Catholics and protestants in a Guatemalan town : an anthropological study of religion, tradition, identity, and change

Abstract

I have conducted fieldwork in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, an Indian town (pueblo indígena) in the central highlands of Guatemala. My focus of research has been religious diversity and how different concepts and ideas of religion, culture, and change are expressed in terms of religious discourse. Catholic and pueblo traditions and identity expression have been closely linked in Indian Guatemala. Protestant identity construction centers around the rejection of Catholicism and Catholic tradition, but Protestants still retain a strong Indian identity. One question has been how Protestants conceptualize Indian and pueblo identity. I found that Protestants are ambivalent towards tradition as the problem arises over what to reject as ‘Catholic’ and what to keep as ‘San Antonio’ in identity expression. I also take a look at public celebrations and explore how they reveal something of the social communities being expressed in celebrations and how individuals become localized in different ways in the spatial, symbolical, and social landscape. Another question of focus has been how the discourse of religious difference may be related to other discourses of tradition, modernity, and change by examining the concept of tradition and how it is used as a boundary marker between Catholics and Protestants.