Abstract
In the article, I explore different motorcar blessing rituals undertaken by drivers from the Bolivian region of Chuquisaca, while centering primary my description on the side of the doing of the rituals and only linking them on a second stage to individual meaning and theological reflections. In that way, I show that the interviewed drivers differentiate the performed rituals first of all by their components (and not by their addressees) and consider all three of them as necessary parts of Catholic faith regardless of the positioning of the clerics. The interviewed drivers attribute effects of safe driving and economic successes to the rituals, but also experience them as partly linked to accidents and incidents and by consequence increase in the aftermath of misfortunes their ritual offerings. Therefore, I conclude that drivers of automobile Bolivia through the performed rituals are reproducing a social system of reciprocity that goes beyond human counterparts and that religious synthesis in their reflections is to be understood as a reaction from below (rather than a cause) to anti-syncretistic discourses amid religious elites.
Highlights
Resumen En el presente artículo se exploran rituales que choferes de la región boliviana de Chuquisaca emprenden para bendecir sus coches motorizados
Los choferes entrevistados atribuyen tanto efectos de conducción segura como éxitos económicos a los rituales, pero también los experimentan como vinculados en parte a accidentes e incidentes y, por consiguiente
This article explored car blessing rituals performed by drivers from Chuquisaca
Summary
The mobility turn brought more awareness of movement(s) into the social sciences which for a long time had centered their main attention on rather static groupings of people and concepts. One of the core actors to be studied under the new paradigm was the automobile and its place in human society: Going beyond historical studies. Whether automobility is a system or automobilities are regimes, all these meta-narrations fail to analyze the day-to-day reality of life with a car Until this day, rather few ethnographical studies have been made about what Daniel Miller (2001) called the “humanity of the car”, the role of the car in non-Western societies and lower socio-economical classes is rarely addressed and even more rarely scholars acknowledge car cultures linked to religion.. Tim Dant (2004), while acknowledging that car and driver inter-influence each other, refuses notions as hybrids or cyborgs, but classifies the driver-car as assemblage of human and car into a temporally restricted unit This (at least temporal) merging of human and non-human bodies is experienced by Bolivian drivers, as F*, nowadays a self-employed taxidriver, reveals when answering my question whether he performed blessing rituals on the heavy goods truck he drove before: The owners, they only do the blessing of the mobilities. F* was intrinsically linked to the automobile and while doing the libations and drinking alcohol (explained further in the chapter) he experienced himself as a recipient part of the truck’s body, while nowadays he experiences more possibilities to disentangle himself from the car for the time of the ritual and taking on a sovereign providing role in the ritual
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