A journey into symbolic disorder: Miskitu reactions to Mestizo Catholic ritual in Nicaragua

Abstract

This article considers a Catholic Miskitu catechist’s view of Managua’s festival of Santo Domingo, an event that should be understood as a ‘rite of reversal’ emphasizing ritual humiliation of the saint, symbolic disorder and regeneration. It shows that the horror experienced by the catechist witnessing this series of rituals, then travelling with the anthropologist, had less to do with a lack of a relativist appreciation for the practices of others, as evidenced by his appreciation of the festival of the Virgin of Fátima in Bluefields, than it did with a very real fear of symbolic inversion and the possibility of divine punishment. The article argues that an understanding of this reaction should be sought in the history of a in Miskitu Catholicism very different to orthodox Nicaraguan Catholicism and in Miskitu notions of divinity.