Paper short abstract:

In the contemporary context of Puerto Rico, characterized by the dependency on the USA, afroamerican religions and the recovery of indigenous Taíno heritage emerge as practices of identity resistance which express a sense of Puerto Rican nationalism associated with the larger Afro-Caribbean family.

Paper long abstract:

In contemporary Puerto Rico, Afro-American religions play a key role as nuclei of political resistance, as spaces in which Puerto Rican identity is claimed over a North American one. The same occurs with certain popular Catholic practices and the movement to recover the island's indigenous Taíno heritage.

Moreover, in all of these cults, movements and political discourses, the body, sexuality and material culture are constantly used and evoked. In afroamerican rituals, spiritual alterations are experienced through the body and sexual disorders are often interpreted in a social and moral tone. Sexuality is also visible in the material representations of the female divinities worshipped during ceremonies and in the possession rituals in which these divinities "descend". These goddesses are often used by Puerto Rican women in order to act, through religion, against the patriarchal culture which prevails on the island. Neotaíno's movement is sometimes associated with an ecological and mystic discourse which includes the claim of a "new" concept of body and sexual culture.

In this paper, based on an ongoing fieldwork, I propose to study these religions of resistance using a visual anthropology approach, a discipline which combines the study of the image as a research object, as an ethnographic method and as a part of anthropological discourse. This is an ideal perspective for analyzing the relationship between body, nationalism and popular religions in contemporary Puerto Rico, and for examining the relationship between the particular political and cultural characteristics of the island and other parts of the Caribbean region.