Gisela Cánepa Koch
Pontificia universidad Católica del Perú
Email: gcanepa@pucp.edu.pe

Authenticity, Migration, and Visual Reproduction:
De-essentializing and De-territorializing Identity in Andean Religious Rituals

Andean religious festivals and visual reproduction

The presence of the photographic and video camera in the context of religious festivals is already a familiar sight in the Andes. Not only tourists, TV reporters and anthropologists, but also local population visually record the festival, its main celebratory events and the performance of devotional dances that are central to it. Not only the gazes are manifold but also the intentions, uses and destinies of the recorded materials. While tourists want to take a souvenir home, TV reporters look for exotic material that can sell, anthropologists recollect ethnographic documentation, the agenda of dancers that assist to the main festivals of a province or a region is to copy and later introduce the most prestigious choreographies into their own local festivals. The camera is no longer a foreign agent but has come to be a constitutive element of the festive context itself. Consequently, if we persist in assuming that religious festivals and dances are practices through which identities are recreated and transformed, then it is necessary to conclude that their visual reproduction is part of that process.
One of the changes that the presence of the camera has generated is to be understood in the context of the debate over "authenticity". The popularization of audiovisual technologies and media, the commodification of culture and the appearance of new audiences, as well as of new consumers and new modes of consuming, has provoked the inquest of traditional markers of authenticity, such as the territorial. In the context of migration and the re-contexualiztion of ritual and choreographic practices by Andean migrants in the city, this process has, as I want to argue here, the potentiality to contest a localized and fragmented sacred landscape (Sallnow 1987) that has helped to historically construe a cultural and spatial order that had territorialized and essentialized ethnic and local identities, ascribing them to specific geographical locations (Orlove 1993; Poole 1988; Radcliff and Westwood 1996).
To advance in my argument I want to discuss three points: (i) how the festival and dances are inscribed as visual texts offering new resources for the appropriation of festive and choreographic practices by diverse groups; (ii) how this process influences the debate over "authenticity," de-territorializing the markers of authenticity and challenging the condition of the festival in the town of origin as the only referent of authenticity; and (iii) how this process provokes the emergence of an alternative sacred landscape.

The ethnographic case: migration and the re-contextualization of Andean religious cults

The ethnographic context for this reflection is the festival of the Virgin Carmen that takes place in the town of Paucartambo, in Cuzco, Perú. I have been studying this festival since 1989 when I visited the town for the first time (Cánepa 1998). Today, in order to understand its dynamics, I have been forced to move between the festival that takes place in the town, and the festival celebrated by the migrants of Paucartambo in Lima (Cánepa 1996).
In the town of Paucartambo the festival is celebrated annually from July 15th to 18th. It includes a series of ceremonies that are common to the religious festivals of the Andes . It is a tribute to a Patron Saint that represents the local community. As a result of Colonial politics of population and territorial administration, and strategies for Cristianization, a strongly localized ethnic and geopolitical order was instituted. This process was shaped through the institution of local cults organized around the Patron Saints (Fuenzalida 1968; Marzal 1983) transforming the pre-Hispanic regional sacred geography into a landscape of localized and highly differentiated and hierarchizied cults (Sallnow 1987).
In the Andes catholic images have been constructed and are perceived as the materialized and territorialized expression of local identities. Within that logic each image is fetishized as the embodiment of a local community (Marzal 1983). A relation of reciprocal exchange with the revered image, which in return brings protection, health, economic growth, and harmony to the devotees, is at the ground of ritual performance. Through celebratory acts like masses, processions, fireworks and dances, a primordial relation between the image, the local community and its spatial location is ritually constituted. The main ritual strategy to accomplish such relation is the performance of devotional dances. Each local Patron Saint has its own choreographic repertoire. Although this repertoire is shared regionally, distinction is acquired through stylistic variations and giving local repertoires a patrimonial character. So, variants of a dance can only be legitimately performed by authorized groups and in the context of a specific religious festivity. That explains why the celebration of the festival of the Virgin Carmen and the performance of dances in Lima, following the festival's tradition dictates in Paucartambo, is challenging to its local character, putting into question the primordial relation between cult, identity and the town.
