Ritual and Remembrance is a wide-ranging examination of the religious practices of indigenous Salasacans in highland Ecuador. This historically informed ethnographic discussion expounds on the interplay of indigenous highland, Catholic and Amazonian cosmologies, and demonstrates the ways in which Salasacan actors draw upon, negotiate, transform and localise these multiple symbols and paradigms in their own religious and ritual practices. In particular, Corr draws attention to the role that the landscape plays in both collective and individual rituals. In chapter 2, for example, she introduces the interplay between sacred space and sacred time and illustrates, with stories of the quishuar tree, how the dominant Catholic religion became localised within Salasacan sacred space. Similarly, chapter 4's account of the muy and ritual pathways elucidate how cultural memory is enacted through the reorientation of ‘Catholic’ fiestas, practices and symbols. This theme continues in part II, which is focused primarily on individual rather than collective experience, with Corr showing how cosmological power is understood to emanate from the earth, and how purgatory is located in an alternative geographical reality.
Corr presents archive documents, oral narratives and observations to substantiate her arguments, and pays close attention to the poetics and meaning of language. She makes good use of this multivocality, reading historical accounts against the grain and weaving them into her discussion without ever privileging them over Salasacan voices. She thereby successfully avoids the trap of unearthing and presenting cultural traits as static retentions by illuminating areas of convergence, and her framework is dynamic in that she emphasises the agency and actions of Salasacans while also situating them in broader global processes. This emphasis on agency is particularly evident in the second part of the book, which elucidates how narratives and experience are dialectically constitutive and shows how the individual both draws upon and reproduces the collective. By demonstrating how ritual and healing practices are given authority because they are understood to work, while also emphasising the room given for individual interpretation, scepticism and alternative modes of health care, Corr not only demonstrates the interculturality and multimodality of Salasacan lived religion and ritual, but also demonstrates the interplay between embodied experience and textual formations.
The agency of Salasacans is also evident in Corr's discussion of mediators, the position of priests and healers, and the negotiations between the Catholic Church and its Salasacan congregation. Corr shows that Salasacans did not submissively accept the political authority of the Church; at times they used the Church's hierarchy, textual language and discursive norms for their own political advancement, bypassing local priests and writing, through the mediation of scribes, to archbishops in order to settle matters of ritual sponsorship, for example. Thus Corr demonstrates how the Catholic Church provided a site for individual prestige within the community, albeit one contained within broader social hierarchies. The theme of mediation continues in her later account of shamanism, particularly in reference to cultural knowledge and the relations between bodies and the landscape. Ritual and Remembrance thereby draws our attention to relations between the Andes and the Amazon, showing that Salasacan religion is not just an interplay of Catholicism and indigenous highland beliefs, but also incorporates symbols and spirits from the Oriente. This challenge to Andeanism is significant, and Corr builds upon Salomon in highlighting the salience and historicism of relations between these two sites.Footnote 1 This discussion could have been even more fruitful, however, had Corr considered how, by constructing the Amazon as a site of ancient knowledge and spiritual power, Salasacans potentially also reproduce ‘moral topographies’.
While the arguments regarding agency and interplay are convincing, Corr's assertion that these practices are tantamount to a distinct Salasacan identity is less so, and there is some slippage in the manner in which ethnic identity, cultural memory and relatedness are presented as synonymous. This points to an unresolved tension within the book between Salasacans being represented, on the one hand, as rather open to, and actively engaging with, global processes, and being depicted, on the other, as an endogamous social group. To elucidate, Corr's discussion of the muy is based around Salasacan cohesion and entrenched community relations. Yet, her earlier account of sponsorship indicates power struggles and political manoeuvring within the Salasacan community and, although she hints at significant change – for example, migration and the introduction of a mestiza girl band into a Catholic fiesta – the potential tensions that arise from these processes are not addressed. Thus, contrary to Corr's intentions and focus on agency, Salasacans are, at times, represented as rather static and homogenous. Likewise, the accounts of intergenerational transmission and the critical role that affines play in death rituals raise more questions than they answer, and I was left wondering where those households that include non-Salasacan affines and migrated kin fit within Corr's dichotomous framework of indigenous Salasacan and mestizo-white households.
Questions regarding ethnicity and self-identification are not incidental in Ecuador, and Corr appears to be arguing that Salasacan subjectivity is performed through cultural memory and ritual practice while also implying that it is founded on descent and kinship. While these forms of belonging potentially interplay, Ritual and Remembrance could have been strengthened if these questions had been tackled directly and Salasacan self-definition further unpacked. These issues relate, in part, to a loose use of terminology. Corr eloquently and convincingly shows us how memories and knowledge are transmitted through ritual practices, many of which are kin-based. These processes are evidently related to ethnic belonging, but they are also not necessarily as one, and the seamless association Corr makes is problematic. Consequently, conclusions regarding unique ethnic identity appear more tenuous than is perhaps necessary. These concerns about ‘ethnicity’ aside, Ritual and Remembrance makes a nuanced contribution to discussions of cultural memory, landscape, lived religion and agency, and significantly enriches the ethnographic record of Ecuador and the Andes.
