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Research as pilgrimage, pilgrimage asresearch. How I became a pilgrimEnzo Cozzi aa Teaches drama at Royal Holloway College , University ofLondon ,Published online: 27 Feb 2009.

To cite this article: Enzo Cozzi (1995) Research as pilgrimage, pilgrimage as research. HowI became a pilgrim, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 4:2, 161-173, DOI:10.1080/13569329509361860

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1995 161

Research as Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage as Research. How IBecame a Pilgrim

ENZO COZZI

To my mother.A Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Ayquina.

Faced with the crisis of the paradigm of the enlightenment and of westernphilosophy, a new paradigm emerges that seeks to re-establish links with theLatin American peoples' cultural and religious roots. All this against the back-ground of the great transformations brought about by the transition from atechnological-scientific to a technotronic-informational society...

We are in the presence, thus, of a kind of 'resacralisation' of certain functionalspaces introduced by scientific-technical rationality itself. (Parker, 1993: 65, 393,my translation).

The (Re)Search

In April 1992, after seventeen years of exile, I went back to Chile with my family.Our plans were for my wife to seek to re-settle permanently in our country,working as an alternative therapist, whilst I kept travelling back to England forfive months each year, using my periods in Chile to research into paratheatricaltherapeutic rituals in urban contexts. I was curious about the ways in whichtraditional paratheatrical therapies might be cross-fertilizing with modern—postmodern even—theatre and therapeutic practices amongst urban populationsin Chile. This was an expression of a mounting preoccupation with the purpose-ful theatres of migrations and syncretisms, and of intercultural activisms. I wasdriven in this direction partly by questions around my own identity/ies as acultural migrant, and partly by my witnessing the growth of transculturalperformance practices in London in the eighties to fill in the cultural vacuumsleft by the retreating socialist theatres of the seventies. I felt that political andother purposeful theatrical practices in Chile might benefit from my country'sown confluence of several waves and kinds of migrations: from the Northernhemisphere as exiles poured back into our land in the wake of the slow rebirthof democracy; from the countryside to the towns; from the mass communicationand televisual media to the local neighbourhoods; from aesthetic theatre toparatheatre and popular theatre and viceversa; from hi-tech to traditionalmedicine (each with its own rituals and performances); and from organizededucation to local mediation.

My interest in these questions was practical and theoretical. Having comethrough the years to define myself as a paratheatre practitioner in both senses of1356-9325/95/020161-13 © 1995 Journals Oxford Ltd

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the Spanish word 'para' (i.e.: parateatro': paratheatre, and 'theatrefor'), I wasmotivated by a need to explore new ways in which my own work could nurturecredible links with what we might call social 'forness'—i.e., purposefulness,usefulness—in the changing political climates of the times. I had moved from apolitically interventionist theatre practice in the seventies, towards a moreculturally preoccupied endeavour in the eighties. This had meant, for instance,the founding of my own theatre company, Travesura, in 1983, with the aim ofexploring the uses of Latin American folk art, festivity, puppetry and storytellingtraditions, in intercultural education and special education in Britain.

In short, then, my research aims for the last three years in Chile have been toassess what the theory, and my own practice, of purposeful paratheatre (in theinter-related fields of education and therapy) might stand to learn from a closeacquaintance with certain therapeutic and mediational paratheatrical practices inChile. In what follows I offer some reflections and recount some experiences onthe subject, inspired by my personal acquaintance with devotional dancing andpilgrimage in northern Chile, and by my scrutiny of some of the ethnographicliterature on the field.

