Alicia Ortega Caicedo
Department of Spanish
University of Pittsburgh
Email: alo16+@pitt.edu

"Believes, Practices and Urban Symbolic Geographies: A Reading of the New Spirituals Searches in the City of Quito".

People of the Contemporary Age live in a world that lost its capacity of being a valid interlocutor of the permanent search for transcendental meanings. The rational and scientific logic promised a harmonic life that would satisfy desires. In the XXI century we need to admit that the desired harmony become replaced with irreparable ecological damages, and deep social inequalities. In different sectors of Quito's population we observe the construction of new interpretation keys of reality and practices that try to eliminate the world's intolerable indifference. These inquiries embody in multiples ways the recuperation of ancient wisdom of indigenous cultural matrix (in the medical practices and use of ritual plants, in relation to earth and space, in the understanding of history and in the formulation of our identities), the use of feminist epistemological paradigms. This includes the care of the body and the art of healing, nutritional habits, eroticism and sexuality, in the interaction with Nature from a perspective that incorporates the holy in the use and appropriation of the space.
Two years ago, I took part in a project that wanted to understand these new ways of keeping in touch with reality. We participated in different ceremonies and rituals. I compiled stories that combine multiple cultural and symbolical matrices, ancestral knowledge, mythic, religious and emotional elements. In the stories we gathered, we can underline a humanistic and holistic perspective in an effort of constructing alternative paradigm from the scientific rationality, incorporates intuition and imagination as valid forms of knowledge and interpretation.
A key element for understanding these processes is the "politic aura" a new believe and symbolic practices acquired in Quito. In our society believing in magical powers of plants and objects has never been something unusual. The events occurring in Ecuador have reached a different character nowadays. Today it has the intention of building an alternative episteme from the instrumental logic. It seeks not only the simple effectiveness of the exorcism but integral projects of transforming the human being in the relation with his/her environment. The incorporation of Andean elements among the urban population is related to the indigenous political mobilization during the last decade. Ecuador has been living a socio-political and economic calamitous situation. The traditional politic parties have lost credibility as well as the left wing ones. As a result the search of spiritual contact with the "Pachamama" and Andean references had allowed young people, artists, professionals, professors and different social sectors to assume a particular magic-revolutionary position, mostly in the effort of providing sense to the world and constructing links of identity and belonging. In my work I will be working with the stories compiled during the work performed in 2000-2001.