Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

These brief notes are not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of the subject. They only want to warn about an aspect that is not always taken into account in our pastoral work: often certain words in common use have a very different meaning in the mind of the speaker and in the mind of the listener. In the proclamation of the Word, some give it meanings typical of Western biblical theology and others give it autochthonous meanings in accordance with local pre-colonial beliefs and cosmogonies or derived from the popular religiosity of colonial Spanish. Here we will limit ourselves to enunciating some common popular meanings such as "spirit" and "holy". But the problem reappears in almost every paragraph of the Bible and the liturgy. Think of other words like believe, body and soul, grace, church. etc. It could be generalized that in order to effectively transfer the salvific message from the culture in which it was originally formulated to the very different culture of the new churches that it is desired to help, almost every "technical" word presents this problem. Then a simple "translation" is not enough, since all the connotations are often different or simply absent in one culture or another.

In this article we intend to examine the changes suffered by one of the traditional institutions of the Andean Regions, the cargo system, with the application of the Agrarian Reform. A study of this type is not only of theoretical but of empirical interest because the current Government of Peru is causing a change in the rural parts of the country with the application of the Agrarian Reform Law and the establishment of production cooperatives. One of the purposes of Law No. 17716, the Agrarian Reform Law, is to promote market integration and expand the purchasing power of the peasant groups with the lowest incomes (Carrol: 1970, pp. 29-30 and Mann , 1970). If the Agrarian Reform tends to increase the economic resources of the peasants, we wonder if the higher income they have will be spent in the market or will serve to make the sumptuousness of the festivities.

At the annual meetings of the I.P.A. We have often spoken of the compadrazgo spread among our peasants everywhere; some praise it, most would like to see it extinguished once and for all, because they see in it a form of social exploitation. The pages of the Allpanchis Magazine give us the opportunity to reflect on this important phenomenon in the lives of our peasants in the Sierra. Where does compadrazgo have its roots? Is it an institution that comes only from the socio-economic infrastructures or, on the contrary, is it also supported by a whole rich range of an ancestral subconscious and an existential theology planted in our town by the missionaries of the colony?

For two weeks (February 12-24, 1973) a "Popular Religiosity Course-Seminar" was held in Huampaní (Chaclacayo, Lima), organized by the former Pastoral Episcopal Commission. About 30 pastoral agents (priests and nuns) participated in it, who worked in the 8 pastoral zones of the country, although their participation in the seminar was in a personal capacity and they did not have any official representation of their respective work zone. The objectives of the course-seminar were, according to the official invitation document, a common reflection on popular religiosity, made by the same popular pastoral agents, to study "evangelization based on popular religiosity" and to draw up some concrete norms of popular ministry.

Anthropologists have preferred to concentrate on the analysis of societies and their cultures as units taken out of the context of their external relations, thus ignoring the valuable body of data that could make important contributions to the understanding of each society, analyzing in such a way that the emphasis would be placed on understanding the total context in which society operates. While early anthropological methods were adequate for the study of isolated communities and primitive nomadic bands, they are not adequate for the investigation of more complete societies.

In the Aymara populations, the peasants are grouped in a certain ayllu and this has its communal authority, the Jilakata, a native authority that complies with the customs of our Aymara ancestors. Within the ayllu, the Julakata is the highest authority whom everyone must respect.

The Andean Pastoral Institute has existed since 1968. Its foundation was due to the fact that the action of the Catholic Church in the Andes of southern Peru seemed increasingly out of step with the Andean world. It was about better directing said action.