Redeeming: Cultural Negotiations and their Remains in [De]Colonial Costa Rica

Abstract

“Redeeming: Cultural Negotiations and their Remains in [De]colonial Costa Rica” is a dissertation project that studies and analyzes religious performance traditions in Central America, specifically the performances concerning the worship of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in Cartago, Costa Rica. This is a project that reviews the manifestations of race, religion, political and economic relations, with the purpose of a clear understanding of the formation of national identity. This work is theoretically grounded in the concept of Decoloniality and the decolonial perspectives on the analysis of cultural phenomena proposed by Mignolo and Walsh. Additionally, a practical approach combining fieldwork and an ethnographic perspective drawing on methodologies like Madison’s Critical iii Ethnography, and analytical approaches and concepts such as Diana Taylor’s Archive and Repertoire, and Roach’s Effigy and Genealogies of Performance, serves as the cornerstone upon which the thesis of this work is built. The study brings to the academic conversation the concept of Redeeming. The combination of a Cultural Landscape (a place, tradition, or event where a meaningful cultural representation takes place) and a Cultural Negotiation (the complex cultural process where relations of identity, power, and dominance intersect and re-shape themselves) can create a Redeeming, which is a moment when, through a participatory performance (usually a public one), societies negotiate and redefine their history, power relations, and identity. This dissertation finds that different performance traditions related to the worship of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, like La Romería, the Mass of August 2nd, and La Pasada, are clear examples of Redeeming. Each one of these performances are linked to previous cultural negotiations, which used the Catholic Church’s traditions to develop relations of race, class, economic and political power, a sense of belonging, and finally a national identity, or as this study calls it Costarricanness. The present work illuminates a way in which religious performances in the Americas can be understand and studied as repositories of previous cultural negotiations, which performatively activate new negotiations and relations of belonging and identity.