In Paucartambo 16 different dances are performed in the festival, each with a distinct choreography and with its own musical accompaniment, as well as their own masks and particular attires. The vitality of these expressions is such that four of the sixteen dances have been introduced during the last 5 years, reinventing the repertoire of local dances. In fact many of them have not originated in the town, but they have attained a "local condition" - as Paucartambino dances - by developing a series of particular aesthetic and stylistic traits in terms of costumes, music and choreography. This processes of "invention of tradition" has additionally implied a regional wide dissemination and validation policy of the choreographic repertoire that has consisted in the participation in regional folk contests and the promotions of the festival as a destiny of tourist and ethnographic interest.
So the Paucartambino choreographic repertoire has been legitimized as "original" of the town. Through this process the festival and the dances have been furthermore elevated to the condition of representative of the Cuzqueño region, officially recognizing Paucartambo as the "folkloric province of Cuzco", and becoming an cultural event of national interest as manifested by different media like TV, tourist magazines, advertising agencies, cultural and artistic institutions (private and public), and academic institutions (folklorist and anthropologists). This process speaks to the fact that the local condition of religious cult and the choreographic repertoires is not given, but has to be constantly re-defined since it is immerse in regional dynamic. The implied tension between locality and trans-locality becomes even more conflictual when migration and visual reproduction are at play.
Two main institutions are in charge of the realization of the festival. These are the comparsas and the mayordomías or cargos. The comparsas group the dancers of each dance performed in the festival, while the mayordomías that function as a system based in commitments of reciprocal exchange, sponsor the festival. Two different types of sponsors are at work in the festival. The highest ranking is the prioste, who is the maximum authority of the festival and who has been in the last 5 years alternatively held by the 5 barrios (neighborhoods) that configure the town. This has been done under the argument that the prioste's position was been held by people that did not reside in the town and maintained few family ties with the local residents, who were losing control over the festival. On the other hand there are the mayordomos or carguyoc of each comparsa. They cover the yearly expenses of a dance group of the festival. At this level, State institutions and private institutions like brew corporations have played a major role. The changes cited here can be observed in many other places in the Andes, and are linked to major processes such as the formation of regional or national identities, the commodification of culture and the dynamics between the local and the global, within which ritual manifestations and forms of expressive culture are currently framed.
The festival of the Virgin Carmen in Lima is celebrated the weekend before the 15th of July. Although the temporal and spatial dynamic of urban life certainly forces to schedule the festival on the weekend, this shift is a calendric devise through which the town is marked and legitimized as "the place of origin" and territorial referent of authenticity. The dancers in Lima argue that in this way they have time to assist to the festival in Paucartambo and dance there, since they consider the festival in the town to be the genuine version. Authenticity is a main concern between dancers and most of the decisions as well as the initiatives taken have to be legitimized through a claim for authenticity. However, custom is not always closely followed, most of the dancers in Lima are for different reasons not able to travel to Paucartambo and the desire to dance there is the cause of complex and difficult relationships between the comparsas of both places. All these situations speak of schisms and continuities between both places.
At present, after almost 20 years of activities in Lima, 10 of the 16 dances that are performed in Paucartambo have been instituted. In this process the efforts of the migrants in Lima for being close to the town's traditions have been commendable, but also its attempts for catching up with the innovations that are introduced there. For that reason the introduction of dances with innovative elements have been priorized, while many with more "traditional" traits have still not been recreated in the city.
The festival, according to the patterns of Paucartambo, begins with the entrance of the dancers and the removal of candles, but ends on Sunday with a lunch and the staging of the dances as a folkloric presentation. This presentation, which is done on a wooden stage, around which the devotees and their friend and family are located, constitutes an innovation. A master of ceremonies that introduces each of the comparsas and explains its choreography, attires, music, characters, origins and meaning of the dance that is performed complements the performance. This introduction alludes to the dancer's recognition that the festival and dances are being exposed to new audiences that require an explanation of what they are watching. The context in Paucartambo is not free from these processes. It has been a few years that the municipality and the comparsas announce the festival and dances with posters that are exposed in the city of Cuzco, and aims the attention of the national and international tourism. Even the municipality has taken the initiative to give away brochures and leaflets explaining the origin and the meaning of the festival and the different festive ceremonies.
