthropological evidence, the experience of the Protestant missions among the indigenous peoples of the Argentine Chaco, particularly among the Qom (or Toba), Wichí, Pilagá, Mocoví and Nivaclé groups, contributed to the emergence of an unprecedented process of socio-religious change since the first decades of the 20th century. xx (Cordeu and Siffredi, 1971; Miller, 1979). If there is a context in the national religious field in which evangelical Christianity does not constitute a minority, but its opposite, it is in the social world of the aboriginal groups of Chaco. The fact was also disruptive in the dominant narrative of the Catholic nation (Di Stefano and Zanatta, 2000), since the social history of indigenous Chacoan Christianity has been a phenomenon that harbors a meta-cultural critique of the identification of Catholicism as a religion of the Creoles (or whites) and of the State (Wright, 2008).

The spiritual and community life of indigenous localities, in rural or peri-urban contexts, is centered on belonging to the “gospel”.”, practical category that encodes a multiple ascription of ontological, moral, aesthetic and political anchors (Wright, 2002; Ceriani Cernadas and Citro, 2005). The religious evolution of each rural community, neighborhood or settlement unfolds through a calendar of regular and special events of the congregations. The latter are generically called “special celebrations” and involve ritual and commemorative events, such as baptisms, marriages, birthdays, worship movements, evangelistic campaigns and church “anniversaries”. In the classic Maussian sense, anniversaries constitute a sort of “total social event”: ritualized events that bring together social, spiritual, moral, moral, economic, political and aesthetic dimensions.

In this article I place an analysis on the celebrations of church anniversaries among Qom and Wichí partialities of the Chaco territory. The proposal deploys two conceptual purposes: one oriented to rethink the process of historical transformation of indigenous celebrations and the condensing sociological role of current church anniversaries; the other one rehearses -in Marshall Sahlins“ terms (1988: 15)- a ”situational sociology of meaning" of the anniversaries, ethnographically problematizing their performative, political and aesthetic dimension.

The empirical roots of the paper are based on historical and ethnographic research on the process of social and religious change of the Chaco peoples and the cultural, spiritual and political place of the “gospel”.1 The first part of the article reviews in a historical-cultural key the implication of the indigenous Christianisms of Chaco, demarcating its outstanding characteristics and proposing four instances of the process of transformation of these collective celebrations. The second part positions the ethnographic focus on the social relations and the performances The cultural relations between leaders, local members, musicians, dancers and guests that each religious festivity unfolds. Based on two ethnographic vignettes of anniversaries in the colonies La Primavera and Misión La Loma (Embarcación), discursive and practical relations between actors and audiences, locals and guests, are problematized in a comparative way, analyzing the relative and positional effectiveness of ritual actions.

The “gospel” anniversaries” as historical practices

From the second decade of the 20th century xx, the Chaco territory became a socio-religious laboratory for various Protestant and evangelical missions, arriving from England, the United States, Norway and Sweden. These “missionary configurations” (Ceriani Cernadas and López, 2017: 20) implied new social formations determined by relations of interdependence between missionaries and indigenous people, which were crossed by cultural schemes, pragmatic strategies and power asymmetries. Beyond the differences in their theologies or practices, Anglican, Evangelical, Mennonite and Pentecostal undertakings directed concrete social and cultural policies on those populations. The ethos civilization, moral-corporal reform and health care were hallmarks. Likewise, although with different emphases, was social engineering in the diffusion of agriculture, the translation of indigenous languages, bilingual literacy (Spanish and native language) and the modification of clothing and housing.

Towards the beginning of the 1950s, the expansion of the “gospel” movement was seen in the profuse emergence of independent churches, led and contested by Qom leaders from Chaco and Formosa (Reyburn, 1954). In an ever-expanding field of new denominations, we find three main ones: the United Evangelical Church, the first autonomous Qom congregation organized in 1961 and progressively expanded towards the Pilagá, Mocoví and Wichí peoples; the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, established at the end of the sixties and with a constant growth and social legitimacy in Formosa and Chaco; and the Iglesia Misión Evangélica Asamblea de Dios, founded by Scandinavian missionaries in northwestern Salta around 1947 (Cordeu, 1984; Wright, 1990; Ceriani Cernadas and Lavazza, 2017).