The questions I have been trying to grapple with are of two kinds:

(1) Given that these pilgrims are in their great majority urban dwellingmestizos (Van Kessel, 1987), and hence removed from the rural environ-ment in which their sacred and therapeutic dances take place, what isit—in paratheatrical terms—that they are doing, and in what relationdoes it stand to the specific paratheatricality of some of the rituals stilltoday endogenous to the Andean environment, i.e. those of the presentday Aymara shepherds and agriculturalists of the Chilean Andes? Inother words, are the pilgrims' performances culturally transmigratory,are they an expression of urban and rural cultural cross-fertilizations?This is what Buechler (1980), for instance, has argued takes place in manypresent-day urban festivals in Bolivia. They would be, that is, expressionsof living urban/rural communication networks made possible by localmigratory patterns. To a certain extent, in this part of my enquiry I havefollowed in Buechler's groundbreaking steps, albeit focusing more onaesthetic/theatrical aspects of the celebrations. In the second part I havebeen more on my own.

(2) In the event of an affirmative answer to the above, what can otherintercultural theatre-therapeutic practices learn from what the mestizodancers and pilgrims are doing? How can one become a purposefulparatheatre pilgrim as it were, without pretending to somersault out ofone's semi-europeanized criollo 'identi-kit', a product and witness ofother cultural syncretisms? Can a culture-bridging leap be attempted, 'sintratar de saltarse su propia sombra', without trying to leap out of one'sown shadow, as it were?

The Ordeal

On 5 January 1993 my young son, aged six at the time, fell through a windowin Santiago, Chile, and sustained deep wounds to his right arm, which compro-mised arteries and nerves. He was alone with other children when the accident

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happened, and was saved by two things: the providential intervention of agardener from a nearby house who, upon hearing screams, jumped a gardenfence and applied a tourniquet to his arm; and by the accident happening at ashort distance from one of Santiago's most advancedly equipped private clinics.By the time I got to see him he had been pulled back from the edge. Once thelife-threatening emergency was over, he underwent micro-surgery to rejoin thesevered nerves, and we were left with an open prognosis: anything was possible,between partial and near-total recovery within one to two years; with thepossibility of subsequent operations if the recovery was too slow.

A few days later I had to come back to England to resume my teaching dutiesand he stayed with his mother. During my absence, trying to think of ways ofhelping him from a distance, I started writing and sending him 'rehabilitationtales', 'cuentos para sanar'. These were interactive stories devised with the aim ofmaking his physiotherapy exercises less tedious, and with what at the timeseemed a forlorn hope of mobilizing his internal healing resources. For thisenterprise I took my cue from the well known link in many traditional therapiesbetween ritual healing and storytelling (e.g. yatiri (medicine men) myths in theAndes; Yorubamerican myths in candomblé and santería, etc). This link makes themythical/symbolic underpinning of the ritual process come alive for the patient,and opens up possibilities for performative transference processes to take place.The individual imaginatively rehearses, repeats and 'stages' processes of projec-tion and introjection, identification and de-identification which have been im-portant in earlier stages of his/her psychical development, and in theorganization of his/her drives, through identifications and de-identificationswith mythical characters, and projections and introjections around mythicalevents.

But perhaps the most important—at the time unconscious—cue I must havetaken from the uncannily dramaturgical and mythological aspects already pre-sent in the event itself, which was strangely deprived of semiotic neutrality. Itseemed to 'playwright' itself, to become organized—simultaneously with itsactual occurrence—along mythical performance structures: three children alonein a house; going through a window into 'another world'; the letting of blood;an intervening gardener (inevitably associated with the earth, regeneration,etc.)...all the way along a familiar signifying chain right through to my sonwaking up after the operation to tell us that his recently deceased grandfatherhad come to stand next to him, to reassure him that everything would be alright.

The story-kits I sent to Chile included regenerating trees, and various otherimpaired creatures—animal, vegetable and human—helping and supportingeach other against the imaginary landscapes of Chile, especially those of Aymaraand Andean mythology and crafts, which I had become acquainted withthrough my research at the time. These were juxtaposed to some mythical motifsthat I knew to be present within my son's mind. To give an example: I knewDanilo to be very fond of those fumbling and anti-heroic tigers that figureprominently in Buddhist teaching tales, whilst he also had at an earlier point inhis life developed a strong identification with prince Rama, from the Indian epicpoem (to the extent that he would at times introduce himself to strangers asDanilo Rama Virgilio). So what I attempted was a sort of therapeutic syncretism:by making use of the meaning of 'Kama' ('branch') in Spanish, to suggest a questby the Indian hero to assist in the regeneration of a branchless tree (which was

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Reyes Morenos in Ayquina, 7 September 1992.

what the regenerating nerves in his arm would have to do: 'branch out' again),helped by a scraggy tiger fashioned like a tiger petroglyph from the Chileandesert. All this, within a story which owed much to the Aymara myths I waspreoccupied with at the time.