Behind the recognition that an audience exists, is the notion that the festival and the dances constitute events to be exhibited, viewed and judged; that is, that they constitute forms of public interventions, of what Appadurai (1995) defines as public culture. While in fact performance theory argues that all festive or religious ritual implies a mise-en-scene (Baumann 1992), here a reflexive character is added to what the performance stands for and how performers understand it.
The re-contextualization of the festival and the dances in Lima has introduced innovations, but it has also provoked the suppression of a few habits, such as the visit to the cemetery. Two types of arguments are raised by dancers and devotes in regard to that fact: first, that the cemetery is too far from the church where the festival is celebrated and there is no time left in the festival schedule. Second, that the people of the town have their dead in the cemetery of Paucartambo, underlying in this way, the condition of the town as a referent of "authenticity," that is, as the "place of origin." It is important to say that one of the most crucial criteria for authenticity has been territoriality. Within this logic it is the physical space of the town, as well as its geographical framework, the referent that provide identity. Having been born or residing in the town, and to dance there, are still powerful arguments used in the debate about "authenticity."
Nonetheless, in recent years the arguments for not realizing the visit to the cemetery have lost weight because the dancers in Lima are beginning to bury their dead in the city; although I must clarify that some of them still make efforts to take their relatives to be buried in Paucartambo. In recent years I have been able to observe the case of one of the comparsas that is reviving the practice of visiting the cemetery. This fact, along with the recent proposals about the possibility of celebrating the festival in Lima at the same time as Paucartambo´s, indicates that the town and its festival are slowly departing from its previous role marker of authenticity of tradition and identity. In this sense, the processes of migration and the re-contextualization of the festival and dances from Paucartambo in Lima have a decentralizing and de-territorializing effect in relation to the town as "the place of origin." With the celebration of the festival of the Virgin Carmen in Lima, a new territorial referent of authenticity emerges. So, the local cult begins to be spread throughout a wider landscape, giving birth to (i) a regional calendaric and monumental community that exists in specific events of time and space, and to (ii) a regional sacred geography that redefines a fragmented geographical and cultural order. But here I want to introduce the use of video and its influence in these processes.

Politics of representation and cultural appropriation: comparsas and the use of video

In the context that I present here, like in other ones in the Andes, the comparsas are complex institutions with different functions at the same time . They are the institutional frameworks that guarantee the effective participation of one dance group in the festival, and on the other hand, it defines and established its social limits, grouping and distinguishing individuals and groups within a greater community. It has an internal organization with rules and regulations, which guides its functions, establishes obligations and rights of dancers, and imposes requirements for the admission of new members.
Comparsas are, as well, units of aesthetic creation, through which distinctions between social groups that are represented by them are established. Appealing to a poetic based on the use of metaphors and sensorial resources, an identification between the dancers and the characters of the dances is achieved, essentializing and naturalizing in this way, differences and socio-cultural hierarchies that the comparsas establish in the social field. More specifically, ethnic and social identities are constructed as embodied conditions (Poole 1994; Mendoza 2001; Cánepa 2000). When one asks a dancer why he dances one dance or another, the immediate response is: "because it is my nature" ("porque me nace"). It is in this sense that these choreographic manifestations have been effective for the construction, reproduction, legitimization, but also for the transformation of social identities.
In this context and throughout Cuzco, dance plays a major role in the constitution of ethnic distinctions between Indians and mestizos (Cánepa 1998; Mendoza 2001; De la Cadena 2001a). In the Peruvian southern Andes the dichotomic and hierarchical social structure between indios and mestizos emerges in the beginning of the 20th century as a racial distinction that differentiates between pure blood indios and racially mixed mestizos. Such distinction is later on redefined shifting from categories of race to those of ethnicity, class and gender (Poole 1994; De la Cadena 2001a). The displacements along different social categories have been the way through which social classification and location has been re-defined and negotiated. Within such logic for example, formal education, urban manners, economic status and gender could strategically be brought into play to argue for a mestizo condition. To perform indio or mestizo is for that reason always context bounded and relational.
