Anthropologist Rachel Corr has spent almost two decades periodically conducting fieldwork in Salasaca, an Indigenous parish home to twelve thousand Quichua-speaking people in the Andean province of Tungurahua, Ecuador. Her new book Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is now available from the University of Arizona Press. Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is the first book in the First Peoples publishing initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
How did you get involved in your research community?
My first trip to Ecuador in 1990 was part of a college semester abroad program through the School for International Training. Part of the program involved a weekend “homestay” with an indigenous family, and that was my first time in Salasaca. Toward the end of the semester, each student was required to do a three week independent study project, so I asked the Salasacan family I stayed with if I could return to live with them and learn more about their customs. During those three weeks I learned a little bit of Quichua, I learned about foods and medicinal plants, and I watched as the grandfather of the family, a shaman, diagnosed illness by using a guinea pig. But I was very surprised when I woke up one morning and the mother of the family I lived with was giving birth in the next room. Her husband, mother and five year old daughter were with her, and it all seemed very natural. Unlike people I knew in the U.S., the family did not have the same concerns about children being traumatized by the birth process, and the five year old was not sheltered. I began to think about how different cultural practices of child socialization affected growing up in different cultures. Jim and Linda Belote had written an article about the place of children in Saraguro society in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, and I wanted to study child socialization in Salasaca. When I returned for my senior year of college, I applied for a Fulbright grant to spend a year living in Salasaca to study child socialization.
You write about how Salasacan consultants served as important checks to your anthropological and linguistic interpretations. What was your process for getting their input and how did you incorporate that input into your work?
I immersed myself as much as possible into Salasacan life through participant-observation. Later, I would ask people if I could interview them formally about something I had observed, or some event that needed more explanation. Then I would ask people more detailed questions. After writing up my own analysis, I would then tell people what I thought and ask them if I was “right.” For example, after interviewing many people about the process of festival sponsorship, it seemed that a lot of money was flowing out of the community at festival time. I drew a chart in my notebook that showed cash flowing out of Salasaca into the nearby towns for the purchase of food, alcohol, music, and other items for the fiestas. I showed this to one of the men I had interviewed, and he clarified the situation from his point of view. He explained that many Salasacan men and women made their cash incomes from working at jobs in these towns, and only some of it goes back into making purchases for fiestas.
What role do you think this kind of collaborative research plays in Indigenous communities today?
Many anthropologists share their interpretations with people they interview, and write about people’s reactions to their interpretations. Anthropologists today recognize the dialogical nature of ethnographic fieldwork, and the need to present the multiple voices present in any society, so I made an effort to present different Salasacan points of view on the issues that I explore in the book.
You write that your advisor and mentor Norman Whitten taught you to be attentive to Quichua linguistic expressions, kinship networks, and social relations while also considering how local people engage with national and transnational cultural systems. How do these understandings manifest themselves in your work?
I was fortunate to have very skillful consultants in the field. I would record interviews in Quichua, but since most Salasacans are bilingual, they were willing to take the time to explain certain Quichua expressions, including the meaning of kinship terms, to me so that I could understand the implicit meanings. It is an ongoing process—I continue to learn new things every time I talk to Salasacans about their language and cultural practices, such as the role of ritual kin in people’s lives.
I did become very focused on local happenings within the community, and Norman Whitten pushed me to pay more attention to national transformations taking place in Ecuador. This was at a time when indigenous political movements were fighting for political and cultural rights in the nation’s capital. In the book, the interaction between local actors and global institutions such as the Catholic Church is seen most clearly in the chapters on religious history, as I try to understand how Salasacans transformed their culture through interactions with representatives of the Church.
During the course of your two decades of fieldwork, you witnessed both changes and continuity. What changes in your research community strike you now, looking back?
Out-migration is one of the biggest changes I have seen over the years. During my first year of fieldwork, I knew many men who had temporarily migrated to the coast of Ecuador or the Galapagos Islands for work, then returned home to their wives and children. Now, entire families have moved to the Galapagos Islands and have official residence there. There has also been much more international migration. When I return to Salasaca now, it is common for families I know to show me photographs of their young adult children in France, Spain, Germany, or the U.S. Communication technology has also enabled Salasacans to keep in touch with one another. When I lived in Salasaca from 1991-92, there was one telephone in the community, located in the central post office. Young women whose husbands or fiancées were serving in the army would wait there for phone calls. The last time I went to Salasaca (2008) almost everyone I knew had their own cell phone, and there were two internet cafes. Now I can keep in touch with the children of the families I am close to through email and internet websites. These changes provide insight as to what people consider important to maintain. For example, many Salasacans now have their own DVD recorders to record fiestas and other traditional events in the community. Also, returned migrants help to maintain some of the traditional fiestas by sponsoring them with money earned overseas. And whenever possible, people still return to the community to honor their deceased loved ones on the Day of the Dead.
Originally, you set out to look at child socialization, but through your fieldwork you became interested in Salasacan uses of sacred places on the landscape, especially mountains and crossroads. What caused you to shift your research focus? And where did the inquiry take you?
