Abstract
This paper aims to show the empowerment processes that different members of the group known as “Llave Mariana” experienced due to the incorporation of a new cosmology and the everyday practice of their healing rituals. Taking theoretical tools from gender theory, especially from feminist anthropology, I analyze the self-transformations that these women have undergone in their life trajectories. The first section accounts for the circumstances under which they have leaned toward a spiritual path. The second section explores the native notion of femininity and how it is influenced by a Marian maternal role model. Finally, I analyze how these spiritual experiences—and the empowerment processes they entailed—have concrete effects on the way these women live and feel. For the methodological approach, I implemented a combined perspective combining virtual ethnography techniques with traditional fieldwork resources, primarily participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Most of the fieldwork was conducted in initiations where the participants are taught the core doctrinal aspects of the movement, some healing techniques, and particular meditation routines. For this article, I focus on a group of women living in a working-class neighborhood in La Matanza district (located in Buenos Aires’ suburban area) and who in some cases live in underprivileged circumstances.
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Notes
As a minimal definition, we understand the New Age as a set of practices and knowledge that share common elements: the notion of energy—typically occupying a central place within its cosmology—a holistic conception of the self in which physicality, intellectual aspects, and spirituality are presented as continuous and mutually affected spaces—thus breaking with the tripartite schema that posits the soul, mind, and body as separate fields—and, finally, a quest for inner transformation oriented toward the production and management of well-being.
I am aware that several authors warned about Argentina’s deep religious diversity—commonly ignored—(Bianchi 2004; Di Stefano 2020; Flores and Seiguer 2013; Frigerio 2007) questioning the “catholic nation” myth. In this case, I want to point out the importance of Catholicism and devotion to the Virgin Mary as a cultural trend. For further detail about Argentina’s socio-religious field, please check the “Second National Survey about Religious Beliefs and Behavior” (Mallimaci et al. 2019).
For more information on doctrine, ritual, and the methodology of the present research, see Gracia 2021.
“Second National Survey about Religious Beliefs and Behavior” (Mallimaci et al. 2019).
For further details on Llave Mariana’s history and structure, please see Gracia 2019.
Here, agency is understood as all that “is made or denied, expanded or contracted, in the exercise of power. It is the (sense of) authority to act, or of lack of authority and lack of empowerment. It is that dimension of power that is located in the actor’s subjective sense of authorization, control, effectiveness in the world” (Ortner 1997: 146), while subjectivity is, according to Ortner, the “place” where agency is shaped and takes place, a culturally constituted matrix of feelings, thoughts, and meanings.
Santiago del Estero is an Argentinian province placed at the northwest of the country with a very important indigenous heritage.
Since the 1980s, academics such as Carol Gilligan (1982), Sara Ruddick (1989), or Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1984) have problematized the concept of “care” from a feminist perspective. There is a vast literature that shows how, in general terms, women are mostly responsible for the tasks of domestic reproduction, management, and care of family members (Aguirre 2005; Delfino 2012; Durán, 1997; Faur 2014; Picchio 2001). In this article, we rely on the classic definition of care that Fischer and Tronto had established in 1990: “A species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world”, so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher and Tronto 1990:40).
The term “empowerment” comes from the concerns of feminist scholars such as Carolyn Moser (1989), Kate Young (1988), and Maxine Molyneux (1985) about the impact of development in women’s lives and their proposal that overcoming inequalities was about specially overcoming gender inequalities. In this sense, the term implies psychological, economical, and political aspects. I take Teresa Del Valle’s definition understanding empowerment as a process by which oppressed people gain control over their lives by participating with others in activities that transform everyday life and structures, thereby increasing their capacities to influence everything that affects them (Esteban 2013: 65).
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The present research was funded by a postdoctoral scholarship (Grant Number 10520220200173CO) awarded by the National Council on Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina.
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Gracia, A. Female Agency in an Argentinian Spiritual Movement: An Ethnographic Approach to Female Trajectories in Llave Mariana. Int J Lat Am Relig (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41603-024-00229-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41603-024-00229-w