But these social distinctions, which in everyday practice are in constant flux and negotiation, are on the other hand objectified and naturalized in specific forms of cultural peformance, being folklore a central one. The creation of distinctive choreographic repertoires has been crucial for the representation, distinction and negotiation of indio and mestizo identities. Furthermore, the fact that dance as a performative practice entails particular bodily dispositions, have contributed to signify class and ethnic differences as embodied forms (Poole 1994; Mendoza 2001). In other words, Cuzqueño regional folklore is the semantic field where social differences are constituted and embodied, but also transformed. It is through the struggle over representation (Bourdieu 1994) between different social groups that folklore has emerged as an efficacious practice for intervening in social life.
In the first half of the 20th century indigenista artists and intellectuals begun to imagine and represent regional identity collecting, classifying, studying, disseminating and performing popular dance and music. The creation of distinct choreographic repertoires, and the establishment of proper performative contexts and groups to legitimately interpreted them were the means through which Cuzqueño regional folklore was invented and shaped. Its dissemination through academic publications, local and regional contests and the school system was instrumentalized as the true and faithful representation of social life, empowering a regional elite as the authorized voices to dictate social frontiers and location. Consequently, subordinated groups contested social classification imposed on them by re-appropriating folklore for their self-representation. Introducing aesthetic and stylistic changes in the performance of choreographical repertoires indio and mestizo identities could be re-defined and the position within social structure re-located.
The repertoire of Paucartambino dances have been instituted as a repertoire of mestizo dances, which distinguishes itself from the dances performed by Indians of nearby communities in the festivals to honor their own catholic images. In this sense choreographic repertoires pertain to one or another ethnic group. It is this exclusivity that is debated in contexts of social transformation. Then, the debate for authenticity, that touches issues such as with whom do you dance, where do you dance, what do you dance, acquires relevance.
Other central element of the comparsas is its religious function that can be synthesized in its devotional character. Dances are highly valued offerings in the reciprocal exchange between people and the divinities . As religious experiences these may be understood, as well, as forms of sacrifice and communion with the sacred that finds its aim in the corporal experience. In other words, that the experience with the sacred is possible thanks to the dance as an aesthetic practice and a technique of the body.
The dances of Paucartambo must be danced exclusively in the contexts of the celebration of the Virgin Carmen. Since the Virgin Carmen is identified as the virgin of the mestizos of the town in opposition, for example to the Virgin Rosario, patron saint of the Indians from the peasant communities (Villasante 1980), this argument is another that tends to essentialize the mestizo identity that these dances represent. The fact that these dances are presented in other contexts such as regional contests of folklore, or television programs, or even that they are re-contextualized in Lima, constitute true challenges for those groups that traditionally have claimed exclusivity over them.
The inscription of the festival and the dances as visual registers have had a deep impact in the debate about authenticity and in the dynamic of cultural negotiation that this implies. The introduction of the festival and the dances in the market, tourist circuits, and the media, through its visual representation, has been crucial phenomena in its redefinition and objectification as visual texts. This is a line in which the festival and traditional dances have been introduced and affected by the globalization process and commodification of culture. A consequence of this process is the fact that the authenticity of an expression becomes a questionable value and even unnecessary for its authoritative existence , since it is the exhibition value more than the original condition of an expressive manifestation, which is beginning to be prized. However, it would not be adequate to understand this process as an evolution of the festival and Andean dances from traditional to modern, from the local to the global. However, as an introduction of new arguments used by different groups to legitimize their identities and negotiate their place within the context of migration. As I will argue, the visual reproduction of the dances, will reinforce the de-territorializing effect that migration and the re-contextualization of the festival and the dances in Lima has on ethnic and local identity.
In relation to the debate on "authenticity" in the context of visual reproduction, we would need to take into account the various agents and views that lie behind the many video and photo cameras that are part of the festival paraphernalia. Nonetheless, I will limit myself to reflect on the cases in which the dancers themselves are holding the camera.
