Searching for meaning: Religious pluralism and identity in a Puerto Rican town.

In Loiza, social identity and religious pluralism greatly interfere with religious ideas and practice. Loiza is regarded as the town that most closely represents the African component of Puerto Rican national culture which was officially invented during the creation of the commonwealth in 1950s, based on the coexistence of the African, the Spanish and the Indian. Loizans are still considered to be highly superstitious and the town is thought to be full of witches, Spiritists, and Santeros. However, in the past few decades these practices have declined, Pentecostalism has grown rapidly, there are many small geographic areas with a high concentration of churches mostly resulting from church switching, and the number of passive Pentecostal has also increased. The Catholic church has experienced great transformations with the incorporation of a charismatic style and a growth in active participation. In Loiza, the tension between promoting and contesting stereotypes has become the fertile ground for the dynamics of religious competition and socio-political action to improve the quality of social life. Moreover, the experience of Loizans demonstrates that religion is broader because it involves different aspects of human experience or layers, simultaneously: the intellect; the physical-emotive experience; body practices; gender, family, community, and spatial interactions and relationships; verbal and non-verbal religious elements; unconscious motivations; the social situation; and the transcendence. Historical research, interviews, participant observation, and native experience, applied to a multi-layered perspective and to the levels of the individual, collectivity, ritual, and everyday life, reveal the complexity of religion through the many ways different layers relate to each other and through a wide range of implications for social life and the lives of individuals. With this approach, the great capacity of religion to be a source of meaning and its great potential for spiritual and social contribution are demonstrated, showing that religion is an area that still deserves serious consideration. Therefore, this dissertation moves beyond previous studies of religion in the Caribbean and Latin America, most of which have ignored some layers and therefore, have explained the phenomenon of religion and its implications only partially.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyHistory, ChurchLatin American historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132589/2/9977174.pd