Session Abstract

Perhaps the most stunning aspect of the history of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World is the emergence of new peoples, new cultures, and new religions facilitated by the interaction of different cultures in a social milieu whose actors included Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans.  To be sure, a significant historiography has coalesced around this phenomenon, and has defined this mixture variously as “creolization,” “mestizaje/mestiçagem,” and has produced much commentary on such concepts as "syncretism," “accommodation,” “agency,” and “survivals.”  This panel endeavors to examine the development of cultural creolization and popular religion in greater detail, primarily through the examination of the lives of various actors in colonial Latin America, specifically Brazil, New Granada, and the island of Española.  The panel shall take a longue durée approach to the examination of the social dynamics of religious change in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean.  Erin Woodruff Stone examines interactions between Franciscan priests and Indian caciques on Española in the early sixteenth century.  Karen Shears Cousins analyzes the emergence of the New Granadan Marian cult of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá in the latter portion of the sixteenth century.  Joanna Elrick examines religious exchanges between members of the military in northeastern Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Kalle Kananoja will tell us the fascinating story of a black Angolan woman in Brazil, Mariana Pequena, who willingly converted to Judaism in the early eighteenth century.

The examination of individual histories and the stories of specific places in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean can greatly advance our understanding of religious and cultural change in Latin America and in the wider Atlantic World.  The overarching assumption in the historiography has been that religious and cultural change was a mostly unidirectional process, and that beliefs, cosmologies, symbols and rituals were imposed by elites upon subalterns, on colonizers upon the colonized, on masters upon slaves.  However, as close examinations of individuals and their stories related in archival documents bear witness, religious change in colonial Latin America and the Iberian Atlantic World can be characterized as more of a negotiation, rather than an imposition.  This is not to say that power dynamics never entered the equation in the evangelization, promulgation, and blending of religious beliefs and cultural practices; however, many individuals exhibited far more “social agility and cultural plasticity” (to borrow Ira Berlin’s terminology) in the sphere of religion than the current scholarly consensus might lead one to believe.  Individuals, regardless of race, class, or trade affiliation adopted religious practices and beliefs for a broad spectrum of reasons, as this panel will demonstrate.  As all historians of religion, culture, and society can attest, the phenomenon of “belief” is an incredibly difficult aspect of the human experience to extrapolate from archival sources.  However, it is imperative that historians of Latin America and the Iberian World move beyond the assumption that force and intimidation were the primary drivers of the spread of religious belief. This panel endeavors to stimulate thought and discussion about religious change.