The fact that access to audiovisual technologies have become easier, has allowed the indios of the peasant communities of the province of Paucartambo, that participate of the festival of Virgin Carmen only as observers, to record and film the choreographies of the mestizo dances. In that way they get access to them and to the possibility of choreographically master them, something they could not do before. With this visual source the dancers learn and recreate the performances presenting them locally in their own patron saint´s festivals. This constitutes a new way of appropriating and reinventing foreign manifestations questioning in this way the frontiers and ethnic distinctions between indios and mestizos that distinctive choreographic repertoires do establish.
These documentation practices, which could be considered as ethnographic , applied to the music and festive dances, have a long history in Cuzco region (De la Cadena 2001a; Mendoza 2001). Intellectual cuzqueños of the indigenismo movement of the first decades of the XXth century, made great efforts to create a choreographic and musical repertoire that would represent the new Indian as a synthesis between the Indian and the Spanish. Part of that effort consisted in documenting, at that time without video cameras, local dances so to study and identify those elements that could be distinctive of an Andean and Cuzqueño identity, but also to create choreographic versions that could condense and provide a more universal character to this new identity. The repertoire of folkloric dances that we know today is in part the result of this indigenista project.
The Indian peasants that today document the mestizo dances of Paucartambo using video, are not invested with the authority or the professional credentials of the old indigenistas, nor of the contemporary anthropologists or TV reporters, but they use a tool that, in the current context have acquired great authority in itself. The notion that photography and video guarantees an objective documentation of reality is widely disseminated, and that visual authority allows the dancers to argue in favor of their own authentic version of the mestizo dances. Consequently, these new technologies are not only used by local Indians as documentation formats, but also to provide authority to choreographic versions that, having been based on them, are later recreated and performed. This last interest does not aim to inscribe dances as visual texts, but points to the possibility of translating them into an authorized choreographic version, that De la Cadena (2001b) qualifies as auto-ethnographic .
A second context in which one can observe the use of video is among the migrants in Lima. Many of the dancers that perform there are sons and daughters of migrants from Paucartambo and even from other provinces of Cuzco. Therefore, in many cases, they do not know the choreographies they want to recreate for the festival in Lima, nor do they have the networks, ties or relatives that would permit them to invite a dancer from the town, in order to teach the dance. These dancers have used the videos that have been informally brought to Lima by their family and friends from Paucartambo. But these documentations have been done with the logic of shooting only the moments and scenes in which the people they know happens to appear. The intention is to take home a souvenir and not to document the festival. On the other hand, choreographies can last longer than 30 minutes and not all of it is danced straight. On the contrary, sections of it are danced distributed along the several days that the festival lasts. So it is almost impossible to document the whole festival. The strategy of the dancers has been to reconstruct the choreography assembling images from different videos.
On the other hand there are some dancers that have begun to travel to Paucartambo to bring more systematic documentation. In both cases the underlying idea of these appropriating visual strategies is that knowledge can be obtained from the captured image. Consequently, the visual inscription of dances constitutes documents that guarantee its transmission and authentic reproduction from generation to generation. This argument implies that the notion of culture and identity is something that can be learned. In the context of the Paucartambino dances this constitutes a challenge to the traditional way of understanding identity, according to which "the paucartambino is born dancing" (el paucartambino nace bailando). Following the latter line of thought, dance and the identity it represents is not a matter of learning, but an essence and a heritage acquired through blood and the links to geographical settings. It is in that regard that that the strategies of appropriation of dances from Paucartambo through visual media have a de-essentializing and de-territorializing effect of the Paucartambino identity. Within this logic someone that has not been born in the town or that is not descendant of Paucartambinos can learn the dance and perform it according to tradition. The understanding of identity like something that can be acquired, is an important argument that young dancers have adopted as their own discourse; they affirm that one can adjust "the bodies to the dance." This discourse is contested, however, by other group of dancers that feel threatened in their exclusivity rights over their dances.
It is interesting to note that the comparsas that argue with a more essentialist view of culture in mind, are not less interested in visual media, but they understand it in other sense. In this different perspective, the town tradition would not be contained in images, but in the memories that they can evoke, and that are transmitted through oral tradition. Videos do not have value as ethnographic documents, but as catalysts of collective experiences. Moreover, they do not contain the truth in themselves, since they need to be adequately interpreted by "those who really know the tradition". In other words, the visual records of the dances would not be independent from the subjects who are, authorized to interpret them. It is for this reason that dancers who argue for the authenticity of their dances, within this line of thought, constantly challenge my own techniques and ethnographic methods as a form of true knowledge. While on the other hand, those who make efforts to systematize the dances in order to learn them, consult me about how to proceed ethnographically.