In those interactive stories I attempted a kind of intercultural theatre therapy,and a kind of therapeutic intertextuality. With what degree of success? I willnever be sure. By the time we saw each other again, three months after theaccident, there couldn't have been many signs of progress; nevertheless I thenwent on to stage a storytelling puppet show using the interactive stories, withDanilo helping. We enjoyed that, and we both grew very fond of the show'sresourceful little protagonist: Niñeco, the offspring of a star and the tree whichhad lost its branches.

The next step in my efforts to engage my own practice and research inDanilo's rehabilitation took place upon my return to Chile in the winter of 1993(European summer), when I decided to take him with me on a pilgrimage.

The Sacrifice

In September 1993 I had been planning to attend the pilgrimage of NuestraSeñora de Guadalupe in the remote Andean village of Ayquina in the northernChilean altiplano. I decided to take Danilo with me, and to leave all myresearcher's paraphernalia (cameras, tape-recorders, and note-pads) behind. Itwas a step I had hitherto been too inhibited to take: to go with my son simplyas pilgrims to ask the Virgin to assist in the healing of his arm.

It was an eventful journey, as befits a pilgrimage. It included, for the final haulacross the desert, travelling in a battered minibus without a clutch, with adeflated tyre and no spare. After the driver somehow managed to persuade anofficer at a police barrier that the tyre was perfectly alright, our transport finallymade it to Ayquina with its full complement of pilgrims and traders (perhaps

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Crawling pilgrim and son, La Tirana, 16 July 1992.

the punctured tyre was a decoy, as the driver was unlicensed). So we foundourselves in the shrine on the night of September 7, the eve of the celebration.September 7 is the date of the all-night vigil when the arriving pilgrims come tomeet the Sacred Image, kiss Her clothes, and leave little written notes andpresents at her feet. It is also the time when the dancing fraternities sing theirbeautiful couplets to the Virgin, intoned in a variety of Latin America's folktunes—from corridos, through sambas and tonadas, to boleros and mariachis, withsome international sounds sprinkled in for good measure: Andalusianbullfighting tunes, Country and Western, and so on:

Campos naturalesdéjennos pasarporque tus morenosvienen a adorar.

Cansados llegamosbuscando a Maríapor pampas y cerroscon tanta alegría.

Natural fieldslet us throughbecause your morenosare coming to worship.

Tired we arrivesearching for Marythrough deserts and mountainswith such happiness.

Unlike the 'farewells' vigil at the end of the festivity, which is the occasion ofmuch display of emotion, the arrival vigil is marked by sober and restrainedworship; the prevailing attitude is one of stillness. During it, many pilgrimsquietly stand near the Image or by the temple's walls holding burning candlesin their hands, allowing the wax to drip over their wrists and arms. The air fillsup with candle smoke and its peculiar smell, which under the candle light givesthe whole picture a numinous iridiscence. Compelled by the atmosphere,overcoming my scepticism and scruples of conscience, and driven by my child's

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Danilo with devil, La Tirana, 16 July 1992.

predicament, I made my way to the vicinity of the Image, lit a candle, and stoodthere.

