Abstract: The oratory system and cargo system of the Sierra Otomi in Hidalgo, Mexico are the bases of organization for the structure of local and intermediate-level social groups. Both systems apply a principal of ritual prestation to organize the relationship between the most local group, the family, and the larger social sphere. Religious solidarity characterizes both local and village wide groups.
The Sierra Otomi live in the mountains of the eastern part of the state of Hidalgo and in adjacent municipios of the surrounding states of Puebla and Veracruz. Their way of life is peasant farming on lands that are not rich and where transportation is difficult. The custom of maintaining oratories (small buildings housing religious images) is found there and among the Otomi and Mazahua cultures of the highlands (Soustelle 1935; Dow 1974; Galinier 1976; Margolies 1975:127-33; Cortes Ruiz 1972). Oratories are typically made with more care than the nearby family dwelling of the owners. An oratory, usually somewhat smaller than the dwelling, is built of more permanent materials. They are large enough for several dozen people to enter for celebrations.
Sierra Otomi oratories are found in small hamlets (rancherias), villages (pueblos), and in capital towns (cabeceras) of municipios. A Sierra Otomi oratory is a focus of pride and security. An owner will use it on auspicious occasions. Important visitors may be received with proper protocol by an elder of the community in his oratory. There they will sip rum and talk quietly and politely in the presence of the revered image or images. The owner may recite their history and explain how they have brought peace and prosperity to the neighborhood.
An important difference between an oratory and a family altar is that the image in an oratory has a separate building. The name for a Sierra Otomi oratory is nguja (god house or sacred house). Putting an image in its own house makes the cult less of a private or family affair and more of a community matter, with increased scope for political organization. While these oratories owned by families are private, their celebrations are always open to other people. A cult can widen when an image moves from a private oratory into a public oratory or into a church. Public oratories are owned collectively (Dow 1974; Lagarriga and Sandoval Palacios 1977).
The images kept in Sierra Otomi private oratories may be images of Catholic saints (santos) or of pagan deities, called antiguas (Dow 1986; Soustelle 1935; Galinier 1976). The antiguas are figurines found in the ground or by streams, or are manufactured. Each has a myth telling how it arrived and other myths telling of its powers. People keep the antiguas only in the private oratories and_not in public oratories or churches, where they might offend a visiting priest. (Churches have been established by Catholic missionaries and are used by priests for Catholic rituals as well as for traditional native rituals.) In Spanish, people distinguish between antiguas and santos, but in the Otomi language no such distinction exits. People call both types of images zidahmu (translated as revered great lord, not as deity).
Galinier (1976) writes that Catholic images in the municipio of Santa Ana represent pagan deities, such as water, earth, and fire. Santa Ana is an Otomi town on the edge of the sierra but still in the highlands of the Tulancingo basin. Culturally it is closer to the Sierra Otomi group than it is to the Mezquital Otomi in central Hidalgo. In the high sierra, Water, Earth, Sun, and Fire are revered as Principales, are addressed as maka, and are never confused with the zidahmu (Dow 1974). The maka are on a higher level of animistic power than the zidahmu and could be called deities.
The founder of an oratory acquires an image, builds an oratory, selects a godfather for the image, and holds a large fiesta to celebrate the first visit of the godfather to the image. Although many of the images are Catholic, the fiesta day is often not the official day of the Catholic saint. Each oratory develops its own tradition for an annual fiesta. When an owner dies, the image and oratory are inherited by whichever son is willing to sponsor the ceremonies. The oldest son has the greatest obligation and usually becomes the owner; however, all the sons and daughters share the obligation to continue the worship of the image. Above all, the oratory is associated with the patrimonial land of the founder. The current owner often explains his obligation to hold fiestas for the image in the following terms: "The images belonged to my grandfathers. They are precious inheritances and must be cared for."
From the day of the first celebration onward, each private oratory brings together two groups in an annual fiesta. One group gathers around the owner of the oratory and another group gathers around the godfather of the image. The owner's group consists of his patrilineal kinsmen, his wife, affines, ritual kinspersons, and neighbors. The godfather's group includes his wife, his patrilineal kinspersons, affines, ritual kinspersons, and neighbors. The role of godfather, like the role of owner, is passed down from father to son. The godfather has most of the ritual duties.
Thus, the oratory fiestas are unions of two ritually bound groups, who refer to the ritual bond between them as compadrazgo. During the fiesta, members of these groups call each other compadre or comadre; however, depending on the circumstances, the compadre relationship may or may not be recognized outside the fiesta.
Women play important roles in the oratory rituals, as they do in other religious rituals. The wife of the godfather is the godmother. The pair take on the responsibility together. The godfather and godmother perform most of the ceremonial duties, leaving the owner and his wife primarily with the job of hosting the godfather's party and supporters of both groups. The wife of the owner prepares the fiesta food. The widow of a deceased godfather assists her son in performing the rituals as godmother.
