The (Un)veiled Pentecostal Culture in the Saltpetre Camps. Pentecostalism in the novel Hymn of the Angel Standing on One Leg, by Hernan Rivera Letelier

Abstract

This article deals with Pentecostal culture based on an analysis of Rivera Letelier’s novel, Hymn of the Angel Standing on One Leg, set in in the 1960s, the saltpeter mining area, in Antofagasta, Chile. Its main objective is to analyze how the concepts of misery, survival, evil, pain and human suffering—characteristic of the social dynamics of the time in that region, and more specifically of the imaginaries embodied in literature—are assumed and resignified from a religious perspective, namely, from a Pentecostal perspective. The theoretical approach is based in the studies of Clifford Geertz, who considers that one of the roles of religion is to assign meaning to pain and suffering as social experiences. In this sense, Pentecostalism does not solve problems, but rather assigns meaning, value and significance to them. This article is divided into three main sections: (1) Time and cultural space. (2) The construction of the masculine and the feminine. (3) The problem of evil and pain. In the first section, we will analyze the relationship between housing and Pentecostal temple as two precarious constructions, where the last one is a flexible space conditioned by worship, as well as by a time and space that provides freedom to religious emotions. Afterword, we refer to the tension between the institutional demands as opposed to the feminine and the masculine, where the subjects finally decide and find their spaces of freedom to make the religious demands more flexible; all of this, despite the mechanisms of control, especially refered to the body, that weigh mostly on women. Finally, in relation to evil and pain, we highlight the different rituals that the author presents, that the Pentecostals carry out as strategies to diminish the chaotic effects in the life of the believer, especially those related to illness and death.