After a while Danilo complained that he was getting bored, and I suggestedthat he play a little on his own. So he went off and joined a couple of otherchildren who were collecting the wax drippings from the floor. For a long timethey crawled around between the legs of the crowd, engrossed in their waxcollection, and then suddenly I had a vision (which was actually happening,true). I saw him moulding the recovered wax into a ball, with both hands. Andin the hazily luminiscent and charged atmosphere of the temple it seemed to meas if his hands were linked through tenuous filaments to the image of the Virginand to all the other candle-holding hands in the sanctuary, including mine (asin a religious lámina).

By that time (September) his right hand had begun to get a lot of sensationand some movement back, but he had so far seemed unable or unwilling to useit much, outside his physiotherapy or exercise routines. It was the first time I

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noticed him using it spontaneously and unconcernedly, whilst recycling waxinto a round candle to take as a present to his mother.

I never interpreted that event as a miracle. But I did read it as a sign, a strangekind of intertextuality. I had the impression of receiving a message that healingprocesses were taking place deep inside him, but that I lacked awareness ofthem. I felt that the text, the map of his incipient cure had been there, but I hadlacked the perceptiveness required to read it, because I had not hitherto beenprepared to sacrifice or give anything of myself on Danilo's behalf. And I hadthus perhaps missed opportunities to keep my actions synchronized with acuring process which, like every such process, is never guaranteed and is thusalways after all something of a gift. I feel now as if the cultural—sacred—environment of the sanctuary made me the gift of a sharper awareness of theprocesses Danilo was living through, in reciprocation for my own inexpensivegift of the journey and the candle-burning, which itself involved the mild painof superficially burning precisely my right hand.

This strange pattern of reciprocal equivalences between the impairment ofDanilo's right hand, my gift to the Holy Mother of holding a burning candle inmy own right hand, and Danilo's subsequent making of another candle with thespent wax using his right hand in order to recycle it as a gift to his mother, holdsother messages for me—pertinent to therapeutic paratheatre—which I yet haveto think through. But I am certain that there I was also presented with anothermap of a wider application, which should help me chart some of the ways inwhich religion, theatre and therapy can interconnect through chains of reciproc-ity, at the boundaries between modern and traditional, urban and rural, Indianand mestizo practices and beliefs, which is what I have been searching for.

So, a paratheatrically encoded sign, and not a miracle. Subsequent reflectionon the experience has made me realize just how much more the pilgrims'ideological horizon is concerned with inscribing and interpreting messages andsigns—with each inscription having an element of sacrifice and an element ofgift within a pattern of mirroring reciprocities—in the environment and cosmos,than it is with expecting miraculous interventions from the Virgin. Thus it seemsto hark back to traditional Aymara religious culture and its vast contextual,environmental and cosmological literacy:

Other visual con texts... are also 'readable'. We shall only allude to thevast space constituted by our surrounding world: mountains, land-marks, crossroads, river confluences. In all that the Aymara reads notonly wayfaring signs, but recognizes also the relationships with ances-tors, neighbours and deities. (Harris and Bouysse-Cassagne, 219).

This is a literacy embedded in chains of reciprocity, as van den Berg has veryaptly pointed out (1990: 75-77). It is an active, transitive, mediating ritual literacyconcerned more with detailed reading—and, in a reciprocating movement,'writing' and dramatizing—the material and sacred contexts around their com-munities' lives in order to ascertain and deliver right and necessary courses ofaction, than it is concerned with expecting the direct intervention of transcen-dent entities. We are talking about a human praxis which is finely attuned to itsinterconnectedness with the cosmos and the environment, and attuned also tothe subtle movements and shifts in its ethno- and chronoscapes (Van Kessel,1980: 275-349).

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This congruence between the pilgrims' and Aymara religion has broughthome to me a crucial contention of Van Kessel's that many aspects of thepilgrims' practices and beliefs associate them less with Catholicism than withAymara religion (1984, 1987, 1993). According to him, the above-describedliteracy is part of a 'symbolic technology' (1980: 314-324) peculiar to Andeanculture, which he insists is something that has by no means become lost to themore narrowly print-literate working class town dwellers in the region, as thestudy of their pilgrimages suggests to him (Van Kessel, 1984, 1987).