The Mexican Revolution did not liberate Sierra Otomi villages from autocratic rule. It put them under the domination of warlords generally referred to as caciques. The villages were freed from these caciques during a period of post-revolutionary peasant revolt in the 1930s. The governments of the caciques were replaced by cargo systems. There has been a tendency among scholars to attribute the origins of cargo systems to events that took place during the Catholic evangelization of Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the cargo systems of the Sierra Otomi have more recent origins, as in other parts of Mesoamerica (Chance and Taylor 1985).
A cargo system is a form of government in which ritual sponsorship and food redistribution generate prestige and authority (Cancian 1967). I use the term cargo system instead of civil-religious hierarchy to describe the Sierra Otomi system of ritual redistribution because one does not always move upward from less to more prestigious offices, as implied by Carrasco's (1961) ladder concept. While the civil-religious hierarchies described by Carrasco are similar to those found among the Sierra Otomi, Sierra Otomi men do not "climb" from one post to another but accumulate prestige and political influence from each office they occupy. They generally do move from less to more prestigious offices, but often take offices at the same general ranking. The ranking of the men who have accumulated prestige and authority is not the same as the prestige ranking of the religious offices they occupied. The prestige ranking of the religious offices is a function of how great the celebrations have been in the past and of their ritual significance. Older men take on offices with more ritual significance.
Ritual significance is difficult to measure objectively. There is a clear ritual superiority in the office of godfather over the office of mayordomo and a superiority of the Santisimo Sacramento (sun god) over other saints. Civil offices do not confer prestige as much as they offer a stage from which to exercise the authority already acquired from service in the religious offices. A cargo system is a competitive system in which a man can gain prestige and enhance almost any office by giving a good redistributive performance and an elegant display of proper ritual behavior. The Sierra Otomi cargo systems have very important political functions. The maximal authority in a village is a group of ancianos who have garnered their authority by spending a large amount of time and money serving in religious offices. These ancianos appoint all civil officials, appoint all cargo holders, and act as a court of appeal of decisions by a local judge. An important feature of the system is that the power holders, the ancianos, determine who will serve in the religious cargos and therefore select the men who will enter their group. Although the political functions of a cargo system may escape notice by people looking for a European-style bureaucratic political structure with formal civil offices, the Sierra Otomi cargo systems generate practically all the political authority in a village.(1) However, this authority is often exercised in an informal manner.
Two problems beset the analysis of Mesoamerican peasant social structure: 1) the distillation of the principles around which the solidarity of social groups is generated; and 2) the etic definition of the intermediate social groups, groups larger than a family and smaller than a village. We lack concepts and models for such groups because nonkinship groups have not been well defined or understood in anthropology (Honigmann 1976:217). I propose that ritual prestation is a principle around which social solidarity is generated in Sierra Otomi intermediate groups and that ritual prestation creates a particular etic type of intermediate group that can be called the "religious corporate group."
The analysis of Mesoamerican social structure began with the application of a concept called "community." Redfield (1956:3) classifies Yucatec Maya villages as communities, using the defining characteristics of distinctiveness, smallness, homogeneity, and all-providing self-sufficiency. Redfield saw the community as divided into social groups, but did not think of the community itself as just a social group. Instead, he proposed various other ways of seeing the community as a whole, which included ecology, social structure, and moral outlook. Thus, his definition of the community became lost in a variety of holisms, each with its own dimension. Redfield's "community" is a slippery concept, impossible to grasp and use in a specific sense. Redfield (1956:36), for example, writes of Chan Kom:
There are no social classes which are named or otherwise identified by the people. There are no age-sets and no societies, secret or without secrets. We shall find it barely possible to recognize any of these bodies called in sociology "voluntary associations." There are no local, spatially defined subdivisions of the village which either the village or the observer would find to be important.
Wolf (1957) adds the idea of corporate to the community concept to imply shared material interests as well as shared culture. However, corporate is so ill defined in anthropology (Dow 1973) that its attachment to community tends to confuse the definition rather than clarify it. Between the nuclear family and the village all that has been defined for Mesoamerica is a great variety of regionally and culturally specific groups for which we do not have a good overall concept. Mulhare (1996) begins the struggle to corral all these concepts by referring to them generally as barrios.
The primary structural requirement of an intermediate group in Mesoamerica is that it be divided into subgroups based on kinship and be a component of a larger group based on residence. Thus, we see that intermediate social groups in Mesoamerican communities cannot define membership exclusively on the basis of kinship nor exclusively on the basis of residence. Other principles that resolve the conflict between the lower kinship and higher residence principles must be at work. Other principles of social organization revealed by later studies of Mesoamerican villages are: 1) ritual co-parenthood residentially based relationships within a neighborhood, and 2) ritual redistribution, which puts the sharing characteristic of kin relations into a larger residential context.
Ritual co-parenthood and ritual redistribution are closely related. Both involve religious ritual and both bond human beings to each other and to superhuman beings. They form a category I call ritual prestation, the establishment of social bonds by giving gifts in the context of ritual.(2) Ritual prestation is the overriding principle for organizing Mesoamerican social groups at the intermediate level. It creates social relationships that bond kinship groups into larger residential groups.
