Iború, Iboya, Ibochiché: the rituals of Santeria, symbolic acts and performance

Abstract

The various religions that are located in different areas of Latin America are considered to be of animistic origin, including Santeria; they are products of arduous colonial process, of the hermetic evangelizing systems that led to the multiple dispersions in order to re-build their cultural background, in other words, its religious imagery. Therefore, we can find a fusion of rites and specific rituals like the ones described throughout this article. According to Fernando Ortiz (1921, 1946, 2001) and Gonzalo Aguirre (1992) the process of transculturation or acculturation in America has been the result of contact between three different worldviews: the indigenous, the black and the Spanish, who in their desire to maintain the local imaginary, chose for multiple mechanisms, the syncretism of one of them.

In the present, these socio-religious expressions are part of the representation of Latin American people. From now on, they are the scenarios considered producers of American reality, stigmatized, and re-fusioned with various transnational ideas from multiple cultures building hybrid societies, and realities that are forged between the past and the present, between the local and global.