The indigenous churches form a dynamic socio-religious arena, subject to constant mergers and mobility of believers among them, as well as interdenominational loyalties and negotiations. Beyond the various congregations, the “gospel” is expressed in a shared cultural conception of power, health, gifts and graces granted by the Holy Spirit. The direct contact between the believer and the Holy Spirit forms the cornerstone of religious cults that is expressed in two crucial motivations: the bodily attainment of ecstasy and special gifts (ntonagak in the Qom language; laweku in Wichí) and the healing of any ailment. This last aspect is vertebral, since the therapeutic dimension is the cosmological hinge that connects the notions of personhood, shamanism (contracts with powerful beings, dreams, harm and healing) and the habitus evangelical (corporeality, moral discourse, vestments and ceremonial ecstasy) (Ceriani Cernadas, 2019).

In his classic study The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game, Alexander Lesser (1933) proposed a cultural-historical interpretation to account for the changes brought about among the Pawnee by incorporating traditional hand games into the visionary cults of the revivalist pan-Indian “Spirit Dance” movement.2 Lesser's analytical focus is the cultural transformation of this people during the first decades of the 20th century. xx -After the complex relocations forced by the federal government, he analyzed the symbolic and social weight acquired by the sacralization of these games in the local variant of the movement. The historical process of the hand games was approached, in the author's terms, as the “race in time” of a cultural institution (Lesser, 1933: 334). The analysis highlights the ways in which a fundamental core of action endures today, while the context in which it is expressed, like the meanings and forms associated with it, underwent major changes.

Here we are interested in taking up heuristically this notion of “race in time” to think about the historical transformation of the celebratory encounters of the Qom and Wichí partialities of the Argentine Chaco. These encounters were modified in cultural action, based on the proposal of Marshall Sahlins (1988), in a line of thought more updated but not alien to Lesser's, from “functional revaluations” of symbolic categories and ritualized practices.

To what extent were the celebratory gatherings of the ancient bands of Guaycurú (Qom, Pilagá and Moqoit) and Mataco-Mataguayo (Wichí-Weyanek, Chorote, Nivaclé) linguistic families, characterized by their intense dances and linked to the carob harvest, sexual courtship and war triumph, recreated in church festivities? What impact did the interethnic experiences of seasonal work in the sugar mills of the western region (1860-1960), where the dances of the Chaco peoples captivated the exoticism of travelers and officials, have on the recreation? 3. In what way did the processes of missionization influence commemorative celebrations, based on the historical cleavage implied by the “gospel”, the classification and regulation of religious practices and the preparation of activity calendars? 4. To what extent did they influence the process of nationalization and nationalization of indigenous populations since 1940, with school events and provincial and national anniversaries, as well as the recognition policies of recent decades based on the discourse of territorial and cultural pre-existence rights?

The first issue was noted by Silvia Citro (2006) in her ethnographic studies on the dances among the Qom Takshek of eastern Formosa, which analyze the symbolic correspondences and processes of change between the dances of power (the Qom takshek) and the dances of power (the Qom takshek).nmi) and female initiation (niematak) within the evangelical experience. Certainly, the importance of dances in Chaco societies and cultures was observed early on by the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries in the centuries xviii and xix, as well as by distinguished ethnographers such as Rafael Karsten and Alfred Métraux during the early decades of the xx. On this genealogy, Elizabeth Bergallo (2004) delves into the notion of the Qom person and its links with the dances of the “gospel”. Likewise, Lavinia Contini (2015), in her inquiry on the “cult-party” in the “United” churches among the Wichí of Nueva Pompeya, points out a reconfiguration of these traditional celebrations of the harvest of the carob fruit (yatchep) from the dances (katinah) and courtship dances (ahutsaj), highlighting the key role they play in the sociological and ritual dynamics of these partialities. We suggest here that it is important to delve into other crucial factors that influenced the historical transformation of these celebrations, accounting for a dense “race in time”, in which social continuity and cultural innovation pivoted the evolution of these peoples in a process of incorporation-exclusion to the capitalist market and the nation-state.

In fact, the second question accounts for the changes in the mobility of indigenous groups from the processes of missionization, the progressive colonization of the territory, the imperative sedentarization and the centuries-old experience of seasonal work in the sugar enclaves of northern Salta and Jujuy (Córdoba, Bossert and Richard, 2015). For their part, the sugar mills massively mobilized numerous indigenous relatives through conchabo and transfer networks, from 1850 to 1960, when the mechanization of the sugarcane harvest implied a radical reduction in their labor force. Social life there formed a space sui generis of inter-ethnic relations, in which nightly dances in circles of men and women with intertwined arms (known as nmi or nomi for the Qom and “baile de sapo” for the Creoles) constituted the performances cathartic sexual courtship and symbolic, material and social exchanges between Qom, Wichí, Nivaclé and Chorote partialities. The possibilities of collective dances as mechanisms for the creation of new social bonds in groups traditionally hostile to each other, as well as a reinforcement of the established ones, had successive reinventions based on local receptions. When the “paisanos” returned to their settlements, also inserted in a process of socio-religious change due to the missionary action, these new experiences of interaction and exchange of practices acquired other meanings and values (Ceriani Cernadas, 2015).