The Sierra Otomi oratory system allies the two localized groups of owners and godparents. Membership in the groups is extended to nonkin through ritual prestation. A similar pattern exists in cargo systems. Each cargo holder is at the center of a redistributive group, a group of supporters. The pueblo fiesta brings together dozens of cargo holders and thus unifies their separate supporter groups in one redistributive ritual. A similar system has been reported in the Mayan municipio of Zinacantin (Vogt, In press) and elsewhere.
Both groups are religious corporate groups because they have leaders, in this case the godfather or the owner. This is corporate in the Weberian sense, which refers to a social group that recognizes the authority of leaders. Weber (1947:145-46) writes:
A social relationship which is either closed or limits the admission of outsiders by rules, win be called a "corporate group" (Verband) so far as its order is enforced by the action of specific individuals whose regular function this is, of a chief or "head" (Leiter) and usually also an administrative staff. These functionaries will normally also have representative authority.
The religious corporate group is represented by its officers in social relations between the group and superhuman beings. The oratory groups and the villages are all religious corporate groups. Economically they are redistributive groups (Monaghan 1990) and politically they are Weberian corporate groups. Oratory alliances have different rationalities in hamlets, villages, and the town. In the hamlets there is a rule that a godfather must come from a different hamlet. Thus, the alliances are always between hamlets. In most cases the godfather comes from a distant hamlet rather than from one nearby. A clear-cut economic interest lies behind this custom. The godfather typically comes from a hamlet at a different altitude and hamlets at different altitudes have different agricultural resources. For example, a hamlet at a high altitude may have pasture and one-crop milpa (growing field). Another hamlet at a low altitude may have cane fields, land suitable for coffee, and two-crop milpa. When groups from the two hamlets join in an oratory alliance, a household head from the high-altitude hamlet may approach "compadres" from the low-altitude hamlets and propose an exchange of rights to pasture animals in his pasture for the rights to plant coffee trees in the low-altitude lands. Such exchanges of resources lend security to the agricultural system.
The oratory fiestas in the villages compete with the village-wide cargo system. In the Sierra Otomi village of Santa Monica, for example, each oratory is associated with an old and strong lineage in its neighborhood. The oratories draw their names from the neighborhoods they represent. Godfathers come from the same neighborhood. Oratory groups pursue one of two strategies: 1) they staunchly represent their neighborhood; or 2) they seek integration into the village-wide cargo system. In 1968 oratory owners pursuing the latter strategy petitioned to have their images brought to the public oratory during village-wide fiestas. Having the images in the public oratory gave their cults more prestige, but put them at the bottom of the more powerful village-wide cargo system. Owners pursuing the former strategy maintained their fiestas privately and remained big fish in a small pond. The overall function was the same. The oratory groups defined neighborhoods within the village and then linked them to the wider religious corporate group of the entire village. The groups that pursued the neighborhood strategy maintained the identity of the neighborhood. The groups that took their images to the public oratory placed themselves more in the line of power created by the cargo system of the village.
The linkage of village oratory cults with the cargo system in Santa Monica was also made clear by the abandonment of oratory fiestas at the same time the village cargo fiestas were abandoned in 1977. The religious system that replaced them was a mixture of Pentecostal Protestantism and a new Catholic movement (Dow 1991, 1993).
In the capital town of the municipio of Tenango de Doria oratories are doing well today. They exist alongside a public fiesta system that does not create political authority as does a cargo system. The political power of the town is in the hands of a non-Indian mestizo elite. There are two types of oratories in the town: the oratories belonging to the town saints, whose images are normally left in the church, and the private oratories with their own images. The oratories of the town saints are not permanent. They are buildings loaned each year to the mayordomo of a town saint by a major supporter. The public images leave the church and reside in the oratory only for a day during one of the fiestas. Mayordomos and godfathers of the town saints are often wealthy Indians from nearby hamlets who want to participate in the public religious life of the town to link their families more closely to important Indian families in the town.
Sierra Otomi villages, hamlets, and neighborhoods are integrated by ritual prestation that organizes religious corporate groups. The religious corporate groups link groups with kinship solidarity at lower levels to groups with residential solidarity at the higher levels. The structure of religious corporate groups is the primary intermediate-level group structure of Sierra Otomi society. The rituals affirm a mutual dependence on higher supernatural powers and promote peace. The largest religious corporate group is a cargo system covering a whole village. The smallest is the local oratory group.
The oratory system and cargo system apply the principle of ritual prestation to organizing groups larger than a family. The place of familial compadrazgo in Mesoamerican social structure becomes clearer when we see it as the smallest-range expression of a ritual principle operating over wider ranges in larger religious corporate groups.
(1.) The Sierra Otomi cargo systems do not fit into Chance's (1990:312-32) category of "religious cargo system" in which "the civil offices have become in large measure formally divorced from the traditional prestige hierarchy." I do not agree with Chance's classification of the Santa Monica cargo system, which I have studied, as a "religious cargo system."
(2.) The translator of Mauss's Essai sur le don, Ian Cunnison, writes, "There is no convenient English word to translate the French prestation so this word itself is used to mean any thing or series of things given freely or obligatorily as a gift or in exchange; and includes services, entertainments, etc., as well as material things" (Mauss 1967:xi).
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