New References of Authenticity: de-territorializing and de-centralizing the "place of origin"

As I have already said, the town as the "place of origin" constitutes one of the main referents for authenticity used by the dancers. A series of social and ritual mechanisms have constituted the town as a referent of authenticity. One of these have been the consolidation of a choreographic repertoire recognized as original from the town, although many of the dances that are performed there today have been appropriated from other provinces of Cuzco. On the other hand, the procession, the entrance of comparsas, the guerrilla itself, the lyrics of the songs, the tales about the origins of the festival and the devotion for the Virgin Carmen are all symbolic and ritual mechanisms that aim to delimitate the town as the very spatial and geographical expression of Paucartambino identity.
In the previous meetings to the festival a series of coordinations and discussions around organizational details are held. In Lima a great part of the debate is centered on the effort for making the festival and the dances as close as they can to the original. In this sense, the oldest dancers, who generally had been born in Paucartambo and have danced there, are the authorized voices who are consulted and who determine if the tradition is well kept. It is precisely the territorial referent what is evoked as argument of both, authenticity and authority.
However, the younger dancers in Lima have begun to question these older voices, by looking for new referents of authenticity. Instead of referring to the festival in Paucartambo, that they have not witnessed, they begin to make reference to the visual records of it, that do not necessarily coincide with what the elders remember and tell about the festival. Moreover, in these discussions, referents of authenticity are also sought after looking at the visual records of the festival in Lima, taken in previous years. So, even the condition of Paucartambo as the "place of origin" is being challenged. This implies a change in the sense that the referent for authenticity is no longer bound to space, no longer territorialized (asi como se baila en el pueblo). A temporal argument can strategically be introduced into the debate on authenticity; arguing as follows: "as it has been danced in previous years"; ("así como se ha bailado en años anteriores"). The authority given to the visual image as an analog record of reality is what validates the type of visual referents preferred by the younger generations. The increasing presence and diffusion that the Paucartambo festival is attaining in the current context, is due to the mass media and the publications which promote tourism that significantly contribute to this phenomenon. For many dancers in Lima, the Paucartambo festival that they never experienced exists only through visual records and visual experience. Once the Paucartambo festival is constituted as image, it is objectified and de-contextualized in such a way that it becomes independent from its territorial referent and from its condition of corporal practice, performed by specific subjects or ethnic groups. Transformed as such, the festival and dances from Paucartambo can be located in the same dimension as the festival in Lima that, in turn, has been also objectified as visual text. We can add that if as visual texts, both festivals and both places are situated in the same dimension, both constitutes potential referents of authenticity.
What I want to stress here is that the process of de-essentialization and de-territorialization of the referents of authenticity implies the de-centralization of Paucartambo as the place of origin and the transformation of Lima into a Paucartambino place. In other words, the festival in Lima becomes a legitimate context to perform the choreographic repertoire of the Virgin Carmen competing with the festival in the town of Paucartambo as the unique referent for authentically representing it. The presence of a sculpted image in the city and the establishment of a new celebratory date unfold the local cult into multiple monumental and calendric events. Considering that religious cult in the Andes have a strongly local character, and that the images become representative of highly territorialized local communities, what the process I am describing here shows is the multiplication of Paucartambino sites and the transformation of the Paucartambino community of devotees into a multiple located community. This community exists and is shaped through festive events that occur in particular sites and dates. In other words, one can claim Paucartambino identity without being born, live of dance in the town. Additionally, the regionalization of local cults is favored creating a new sacred geography of interrelated localities that contests a highly fragmented geography of identity and that connects Lima with the provinces in a new way.