Precisely, the third question involves the processes of Christian missionization, in which the projects of social and moral reform provided for corporal disciplines and new schemes of temporal and spatial organization, gender roles and the fixing of days and schedules for ecclesiastical activities. Two issues should be highlighted here: first, the evangelical challenge to the various indigenous dances, within the framework of a project of corporal reform and moral coercion in which these dances were labeled as pagan, sinful and wrong practices; second, the way in which the Protestant written culture imprinted its effects on these regulated forms of organization of religious life, which were domesticated by the Chacoan peoples when the indigenous churches acquired their own autonomy. It was during this process of indigenous cultural appropriation that the dances were progressively accommodated to the cults of the “Unida” and other churches.

In the 1950s and 1960s, dances were a common practice among seniors and adults in their search for or manipulation of haloik (power) and obtaining the ntonagak (joy), through short steps in place or in slow circular movements (Loewen, Buckwalter and Kratz, 1965). In the 1970s and 1980s, musical ensembles burst onto the indigenous evangelical scene, but from the late 1990s to the present, dances have been the most dynamic spiritual practice in the indigenous evangelical field (Citro, 2009).

Regarding the written devices that gave shape to an evangelical indigenous “imagined community” in Chaco and Formosa, the publication of the quarterly bulletin Qadáqtaxanaxanec (“Our Messenger”), published by the Mennonite Fraternal Workers from 1959 to 2015, was decisive. As a pedagogical and communication mechanism between congregations, the main objective from its origins was to shape a technology of indigenous-evangelical unity that could counteract the processes of fission and provide an encompassing identity (Altman, 2023). Distributed by mail and later by Internet, the sections of each bulletin included notes from indigenous pastors and leaders (in indigenous languages and Spanish), current news, practical advice, socio-political issues (land, education, health) and -on the back cover- the so-called “special dates”, which detailed all the non-regular celebratory activities of the churches, such as anniversaries, birthdays and evangelization campaigns.

Finally, the fourth interrogation situates a social process concomitant to the development of the Qom evangelical movement during the 1950s: the progressive presence of state policies of incorporation and citizenship of the Chaco peoples from national and provincial agencies. The linkage of these policies with the Justicialist or “Peronist” governments between 1946-1955 was direct and the adhesion of the native populations, as well as the interest of numerous chiefs to get involved in party politics were convincing. In this social process, in which the emergence of indigenous churches and the apprehension of Peronism went hand in hand, the new symbols of political belonging were deeply rooted. National and provincial identifications were also reinforced through school devices and new political practices, usually characterized as “clientelistic”, began to spread to the different populations. In these, community referents, such as shepherds, caciques or elders with power and wisdom (usually shamans) extended their interpersonal networks with criollos linked to the “world of politics” (according to the usual reference). As “friends-patrons-padrinos” who usually help with goods, permits, services and work in exchange for political loyalties, thus extending their territorial anchorages among the countrymen, they are the managers of making viable celebrations in which donations, gifts and generous meals are usually given; representative examples are the Day of the Aborigine, the Day of the Child and the Day of Cultural Diversity.

They are also special guests at celebrations of greater public and performative resonance, such as the aforementioned church anniversaries and the marriages of religious and/or political leaders or leaders. During these special celebrations, the prestige of each church is at stake and the charisma of each congregation is revalidated through a relational network between leaders, local faithful, guests (preachers, musicians and dancers). I will talk about this issue in the second part of the article.

Anniversaries such as performances: staging, charisma and efficiencies

In this section we focus on the understanding of church anniversaries as actualized devices for the staging of symbolic and political relations between leaders, guests and audiences. Analyzed as performances In this paper we are interested in focusing on the importance of anniversaries in the fabric of social recognition of pastors in the arena of leadership. To this end, we integrate an ethnographic description of the social life of indigenous churches in the framework of a comparative analysis of two anniversaries carried out in heterogeneous contexts of historical relationships. The first occurs in Colonia Aborigen La Primavera, eastern Formosa, a state reserve founded in 1942 and originally linked to the British Evangelical Emmanuel Mission. The second is in Misión La Loma, a peri-urban indigenous neighborhood in the town of Embarcación (Salta), established by Norwegian missionaries of the Evangelical Mission Assembly of God (hereinafter referred to as the Mission), mead) in 1962.