But it is not only that a 'miracle' interpretation would have been morenarrowly Roman Catholic, whereas a grammatological or semiotic interpretationfelt more in keeping with the traditional Andean cosmology, whose ways ofunderlying the ritual practices of the urban pilgrims to the Marian sanctuariesI am now beginning practically to understand (I have reflected, for instance, thatthe crawling pilgrims' serpentine trails on the soil adjoining the sanctuary canalso be construed as an effect of a drive to re-acquaint themselves with that kindof writing and 'dramaturgy'; a re-acquaintance, in their case, of a drasticallyembodying kind). It is also that an explanation along the lines of 'miracle' wouldhave been disempowering for me, because what was miraculous in that eventwas—to risk a cliché—the cleansing of the windows of my perception. And, overand above that, it signalled a direction for my further work: a powerful feelingI brought back from Ayquina that the urban mestizo ritual practices in theMarian sanctuaries were an expression of an implicit determination to re-acquirean estranged responsibility to keep the cosmos in order. They seemed implicitlyto be taking on a responsibility as mediators, in the face of deities to somedegree powerless without human help, to restore to a cosmos undermined bymodernization its ancestral equilibrium. To me, the pilgrims (and I, as one) arere-learning to be at the windows, vigilant and alert. A duty of vigilance whichis encoded in the name of that 7 September ceremony itself: 'la vigilia', andbodily expressed through holding burning candles well into the night.

This duty of mediation between different dimensions of reality, and ofvigilance regarding the cosmos's needs, is another aspect of the connections ofthe pilgrims' world with that of the Andean mother cultures, echoing as it does,for instance, many fallow season Aymara agricultural rituals that turn aroundthe idea of feeding a hungry environment and quenching its thirst:

The immediate aim [of the rites] is to placate the forces of nature whichin August, according to the Aymarás, are restless, hungry andthirsty...A peasant from Carangas (Oruro) intimated to me: 'In Augusteverything is thirsty. This is the month when we must really give, wehave to satisfy'. (Berg, 1990: 82).

That Aymara culture implicitly places human beings in a role not unlike thatof cosmological diplomats and mediators, is also apparent from the theatricalelements in some Andean mythologies concerning the deities. In these storiesthe deities are often portrayed as vulnerable, easily offended and jealouscharacters, very human-dependent. Santiago, Patron Saint of Toconce, nearAyquina, whose anniversary celebrations I have attended, is a case in point. Thesyncretic présider over thunder and lightning, he is the hybrid product ofat least three cultural influences: Aymara, Christian, and North and CentralAmerican. He is vividly portrayed in images and religious dances as a short-

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tempered, gun-toting, stetson-wearing and horse-riding cowboy, perpetually onthe lookout to chastize any slighting of his person. When someone is struck bylightning, people say it must have been Santiago who shot him/her in a hail ofbullets (Monast, 1969).

The deities can also be victims of accidents, illness and emotional suffering.Such vicissitudes can give occasion for paratheatrical ceremonies of great beauty,which also furnish graphic proof of the privileged cosmic mediating role grantedthe human agency in Aymara culture:

It can happen that the Saints become ill. St James, during one of hisprocessions can fall from his plinth and break a leg. Who will cure him?None other than the Yatiri or sorcerer. Above anything, the sick one hasa great need of comforting, of friendly visits. So the yatiri organizes aget-together with all his kin statues. And he adds plentiful sacrifices ofllamas and lambs...(Monast, 1969: 71).

This discussion of the mythological characterizations underscoring some Ay-mara ritual practices, with the rich theatrical textures—and the humour—I haveunderlined, ushers in the next set of questions: what paratheatrical mechanismsare being deployed by the urban pilgrims in their rituals? And what otherconnections can be traced between their specific paratheatricality and that of theAndean ritual background, apart from the very important ones I have alreadypointed out, i.e. environmental/contextual literacy and cosmological vigilanceand mediation?