The transformation of the geographies of identity involved in that process entails the transformation of Lima making it a proper place to dance, which challenges the non-ethnically marked condition that Lima has held. Although Lima has always been a city inhabited by various ethnic groups -a white elite constituted by an European and Creole population, blacks and Indians- since the mid of the 19th century Limeño aristocracy begins to construct Lima as a white and European city as part of its effort to constitute themselves as the political and economic elite of the emerging Peruvian nation state and the city as the political and economic center of the national territory. In other words, the modernizing project had a racial and ethnic component that required the whitening of the city and its inhabitants. Furthermore, in the ethnic taxonomy developed by the intellectual elite, the white and European groups stood outside classification guaranteeing social superiority through the privilege of remaining unnamed (De la Cadena 2001a). In other words, the whitening process implied the possibility to remain ethically unmarked and so to hold a power position.
The modernization process of the city of Lima implied the creation of an ethinically unmarked public space. This was accomplished by the removing of festive expressions from the streets bringing them to the private ballrooms, while public festive expressions where transformed into folklore and defined as proper of traditional and provincial space. The main religious festivity of Lima, which honors El Señor de los Milagros the patron saint of Lima, does become a main public event only since the ´80 when politicians and the media discover it an important arena for public intervention. Despite the growing of this religious festivity it preserves it liturgical character having the procession of the image as its main public event, distinguishing itself of the festive character that such celebrations have in the provinces. On the contrary, it is the celebration of the festivity of Andean patron saints and the performance of devotional dances by migrants in the city what begins to shape the city ethnically. Lima begins to be constructed as a place to dance and that implies to bring eyhnicicty and tradition to the city, challenging its ethnically unmarked status, and redefining its relation with the rest of the country.

The invention of the "place of origin" as tourist site

Here I want to make reference to another practice where visual reproduction is compromised and through which a new geography of identity emerges; that is tourism.
Many of the dancers that participate in the comparsas in Lima are young descendants of migrants who were born in the city and that in most of the cases have never been in the town or in the fiesta. When I asked one of them about his desire to perform dances he had never seen before, he told me that it was when he once saw the pictures of his grandfather dressed in his dancer costume that he decided that he wanted to dance the Paucartambino dances, because he realized that it was in the festive and choreographic tradition of the town that he could find his roots. He started to dance in Lima and since then the possibility to travel to the fiesta and even dance there had become a dream that he might fulfill when he finishes his studies. Other young people share this dream and expect to travel when they finish school, earn their own money, or accomplish their goal in live. The dancers of the comparsa of the chunchachas, for example organized a trip of the whole troupe in year 2000 when they where celebrating the fifth anniversary of the foundation of the comparsa in Lima. These young dancers constructed traveling to Paucartambo as a rites of passage though which they could mark an important moment of their individual/collective life. Such initiatives can be inscribed in more general trends of contemporary society where the frontiers between tourism and pilgrimage are blurred, and traveling becomes a mechanism of reflection and transformation, "leisure with meaning" (Frey 1998).
The interest in actual traveling to the town of young limeño dancers has increased in the last 5 years. It is on the encounters that I had with them in the fiesta in Paucartambo that I now want to pay attention. In most of the cases the expectations young Limeños have when attending to the fiesta that they feel as their own, have been confronted with the fact that there have occurred many changes since their grandfathers and parents left the village. They do not meet relatives, since most of them have migrated, nor do they easily find a place to go up on arrival having to struggle as any tourist in order to get a place to sleep . They are not received in the houses where the comparsas meet for lunch or dinner, and where they organize their parties. They just do not know each other, and Paucartambino dancers are skeptical about the fact that their dances are being danced elsewhere. In the conversations I had with them, I could see that these young dancers held ambivalent feelings towards the fiesta, ranging from admiration to disillusion. They are aware of the detachment while they feel a strong desire to be part of that place.
One female dancer of the saqra, Laura, who studies tourism in a university in Lima, solved the dilemma for herself in the following way. She explained to me that she has to travel to a lot to different places within Peru in order to do assignments given to her by her teachers at the university. This experience made her competent to handle the arrival in unknown places, and master them as sites. In this conversation and in many others that I had with her, she did emphasize her condition as an expert traveler and knower of many places in Peru. In her view, she was certainly not allowed to dance in the town but she could emplace in it as a tourist.