In the Qom and Wichí indigenous communities that were formed either as state reserves or adjudicated fiscal lands, or as in the neighborhoods or outlying areas of the Creole towns, the religious building and its main pastor are usually located in neighboring lands, thus forming a unified symbol of prestige for the family group and its network of relatives who are members of the congregation. Upon the death of a pastor, usually a lifetime position only diminished by illness, death or his own decision, the most common occurrence is that a son, nephew or related person, such as a brother-in-law, takes over the leadership.

In certain situations, the church remains on the land that the founding pastor gave to the denomination, even though the current leader does not reside there, but in a nearby radius within the community. This is the case of the first Foursquare congregation in Colonia Aborigen La Primavera under Pastor Pedro,3 established in 1968 in the lands adjacent to the then cacique Fernando Sanabria in conjunction with pastor Domingo Mendoza. On the other hand, in other congregations inherited from missionary processes, it is common for their churches to be erected in “neutral” spaces. This is the case of Misión La Loma de Embarcación (Salta), where the annex of the mead is located in the highest part of the land and three kilometers away from the church and central missionary base led by Pastor Marcio.

As social institutions, the churches led by both leaders encompass three key dimensions: 1) an extended personal and family enterprise, oriented to the construction of social, political and economic relevance from the possession of institutional positions, the extension of interpersonal networks, the obtaining and management of resources; 2) a space/time - the “cult” - of highly ritualized and corporeally participatory spiritual sociability, in which emotional and therapeutic devices prove crucial; 3) a domesticated scenario of indigenous modernity, as a religious formation between-medium, or bridge, social and cultural reproduction (language, marriage alliances, leadership and descendants) and integration into the “criollo” or “white” world: bureaucratic organization, technologies, cultural styles, support or financing networks, state agencies, political parties and/or officials, and so on.

The pastor leader of a congregation aspires to achieve some improvement for his church, especially for anniversaries, changing the roof or floor, enlarging the hall, adding chairs or benches, installing bathrooms outside the building, painting the front and buying music and audio equipment. Achieving these improvements is a positive sign for the believers, because it shows that the church leadership “does things right”, as a friend told me about Pedro's church and the important material changes it had made for the anniversary in question. This logic is incorporated in a cultural conception in which churches -their walls, roofs, music equipment, floors and pews- are revealed as materialities charged with numinous and social power. The former in direct relation to the healing practices and the combat with the “evil spirits” that produce it; the latter given the symbol of relevance and recognition it assumes for the pastor, his group of close relatives and the congregation of the faithful.

The tests that certify the integrity of a chief shepherd are measured by his physical health, his oratory capacity in worship services, his talent as a mediator in internal quarrels, his moral integrity and his theological knowledge, which in turn metaphorize the degree of relationship with non-indigenous pastors, missionaries or external agencies. The physical illness or infirmity of a leader assumes a worrisome condition in the indigenous perception of the Chaco peoples, interpreted as a diminution of power or a direct attack by a negative spiritual force (Wright, 1990). This issue, as we will observe shortly, did not go unnoticed on the anniversary of Misión La Loma.

On this cultural pattern, church anniversaries performatively exhibit these characteristics, since the hospitality of local representatives becomes a key exercise for the (re)production of leadership. In this way, the Qom or Wichí pastor who leads a congregation commands a group of relatives, relatives and allies who must demonstrate the possibilities of receiving guests from other churches and places, who must be lodged and -above all- fed for one or two nights. Mobility is paid for by the invited travelers (either individually or in groups of musicians and dancers), depending on the economic help that their congregations can give them from the offerings of the faithful or family help.

Each anniversary shows a guest policy, a pragmatic and situational game for each event, in which indigenous or non-indigenous, local or foreign preachers, musicians and political leaders usually make their place. Inviting pastors from neighboring churches is enriched by the presence of Creole pastors, whose geographical distance is revealed as a sign of prestige. Thus, in this cumulative and inclusive logic, the participation of indigenous leaders from different localities of the territory achieves charismatic power with visitors from Rosario (province of Santa Fe), La Plata or Buenos Aires, or from neighboring countries such as Paraguay and Bolivia. These visits show the networks of allies of the leaders of each church, a fundamental political capital. In the case of the groups of dancers and musicians, the distance is also a sign of importance, although what is crucial is the presence of both and the number of visiting groups.

