Hesukristo superstar: Entrusted agency and passion rituals in the Roman Catholic Philippines

Abstract

In this article I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2013 in San Pedro Cutud, a village located in the Philippine province of Pampanga. The focus is on the performance of theVia Crucis y Passion y Muerte, a passion play held there every year on Good Friday. Central to the play is the individual pursuit ofpanata, or divine pledge, by the cast of around forty actors, and particularly by the play's main protagonist: the Kristo, who is nailed to a cross in front of tens of thousands of spectators. In the first part, I describe how the cast engages in the production of a particular theatrical aesthetic that is coterminous with the embodied pursuit of their respective appeals for divine intervention. In the latter portion, I focus on the act of nailing as a context for the formation of intersubjective bonds of trust, ortiuala ya lub, between the Kristo, and his ritual associates. By describing how rituals of pain are premised upon the shareability and entrustedness of ritual agency, I situate the ethnographic data on passion rituals in relation to wider discussions about the anthropological turn to affect.

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