De la Reflexividad Social a las Mediaciones Rituales: Mutaciones, Convergencias y Paradojas en el Lepün y el Culto Pentecostal

Resumen

Starting from the search of the transformation in ritual practices in williche's communities, this article sets forth a ritual mediation theory that: a) analyzes ritual work from its articulations with the cultural and nature elements which are used by it as context, and b) explains ritual change in connection with the transformations of contextual elements with which ritual is interwoven. From this perspective, ritual is a social reflexivity instance insofar as it shows the features or contradictions of sociocultural systems through which human beings face their needs and adaptative challenges. The counterparts of ritual reflexivity are ritual mediations, the links that turn ritual into a space of creativity and social reproduction. The model that we propose is used, in its most general analysis level, to deal with the mutations, convergences, and paradoxes in the lepün and pentecostal cults.