Every celebration begins with the performance of the “praise movement”, integrated in an organized manner by the different music and dance groups, then continues with the preaching of the pastor, followed by new choruses and dances, as well as the final instance of blessings and requests for healing from the parishioners. Each group presents its own musical, aesthetic and choreographic repertoire, but all of them share a style, a characteristic and mimetic way of performing and exhibiting, observable in the costumes: long satin dresses and bright colors for women, skirts and aprons with strips hanging in symbolically representative colors for women and men, musical tones and synchronized body movements. Underlining the above, dance groups are enclaves of relationships between young people and adults, spaces for meeting and searching for partners and places of expression of contemporary cultural sensitivities, where local-regional and global aesthetics and choreographies converge (Dance of the wheel, The big round, Dance of the tambourine, etc.). The costumes and paraphernalia of the dances (headbands, canes, glasses, etc.) and, even, those who do not wear clothes and only cross their yica (traditional bag) with the Bible inside, express unambiguously forms of identity self-recognition or, in the classic Barthian terms, the definition of ethnic boundaries based on identity aesthetics.

Likewise, these ceremonies form scenarios for the discursive affirmation of the religious community to reinscribe fundamental meanings regarding the future of the church or mission, in the key of a generally epic and sacrificial narrative. The main pastors and leaders preach about the missionaries, evangelists or founding pastors, about the construction of the church and those who participated in its creation. Also, the members who died in the last year and the donations that were received to build the church and to cover the expenses of the anniversary celebration are usually mentioned. Finally, the groups of preachers, dancers and musicians invited to the festive gathering are thanked.

An analysis of two concrete and different situations, ethnographically investigated in two church anniversaries led by Pastor Pedro and Pastor Marcio, will allow us to account for these dimensions and to focus on three key issues: the regimes of consensus and dissent involved, the ways in which the charisma of their leaders grows or wanes, and the aesthetic mediations involved.

Peter's church: the anniversary as a reinforcement of the charisma

Pedro was born in La Primavera sixty years ago. Since 1996 he has been the senior pastor of the Foursquare del Fondo, the oldest and most recognized of the other three congregations of this denomination. The colony comprises a territory of 5,000 hectares, inhabited by Qom Takshek families of the area who in 1937 gathered around the Emmanuel Evangelical Mission directed by the Englishman John Church until 1951. Of medium height, curved nose, good physical appearance, the pastor speaks fluently, but without haste, reinforcing the important words. He lives in a well-maintained house of materials, with a well-kept garden, Creole-style country chairs. His wife is also a pastor of the church and leads the “ladies quadrangular”, a space for female sociability, biblical education and organization of dance groups. Pedro embodies with prestige the type of contemporary pastor, who worked as a bilingual assistant teacher, with an excellent command of Spanish and an interest in the public affairs of the colony: the management for water wells, the reforms of the health center or the improvements in the internal roads, among others.

We met more than 20 years ago, during the anniversary of his church, which included the inauguration of a new temple next to the old one, which became a place for Bible classes with evident signs of material progress: cement floor, brick walls with wide windows and sheet metal roof. As a religious leader respected within the other congregations and community leaders, the anniversary of the church was an important event in those days. It was Miguel, a nurse and friend very committed to his faith and linked to the historical families of the settlement, who invited me to accompany him to the celebration. He told me that an important pastor from Buenos Aires who was campaigning in the area would attend and that there would be a big celebration afterwards with locro (typical stew) and soft drinks.

On every anniversary, once the worship service is over, the big meal is one of the most important moments and long boards are set up to organize the tables. The collective eating is in these events as expected as the healing session by the Holy Spirit. It is not an aggregate or a superfluous event, it is the final act of a “total social event”, in which the meal imprints another affective and value dimension.

There were few seats left in the church and the musical bands had started the “praise movement”. A few women danced in short concentric circles in front of the church. The anniversary was opened with the singing of the national anthem and the denominational hymn of the “Foursquare”. Then, the invited groups of musicians resumed the praises, to which Pastor Pedro also added his voice, welcoming those present, remembering the founding members of the church, thanking the music groups and, in a special way, “Pastor Tito from Buenos Aires, who came here to share this celebration with us and preach the word”. The atmosphere was prepared.