The value of tourism as a way of knowing other places is pretty much linked to the fact of "having been there". Tourist photography plays a very important role within this line of reasoning (Bourdieu 1979). Why would otherwise one spend time and money taking photos when it would be possible to buy a postcard with pictures taken by professionals? Why not relax instead of struggling with other tourist to get one shot of the right scene? The answer is because oneself and ones friends or family are not on those pictures. Although the other young dancers I have met in Paucartambo have not formulated the issue verbally in the way that Laura has, the manner they use photography falls along the same line of thought as Laura's.
When I met Limeño dancers in the fiesta in Paucartambo, I was asked several times to take photos of them in the relevant sites and during the main events of the fiesta. They handed their cameras to me so that I could take pictures where all of them could appear on them. These photos are later seen in Lima to remember and comment on the trip, as well as to show it to others and distinguish themselves to those who have not been there yet. They give meaning to their trip and presence in Paucartambo, as tourism, a figure through which they become part of the town, now constructed as a tourist destiny. This process has to be framed within the developments of the last few years where locals -the municipal authorities- and foreigners -beer companies, tourist enterprises, and the media- have constructed the fiesta as an event to be consumed through tourism or visual mediation. Through visual registration the Limeño dancers are intervening in the construction of the "place of origin" as a tourist destiny, making it part of a lived geography.
On the other hand the trips to the town are also constructed into another direction. As I have explained above, the comparsa of the chunchacha, for example, have in the year 2001 organized a trip to Paucartambo as part of the celebration of their 5th anniversary as a dance troupe in the fiesta in Lima. This trip cannot simply be described as touristic in the sense of leisure or consumption, since it is inscribed into the festive praxis and memory of the fiesta in Lima. As many authors have already discussed human displacement across the globe in the contemporary world do interlace tourism, pilgrimage and migration (Crain 1992; Frey 1998; Eade and Sallnow 2000). It seems to me that the character of these trips is more like a pilgrimage, since it is done with the intention to "express gratitude to the virgin for the support she has given to the comparsa" and "reinforce their commitment to continue dancing". What I see here is the representation of the itinerant condition of Paucartambino diasporic community in the figure of the tourist and the pilgrim.
Pilgrimage to the "place of origin" is an act through which the town is incorporated into the experience and memory of the dancers, that constitute themselves as members of a region that have Lima and Paucartambo as two places of a same geography of identity. What is important to note is that for Limeño dancers the "town of origin" does not simply constitute an imaginary referent of paisanzago (country hood), an abstract arena of signification, but they are investing efforts to became part of it by intervening in the actual making of it as place, and making it part of a lived geography. The pilgrimage to the "place of origin" is the inverted gesture to migration to the city. Through this process the fragmented and centralist cultural and geopolitical order of Peruvian society that have caused migration and that are the product of migration , are offered the possibility to be overcome, giving way to emerging geographies of identity.

Final reflections:
In spite of the re-contextualization of the festival and dances, which has transformed them in something to be seen, it is the introduction of the video camera the determining factor in consolidating its new condition as image. This process has provoked the de-territorialization and de-essentialization of the referents of authenticity of Paucartambino identity, which is used by some dance groups to legitimize their own versions of Paucartambo choreographic repertoire, as they are interpreted by new groups and in new contexts.
The constitution of the festival and the dances as images, but more importantly, the access, although limited, to the new technologies of audiovisual recording, which has allowed the dancers to involve themselves in ethnographic documentation and tourism, is what has motivated a reflective attitude from the dancers themselves in relation to their own choreographic practices. In this way they recognize them not only as a religious and cultural dimension of their lives, but also as a political one. There is total conscience that festival and dances are spaces through which an image of the self can be constructed, and so participation in public culture, and arena of public debate, where one can negotiate a place in the global imaginary. But along with the enthusiasm shown by various groups of dancers to engage in such a task, others are concerned with the costs of entering a dynamic that they have defined as the "commodification of culture." Many of them think that they do not have enough technological, social or economic resources to exert control and negotiate over the images of their own festival and dances. They are the one that de-legitimize the visual record as a form for creating true knowledge about the festival and dances. It is in the context of this dilemma, then, that the dancers reproduce visually their choreographies and hold their debates around the authenticity of their performances, transforming their festival and their dances, at the same time that they transform themselves.

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