The Theatres of Curing

One of the most important paratheatrical principles in traditional Aymara ritualas it still takes place in Northern Chile (Van Kessel, 1993) seems to me to be whatwe might term their portable, wandering 'staging' technique, as exemplified bytheir mesa (libation, offerings) ceremonies, which feature in many rituals and inmany different moments and places within each ritual. This staging device is awoollen cloth that, stretched on a wooden table, a stone slab, or the bare earth,carries the ritual offerings to the Pachamama (the earth), the Achachilas (hills),Patron Saints and other deities: coca leaves, alcohol, chuyas (ceremonial bottlesfor sprinkling), clay or bread figurines, the blood of sacrificial animals, etc.Armed with this cloth and the ritual implements and offerings to place on it theywander around the land, stretching it at diverse points depending on the ritual:graves, fountains, in front of hills, in the house, the livestock enclosure, theplaza. It is always placed open side to the east, closed side to the west, with theopen (audience) side marked by a wooden arch, poles or sticks with banners, etc.

Now, in the pilgrimage ritual there are no cloths stretched on a stone slab,wooden table, or directly on the earth. Their mesa takes the form of an embodiedlibation or 'offerings' ceremony. It occupies the space of the dance itself: thestreet, the allocated rectangle in the square or in the sanctuary's enclosure, withthe sacred image on one end, and the arch surrounding her in lieu of the archat the boundary of the mesa. This is what I am tempted to call a self-sacrificialparatheatricality of psychological embodiment, which would mirror through thevery selves of its participants, what could be called an ecological or environmen-tal sacrificial paratheatricality typical of Aymara rites. In the pilgrims' parathe-

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atre the dancers themselves become the votive 'offerings'. They represent theclay figurines, the bottles, the alcohol, the coca leaves. They fumigate from theirown inner selves through the steps and circumambulations of the choreography.They give out their skill, their tiredness, their own blood and sweat (these arenot metaphors; I have seen many a bleeding knee from prostrate walking, anddrums stained by percussionists' bleeding knuckles).

The Andean Aymara context stresses the welcoming of the spirits, and theirdespacho (dispatching), or sending-off to do good work on their behalf, just ascattle are dispatched and/or welcomed as a gift. Whereas the pilgrims' cel-ebration stresses 'being welcomed' and 'dispatching oneself, sending oneself onthe assignment to do good works—steer clear of sin—and/or 'farewelling',saying goodbye. It is they who are the messengers and intermediaries, as I havesuggested. They are the ones who have to undertake the journey to the sacredcentre, because their homes, their working spaces are not sacred any longer (VanKessell, 1987).

After every mesa offering the Aymara officiant will retreat without lookingback (this is something that repeats itself in many different instances of ritualmesa offerings or oblations). Conversely, after their own ritual salutations to theVirgin, the mestizo dancers will retreat moving backwards, never turning theirbacks to the Image. This happens during the songs at the arrival or at thedespedida, during the dances in the temple, and even within many choreogra-phies (where the dancers tend to stay orientated towards the image even whenthey are receding from it). There are in the cordillera Patron Saint celebrationswhere one can see examples of both forms of retreat, which probably shows thatthey have become places of cultural exchange, of syncretism in synthesis.

In the same vein, whilst the Andean Aymara will sacrifice an animal, or usecoca leaves and alcohol which are spread around the environment, i.e. engage inextroverted rituals with external objects, beings, etc., the pilgrims will (literallyand metaphorically) sacrifice themselves introvertedly. Their oblativity will bechannelled through all the expenses incurred for and in the pilgrimage, and theirmain gift will be the dance, the music, the song, i.e. everything that theythemselves do and perform. There is little or no aspersión (fumigation, sprin-kling), little offering of coca leaves or alcohol in their ritual. Even though it istraditional in pilgrimage sanctuaries to take little presents to leave at the feet ofthe Image or pinned to Her mantle, mainly the objects that the urban devotionaldancers carry are the costumes and the musical instruments, extensions of thedancing self, and their Sacred Image of the Virgin, with the flowers that signifyHer syncretic kinship with the Pachamama. The deities, who in Aymara akapacha(the occupational and living environment) cosmology are centrifugal principlesexisting all around, become in this case a centripetal condensation: a singlepersonified Image.