Another church leader spoke at qom'lactaq (Qom language) to those present and, in Spanish, invited Pastor Tito to preach. He began his speech, in the usual Pentecostal testimony of self-celebration, narrating how he overcame a life of addictions by surrendering to God and emphasizing that the ministry he leads has managed to “get many young people off the street and off drugs”. Then, after clarifying that it was not his intention to offend anyone, he explained: “Before knowing the ‘gospel’, the aborigine was in the countryside just like the drug addict in the city, forgotten, beaten, used, naked, without direction, tied to vices and poverty”. He then continued with the comparison, pointing out how surrender to Christ was the only solution to get out of that state of existential dispossession. The audience remained quiet and the sermon was not very well received by the people in effusive terms, but rather cautious, not very expressive, almost indifferent, few clapping hands, some soft “alleluia”. Nervous in this climate, the Buenos Aires pastor spoke louder and louder thinking that the people were not interested in his talk, to the point of openly rebuking the audience for being “lukewarm” or “inattentive”.

Finally came the big meal: the tables were set outside and a good part of the attendees enjoyed the locro. The pastor talked with his Creole counterpart from Buenos Aires and other Qom leaders, all in a festive and relaxed atmosphere. The situation did not seem to have affected the spirit of the event and the charisma of “Pedro's church”. However, interested in understanding how the preaching of the invited Creole pastor had been received, the next day I asked Miguel what had happened. “It's just that this pastor didn't understand anything,” he answered me, warning that the people had been quiet because that was what the native leaders had asked him to do before the service began. “Listen to the word, be attentive to what is being preached”, they had said in qom'lactac. The exhortation is not minor and contains a historical theme that has strained indigenous Christianity in Chaco since its origins: the relationship between preaching, teachings and knowledge of the Bible and the collective practices of dancing, singing and emotional ecstasy. The overbearing style and ethnocentric metaphors of the guest pastor did not dent Pastor Pedro's reputation and the emotional and aesthetic strength of the anniversary, with its groups of guest musicians and community pastors. Today his congregation continues to be the most active Foursquare church in the colony.

La Loma Mission: the anniversary as a ritualization of the conflict

Misión La Loma was founded in 1962 after the relocation of the indigenous evangelical mission that Norwegian and Swedish missionaries organized in the town of Embarcación during the 1930s. It is a multi-ethnic settlement, made up of intertwined families descended from Wichí relatives from the southern band of the Bermejo (Salta) and southern Bolivia, Qom from western Formosa and southern Bolivia, and a few Guaraní families from northern Salta.

Until 1995, the Norwegian missionaries were in charge of the work, whose headquarters and missionary house resides in the village, three kilometers away. Between 1995 and 2000, a conflict arose between the Norwegian and national leaderships of the mead, which implied the definitive separation from the Nordic tutelage after 80 years.

“When the Norwegian missionaries were there, the ‘paisanos’ said yes to everything, now with me it's a different thing,” Marcio, a Creole of Wichí descent (his maternal grandfather was a pioneer indigenous evangelist of the work) and senior pastor of the institution since 2000, told me. His words sought to express the complexities of his leadership among the indigenous members of the church, marked by political conflicts, territorial claims and mutual distrust. In fact, the La Loma Mission congregation became progressively isolated and autonomous in its way of worshipping: neither the inhabitants of the congregation go to the central church on Sundays, nor do the main pastor or other non-indigenous leaders regularly participate in activities in the aboriginal community, as they used to do in the time of the Norwegian missionaries. The situation opened the possibility of a symbolic negotiation between Marcio and the indigenous leaders regarding the style of the religious ceremonies, which were acquiring dances and ceremonial forms by direct influence of the churches of Formosa and Chaco, a fact that caused important conflicts with the Norwegian leaders at that time.

In this context, it was not surprising that the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Misión La Loma, in October 2012, condensed all these frictions. For our purposes, I will focus on one event as an “interpreted meaning”, according to Sahlins (1988): the performance of reparation in the indigenous worship celebration in Misión La Loma.

The Saturday night service was the epicenter of the celebration in the community. Marcio could not miss it, even though he was suffering from a strong pain in his right ankle that made it difficult for him to walk well. Several invited musical and dance groups from different churches and neighborhoods of Embarcación and other neighboring towns were in charge of the praises. However, one of them acquired special relevance and managed to concentrate the attention of the whole audience: a musical and preaching band from the neighboring town of Pichanal, an ensemble formed by Guarani and Creole Indians. The ensemble, a singer-preacher and three accompanists -two with guitar, one with electric bass-, belonged to a “friendly church” of one of the historical family and political elites of La Loma.

