Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Potosi



I marked the travel itinerary to Potosi in blue.

The trip to Potosi over the weekend was great... filled with lots of Potosi´s 400 year-old architecture and history, great conversations with Wes and Heather, and a trip into one of it´s silver mines. We visited lots of churches, an ancient convent for Clarissans turned into a musuem, a museum about the mining and processing of silver and silver coins, and we also looked out from a bell tower while a guide told us about various locations throughout the city.

I wanted to highlight the silver mine. The mine itself was SCARY. We were led by a guide into the mine that was cool at first and then warmed as we went in with the strong smell of sulfer. (Hot AND the smell of sulfer...isn´t that what hell is described as?). We were led by a former miner, who 8 years ago discovered a piece of high-grade silver so that he was able to leave mining and become a tour operator. (There are both commission-based miners and miners paid hourly on contract). We walked for some time, eventually climbing down 3 ´floors´ of ladders. While in the mine, two things struck me: 1) How easy it is to buy/hold/use dynamite in Potosi. The guide took the $2 stick of dynamite we bought earlier, mixing the ingredients necessary for an explosion, lit it and we quickly walked for 3 minutes around a bend to hear the explosion. We also held lit dynamite outside the mine when we used the second stick of dynamite and both saw and heard its destruction. 2) Miners make offerings to a ´devíl´ inside the mine. This devil is presented with alcohol, cigarillos, and coca to protect the miners from harm and to grant wishes. To the miners, God is the God of the Outside/Cultivated Earth & Sky, but the devil is the god of the Inside/Tunneled Earth*. They suffered so many tragedies in the mines that there is a perverse logic that they depend on this personified evil. There is a confusion of good and evil in their lives, like the admiration that abused peoples sometimes have for their abusers.

The god of the Europeans made them suffer....what if the god of one people is the devil of anothers? The way of salvation described by the Europeans led to damnation in the mines for Bolivians. How interesting then that so many Bolivians adopted the religion of these Europeans? And that some Catholicism here is a mix of indigenous religious beliefs (Pachamama, Mother Earth) and Catholicism.

+The interesting take on God and the devil is not the only interesting theology of the Bolivians. Many Bolivians believe that God dies each year on Good Friday and therefore cannot see any of the bad things that people do until Easter. Therefore, Good Friday and Saturday are days of license...to drink and visit ladies who prostitute because God is dead. Carnival represents the time each year when the devil dies...unfortunately I don´t believe this also coincides with a period of self-reflection and piety.

*Legend has it that the indigenous of Bolivia knew about Potosí´s silver before the Spanish came, but were told in a ´vision´ not to touch the silver because it was meant for people from a far-away land. Certainly this was not a vision from God....can the devils of power and wealth get together to conspire against a whole people to send them a vision and enslave them for centuries?

1 comment:

ButterPeanut said...

Wow... good thing you didn't wake the Balrog of Morgoth inside the mountain.

Pretty amazing illustration of how the Devil does his thing. :(