So, the pilgrimage ritual as paratheatre appears in many ways to be a mirrorimage, a reversed-out and condensed duplicate of the Andean ritual. Thepilgrims, dancers, musicians or otherwise, understand ritual reciprocity asputting themselves in as the offerings in the celebration, in an instance ofzooming in on the ritual practices they have become demographically estrangedfrom. Attending their final farewells to the Virgin, with their sense of tragedyand pathos, their instances of weeping, crying, desperation, anxiety attacks andeven losses of consciousness, I have been struck by the magnitude of the

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embodiment effort. This might be an effect of the presence of the sacred beinghandled within an individualized, discrete conception of the self and its con-comitant theatricality. It could be a case, then, of the relationship with the sacredbeing translated from its typical Andean paratheatrical forms into forms morefamiliar in the urban context today. I am thinking about a notion of self/performance that doesn't manage symbolically to diffuse the presence of thenuminous along a grid of contextual interconnections, but represents it via theindividualized expressive behaviour of the participants themselves, who behaveas if they have somehow lost themselves (which they to some extent have) i.e.a paratheatrical aesthetics of embodiment and 'living the part'. From an every-day, ordinary and collective readiness to converse with spirits and deitiescharacteristic of Andean ritual, we would have moved to an expressive, 'livingthe part' representation of the effects of the presence of the numinous onindividualized psyches unaccustomed to its daily proximity.

The Gift: la mesa en el pavimento

Beyond participant observation, it would seem that the practice, orlived personal experience of Aymara religion must be the final step inan interdisciplinary methodology which aims at a really completescientific analysis. (Van Kessel, 1993: 82).

What lessons does all this have for me, then, as a paratheatre practitioner, and(re)searcher? Van Kessel above goes some way towards replying on my behalf.Some way, because the ideal of scientific completion is Utopian, and also becausein my experience, the pilgrims' therapeutic rituals have more to do withadopting an attitude, a disposition to live their lives de manera consciente (in bothSpanish senses of the word: consciously and conscientiously), attentively, recip-rocatingly, and responsibly in the midst of contemporary Chilean capitalism'sbias towards greed, irresponsibility and recklessness, than it has to do withseeking the gratification or solace of religious 'experiences'. Just as much asAymara religion is about a constant, persévérant, quotidian reciprocating atti-tude, rather than about receiving transcendent experiences. And there are subtleunderlying communicating vessels between the Aymara ritual and its embodiedand condensed mestizo counterpart: what Van Kessel insists upon and I intuitedin the Ayquina sanctuary while watching Danilo play with a ball of wax. Thesecorrespondences can perhaps best be exemplified by the most common bodilyattitude and facial expression amongst the dancers and the musicians, which isone of alert sobriety. This points to the ultimately self-disciplined, sanguine,tranquil ethos of these pilgrimages, as I have witnessed them in the extremeconditions of the deserts and mountains of the north of Chile. Admittedly, theycan result in sometimes enormous emotional discharges, as a byproduct of thesheer strains of what I have called their aesthetics of embodiment and self-sacrifice. But the emotional effervescence must be seen as what it is: a manytimes unexpected, not necessarily even wanted result, rather than a goal.