Once the songs ended, the guest singer-preacher announced that he was in an instance of prophetic revelation and that what he was observing there “was a very strong conflict within the church” and that his special mission was to reconcile the crisis that was being revealed to him. This is how he called the general pastor and the other leaders to kneel down in front, below the stage, to be able to unblock together “the internal struggle and the unrest” that exists in the church. Inserted in a situation from which he could not escape and limping with his aching foot, Marcio fulfilled the performance and knelt with other leaders of the local church in front of the pastors in attendance. They, under the laying on of hands, prayed for the resolution of the danger that had germinated in the congregation, imploring for reconciliation and the union of the brethren. The musicians closely followed the rite of reparation, the audience also prayed loudly and raised their arms in unison. After a few songs of praise and words of thanksgiving, the anniversary service came to an end. All that remained was to participate in the final meal, which was held inside the church, and from which the senior pastor was absent due to his ailment and difficulty in walking.

The next day we talked with Marcio, who did not hide his anger and clarified that he had been deceived, that he had been used to make “all that farce of the prophecy”. Undoubtedly, like all those present, the leader had felt the way in which the ritual thematized and exposed in a spiritual key the complexities of his leadership and the disputes and disputes of legitimacy that marked it.

Now, what do both scenes suggest to us in relation to the importance of church anniversaries within the framework of a performance What do both situations express regarding the tense articulations between cultural traditions and socio-community orders in the historical experience of these indigenous populations? The pattern that connects the first question is the presence of important guests and the differential reception, or co-participation, they had according to the social recognition of the chief shepherd in each specific context. The second question is positioned on a broader analytical scale that will function as a gateway to the conclusions of the paper.

The case of Pastor Pedro introduces us into a situation of cultural incommunication that exposes the ways in which the symbolic and social consensus of the festivities are generated from the meanings and evaluations that the congregation imprints. Indeed, and following Anne Taylor (2022: 69), “in every social performance audiences are fundamental arbiters of its success or failure”. The possibility of merger (or disunion) resulting from the performances is a dialogic relationship involving the audience (members in our cases) and the main actors (local pastor and invited leaders, musicians and dancers). The role of the audience is central, since the participants are in charge of establishing interpretations and evaluations of the events, in which applause, verbal invocations (“hallelujah”, “glory to God”, “amen”) and bodily dispositions (arms raised, pendular movements, standing or sitting) imprint, in their impetus or apathy, senses and affections of social recognition. Precisely, in this vertebral topic, the audience ruled in its passivity the inappropriateness of the actions and aggressive rhetoric of the guest pastor, a fact that far from contaminating Peter's charisma, confirmed it.

On the other hand, the anniversary of Misión La Loma places us in a very different context and social climate. In this sense, both for the previous example and for this one, it is important to take into consideration the second analytical dimension: the historicity and disruptive folds of the social situation. This issue implies that the performances The religious leaders analyzed had already established meanings, affections and legitimations of leadership. Just as Pedro's figure and leadership were socially valued by a good part of the people of Colonia Aborigen La Primavera (even by other leaders and members of different churches), Marcio's case was at the antipodes.

In this sense, if on the anniversary of the Foursquare church the congregational charisma was not dented despite the questioning of the invited Creole pastor, what happened in Misión La Loma ritually exposed the tense relationship between various members and the religious leader. The performance The social commentary on “the prophecy of the division in the church” was interpreted by the local pastor as an attempt by a former rival of La Loma, who had been expelled from the congregation several years ago, to make him -literally- kneel down before everyone. The audience followed the script laid out by the musical ensemble and the preaching of the guest to pray for the prompt reparation of the conflict, making visible in a ritual key the complex chain of mutual resentments between the senior pastor, the indigenous religious and political leaders of La Loma and the local congregation. Although in this episode the control of the social situation was in the hands of the main guests (the group of musicians and preachers), the audience of local leaders and parishioners also acquired a central role in its staging.

