Initially, I was very excited to be reading about a cult, but I actually left this reading with an entirely different interpretation of what a cult is and its significance within a culture. What shocked me was how the cult of Maria Lionza is far more organized as a religious unit than what my biased interpretation of what a cult is. The assumption going into this week was that for a cult to be organized that it needed to be small, therefore, easy to influence to its mass, but what happens in the cult of Maria Lionza is that there is a large following, with nuances in different pockets, and it seems to act like its own organized religion. This seems similar to all religions in the world, in the sense that Catholicism has its pockets and practices that vary in regions, nationalities, and ethnicities. Which is why my biased was slightly changed today, perhaps because a Western understanding of what a cult is has a lot darker of a history, however, I also don’t know how a cult may be perceived in Latin America and which connotations follow.
I thought that the emphasis on the eyes was very interesting, how it almost acts as a western soul, regarding its importance. I think that the emphasis on the eyes is also just another aspect of culture, that as I hypothesize may just be a regular part of Venezuelan culture, because vulture is funny like that sometimes. The respectable way to look at someone or the malicious way to look at someone is also very cultural, i.e. the eye roll.
Lastly, I think that one of the ways to rationalize the mirror effect as an outsider is that culturally there are ways that we prefer to be seen by others, and I think that the filming and the mirror effect play into that. I think that part of it is that they want to be perceived in a certain way and that is why they have specific rules in which they want to be filmed. However, I think that maybe is a stretch because I don’t have any way to back that up and that perhaps it really is just a belief that they have and the way that they experience their religion and life.
Question: What are some ways that the cult of Maria Lionza may affect the culture of Venezuela?
Hey Dylan!
It was very interesting to read your thoughts and ideas on what you believed to constitute a cult prior to Canals’ writing on Maria Lionza. I definitely would agree, I came into this reading with a sort of expectation that a cult was defined as a, quite often, more radical, smaller offshoot of a wider system of belief- but that of Maria Lionza is quite the opposite. I believe we briefly touched on this last class, but because the followers of Maria Lionza are so numbered, it doesn’t seem to ‘fit’ into our, perhaps Western or limited, definition of cult. I wonder then, is it a matter of our definition lacking the fluidity of the very thing it aims to define, or would we even consider the cult Maria Lionza to be a cult at all…