Now, this stressing of pilgrimage's theatricality as one that mirrors, condensesand amplifies through embodiment some salient aspects of the Aymara ritualpractices at source, and their reciprocating ethos, where does it lead me? Itmeans—I feel—that if I could be brought to make the small-scale sacrifices and

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172 E. Cozzi

gifts that becoming a pilgrim entails, and by doing so some subtle mechanismsof reciprocity in paratheatrical therapy could become apparent to me, I can takeanother step. I can try to get through the self-sacrifice and the fervour, theself-doubt and the pain, the embodying revelatory way of pilgrimage, into an'extended self ordinariness of attitude and experience. I can, maybe, cultivate adisposition geared not so much towards self-experience of the sacred, as towardsbecoming more proficient in the paratheatrical languages of those more ac-quainted with it, like the Aymarás of the altiplano. What amounts to the firstpractical lesson has already been delivered to me by those mirroring patterns ofreciprocity I discern in the experience with the candles. I know now that one canbecome able to mobilize the vicissitudes of one's life as a tool towards thisliteracy. It is a commonly available tool; whose life isn't beset by difficulties andpain? The fact that I cannot ever hope to function in these languages without anaccent should be no deterrent; this world of hybrid culturing our theatre artsinhabit, being full of found, adopted and imposed languages, is also full ofaccents and of awkward grammars (and so is this paper, for that matter).

Finally, I feel that these paratheatrical forms founded on awareness andreciprocity have to be tried out in my everyday life, in our akapacha: the streetsand buildings of these cities we enact our lives upon, cultivating an attentivenessto the patterns that interconnect our endeavours with everything else. In termsof theatre and education/therapy, it may become a call to stretch our equivalentof a woollen cloth, unworryingly out of context, and fumigate these concretebuildings and roads that frame us.

And Danilo? Danilo is much better now; he keeps recovering, and we arehappier parents. He has become almost completely ambidextrous, and whoknows? perhaps intimately ambi-thinking, with the seeds of holistic wholenesssprouting in the rich soil of his laughing, jovial, alert, communicative, inquisitiveperson. He occasionally dreams about windows, and we worry a bit. Butultimately these images in his dreams are to me a part of the ongoing pattern ofparatheatrical reciprocities around us; they are pointing things out to me, and Imustn't let my vigilance slip. For I have learned from our pilgrimages, that aslong as I maintain my vigil(ance), a finely interconnected, reciprocating andpatterned universe can graphically curdle into existence all around, where I ambeckoned to keep in touch with every layer of reality, from the world of history,the ancestors and the dead, to the multiplicitous lives of the built-up environ-ments I move in. But whenever my attentiveness flags (more often than not) theuniverse collapses back into the strife of opposites and the abstract chaos ofbinarism. Which is what ultimately, after my experience in front of NuestraSeñora de Guadalupe de Ayquina, my son's predicament seems to be saying to me:'If you don't keep watch at the windows, someone will crash through them.Whichever way you come in contact with it, in the paratheatres of therapy andmediation there are patterns of reciprocity not wedded to dualism; a life is savedand a child is cured by subtle interconnections between the hypermodern andthe traditional: neurosurgeons and gardeners, electrostimulation and story-telling, physiotherapy and pilgrimage, payments and gifts, sacrifice andcelebration'.

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Research as Pilgrimage 173

References

X. Albé, ed., Raíces de América: El Mundo Aymara. (Madrid, 1988).H. van Den Berg, La Tierra No Da Así Nomás. Los Ritos Agrícolas en la Religión de los Aymara Cristianos

(La Paz, 1990).H.C. Buechler, The Masked Media. Aymara Fiestas and Sociological Interaction in the Bolivian Highlands

(The Hague).O. Harris and T. Bouysse-Cassagne, 'Pacha: En Torno al Pensamiento Aymara', in Albó (1988), pp.

217-275.J.-E. Monast, On Les Croyait Chrétiens: Les Aymaras (Paris, 1969).C. Parker, Otra Lógica en América Latina. Religión Popular Y Modernización Capitalista (México, 1993).J. Van Kessel, Holocausto al Progreso. Los Aymaras de Tarapacá (Amsterdam, 1980).J. Van Kessel, Medicina Andina (Iquique, 1984).J. Van Kessel, Lucero del Desierto (Amsterdam, 1987).J. Van Kessel, Cuando Arde el Tiempo Sagrado (La Paz, 1992).

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