In describing folk Catholicism, ethnographers have been obsessed with idols behind altars. Ingham’s book is a physic to this preoccupation. His central thesis is that rather than being a thin veneer over indigenous religion, the syncretism of Mexican folk Catholicism is more European than one might suppose. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Tlayacapán, Morelos, Ingham attempts to show that although elements of pre-Hispanic religion persist—indeed, to an extraordinary degree—“they express rather than contradict the Catholic worldview” (p. 8). Using a modern semiotic and structuralist approach to make this argument, Ingham demonstrates how Catholic themes and symbols imbue almost every sphere of village life with religious meaning.
While one cannot dispute Ingham’s masterful historiography of the European and pre-Hispanic roots of religious symbols and rituals, his thesis that Mexican folk Catholicism is more European than indigenous is likely to be a bone of contention. Here, it should be noted that although Tlayacapán’s roots are Nahuatl, its acculturated populace has long since ceased to speak this language. More to the point, because Ingham focuses on syncretism, rather than on its political-economic context, he underplays the political dimension of the indigenous reaction to Catholicism, and fails to address the contradictions its imposition entailed.
As Taussig (The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, 1980) suggests, in colonial and neocolonial contexts ritual, cosmology, and ideology must he understood in terms of the dialectic between metropolis and satellite. The Spanish conquest not only forced the natives to come to terms with the evolving market economy organized on the lines of race, but also to confront the challenges offered by a church doctrine which lent sanctity to the colonial regime, justified racism and class exploitation, and presented alienation as part of the natural order, the result of sin. Indian communities reacted to these threats posed by the new religion with syncretism which contained a radical critique of the new order and sought to restructure Catholicism on indigenous principles.
Ingham is not unaware of this content. Indeed, in his analysis of contracts with the devil, Ingham observes that the devil
personifies an unmitigated expression of the profit motive. He uses money and a parody of contractual relations to appropriate a person’s soul…. In this respect, his behavior mimics that of the Spaniard who appropriated the labor of Indian peasants and took advantage of them in commercial transactions. The image of the devil and the structure of demonic contractual relations suggest a metaphorical similarity between soul and labor (p. 108).
Unfortunately, Ingham does not systematically address the question of how syncretism served to defend the community interests against capitalist exploitation and ideology rampant in the wider society.
These quibbles, however, are a matter of emphasis. This is a fine, very readable book whose solid scholarship makes it a must for any serious student of Mexican folk religion.