Final thoughts

Throughout this paper we discuss the anniversary celebrations in the indigenous churches of Chaco from two analytical points of view: as cultural institutions and as a means of communication and communication. in time and how performances of personal reputation and collective charisma. Temporality refers us to a historical practice prior to the “gospel” movement, transformed by divergent processes of intercultural mediation and power relations in industrial and agricultural enclaves, Christian missions and the nation-state at its local and regional scales. On these ritualized celebrations of chieftaincy competitions, dances and intergroup feasts, we argue that contemporary church anniversaries constitute the nucleus that condenses, selects and actualizes their main social, symbolic, aesthetic and political “units or sets of relations” (Lesser, 1933: 334). Along with the understanding of their historical conformation, in this inquiry we ethnographically observe anniversaries as “the most important social, symbolic, aesthetic and political units or sets of relations" (Lesser, 1933: 334).“performances social”. The interweaving of oratory, music, dance and collective effervescence, the relationships between local actors, guests and audiences, as well as between accepted or objected religious practices, account for a social and historical creation of multiple dimensions. For the purposes of this research and in order to connect the ethnographic issues raised, we highlight two key dimensions of this cultural institution: a disruptive one, and an instituting one.

The first one situates us, on the one hand, in the processes linked to the configuration of ethnic and religious diversity within the Argentine nation-state and the subsequent national and provincial formations of social alterity (Briones, 2005). In the historical experience of the indigenous peoples of Chaco, the missionary attempts of Catholicism failed and the hegemonic narrative of their place as the religion of the homeland succumbed to the option for the “gospel”. In this context, the new religious identification acquired for these groups a cultural, political and aesthetic dimension of “differentiation” from Catholicism, its ritual forms and its status as a civic religion; and “integration” to forms, styles of behavior, participation in partisan politics and desires to be perceived as “modern” or, in the discourses of several elders, “civilized”.

The disruptive effect with respect to the ideals of the national Constitution in depositing in the Catholic religion a sort of natural right for the “conversion” and “civilization” of the indigenous people, was settled in a religious option understood by the protagonists themselves as a purification of their cultural patterns. In this structural ambivalence of the “gospel” there is a dynamic of social reproduction, symbolic creativity and cultural awareness, widened in the last two decades in the framework of various intercultural undertakings and new forms of indigenous agency.

Both the experience of the Foursquare in charge of Pastor Pedro and what happened in Misión La Loma are located in very different scenarios in their local and provincial trajectories; but they share an identity positioning in which self-recognition as indigenous, evangelical and Argentinean is central. This positioning also embodies a second cultural disruption, as the domestication by the Qom and Wichí groups of a cut imposed by the doxa The evangelical missionary: the prohibition to continue with the dances of the ancients. As we have noticed, the dances currently form an institutionalized and expansive space with numerous groups and commissions. These articulate generational ranks and expose in their practices intergroup competitions, shamanic reconfigurations, new ritual costumes - whose shapes or colors, as in the Ghost Dance among the Pawnee, they often arrive in dreams- and incorporation of recent visual technologies, rhythms and choreographies (Tola and Robledo, 2022).

On the other hand, we emphasize the instituting social dimension of church commemorations, inasmuch as performances cultural that symbolically endorse an institution defined in its ethnic and sociological contours and its aesthetics of belonging. In this way, the anniversaries seek to (re)establish the consecration of a positive continuity between the congregation, its founding stories and its current leaders by achieving its relational efficacy or “arc of fusion”, in Taylor's (2022) terms, between actors and audiences. As we observed from the ethnographic situations, indigenous church celebrations are also the places where power positions are performatively settled between leaders, family groups and the group charisma of each congregation. These leadership competitions were also ritually expressed in the ancient celebrations, as well as rivalries between different groups. Here we briefly problematize two well differentiated positions: in Pastor Pedro's Foursquare church we highlight the recognition of the congregation, its relationship with important lineages in the leadership structures of the colony and the positive weighting by other religious leaders in the area. These conditions set the sociological foundations on which the performances of the audience were disruptive to the pastor's expectations. doqshé (white or Creole) invited, but unequivocally affirmative for the pastor, the local and invited Qom leaders, the musicians and the congregation. Symmetrically and inversely, the event at Misión La Loma led Pastor Marcio into a situation in which the affirmative ritual construction of the invited group, accompanied by the audience, symbolically expressed the disruption that his own leadership embodied among the indigenous congregations.

Analyzed as performances In this study on the celebrations of indigenous church anniversaries in the Argentinean Chaco, this study enables future research on the ritualized forms in which processes of cultural change and dynamics of ethnic and religious belonging are expressed.

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César Ceriani Cernadas D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina).uba). Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (conicet) at the Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, uba. Adjunct professor in the Anthropological Sciences program at the Universidad de la uba D. in Social Sciences at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences).flaccid, (Argentina). His field of research is the anthropological study of religion, interested in the productions of religious diversity in Argentina and, particularly, in the historical and contemporary dynamics of indigenous Christianity in the Chaco region.