I only learned about the importance of sacred places after living for some time in the community. A person would casually mention that on a certain day they were going to leave an offering at a certain place or, in the process of recording a life history someone would attribute an illness to having rested at a certain spot. Furthermore, I observed several healing rituals in which shamans would sing out the names of places throughout Ecuador, so I began to see a pattern, and then I changed the focus of my interviews to questions about the use of the sacred landscape.
Research on religious practices raises questions for the researcher about what should be recorded and what should be kept private. How did you negotiate that issue in both your fieldwork and later when working on the book?
People knew that I was working on a study about sacred places and religious experience, so those who agreed to explain things to me did so in order to help me understand their point of view. There was one time when, during an interview, one person said “don’t record this part,” and said something that he felt should be kept private, so I never reported that information. But for the most part people fulfilled the role of teachers to the anthropologist by explaining things to me that I didn’t understand.
Your book explores both collective ritual and individual ritual. What for you is the relationship between the two and what does that understanding bring to your work?
My concern for individual practice grew out of a desire to really understand what people believed. I wanted to be careful not to exoticize people’s religious beliefs. For example, generalized statements about indigenous beliefs contribute to a stereotype of traditional, “superstitious” people. In graduate school I received some negative reactions about my choice to focus on local cosmology because it was considered by some to be an outdated topic, and, because it is difficult for the anthropologist to know what people really believe. By the time I did my dissertation research in 1997, I was sensitive to concerns about objectifying people, and perhaps I was worried that by focusing only on collective rituals I was inadvertently contributing to that objectification. But I also found it frustrating that some academics had decided that local level religious practices were no longer worthy of study. I had already done a year of fieldwork prior to starting graduate school and learned that collective and individual religious practices at sacred places were a significant part of Salasacan life. So I tried to understand the meanings of such practices to different individuals.
As an anthropologist, what do you feel your obligation is to your research community and what have you done to meet that obligation?
I tried to represent Salasacan points of view on their religious practices as accurately as possible and to protect people’s privacy, and I would like to have some of my writing translated into Spanish so that Salasacans can read what I have written. Since there are different points of view within the community, I don’t expect everyone to agree with all of my interpretations. Salasacans are aware of the uniqueness of some of their customs, and they are proud of their traditions. When I started doing fieldwork in 1991, several Salasacans expressed interest in having oral histories recorded, and since then some Salasacans have done their own studies and writings about Salasacan culture. Although I haven’t had my work translated into Spanish yet, I did explain the contents of one of my articles to some Salasacans. They said that what I wrote was good, but also corrected some of my information. So I look forward to future collaborations with Salasacans.
In the second half of the book, you write about your perceptions from social interactions, jokes, arguments, resolutions, and everyday life experiences of the people you lived with. And you acknowledge that you tried to avoid becoming overly “reflective.” Yet you write that there is an important place for an anthropologist who works in a reflective space. When do you think it is appropriate for anthropologists to be reflective and how do you think that should influence or play into work in the field and subsequent publications?
Anthropologists have recognized for some time now that there is no such thing as a completely objective outside observer, so it is important for an anthropologist to acknowledge how their subjective position might influence their study. But I don’t believe that an ethnographic study should be about the anthropologist. I write about myself insofar as my actions led me to learn something about Salasacan cultural practices, but the main point I tried to make is how I came about certain information that tells us important parts of Salasacan social life. Anthropologists often learn things when they make mistakes and people correct them, and explain why certain things should be done one way or another. Writing about such interactions shows how we came to know and understand certain values that people hold. I have been visiting Salasaca and staying with Salasacan families since 1990, and I am still learning many things about peoples’ customs and values.
How has your life changed due to the work you’ve undertaken during the last two decades?
Humanistic anthropologists have noted the uniqueness of our profession in that we often develop close relationships with people as part of our work. Of course there are often great differences in power and economic opportunities between (non-native) anthropologists and their close informants; I will not be able to reciprocate the hospitality of my host family because they cannot get visas to the U.S. to legally visit me. But nobody can deny that we often form friendships with the people whose cultures we are trying to understand. An anthropologist who is asked whether they are returning to do research or because they miss their friends might not be able to answer the question, because the research and the relationships are so intertwined. Young men who I have known since they were babies now fulfill the roles in festivals that their fathers performed when I first began doing fieldwork, and that impresses me; I feel as if everything is coming full circle. One thing I miss is the time spent talking with Salasacan friends in the evening, by the warmth of the fire. I once expressed to my anthropology class the alienation I often feel upon returning from the field, because I became accustomed to having neighbors drop by for coffee in the evening to chat and socialize. A Latin American student told me that she has the same feelings of estrangement whenever she returns from visiting her family. It is difficult to separate these human relationships from the topic of “research.”
In Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes, Rachel Corr, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, combines new research from Church archives with years of ethnographic fieldwork to show how historical actors recentered Catholic rituals and symbols to serve as mediums for sustaining local collective memory. She presents individual testimonies of modern Salasacans who maintain cultural memory through private rituals at local sacred places. This book shows how Salasacans actively shaped and continue to shape their religion through ritual practices linked to the sacred landscape.
Tags: Andean, Ecuador, ethnography, religious practice, ritual, sacred landscapes
