No abstract

Indigenous Theology was born in Central and South America in the 1950s and 1960s in response to a demand for contextual theology, which takes into account local socio-cultural realities and, in particular, the specific needs of the poor and the marginalized indigenous peoples in these contexts. The fact that for many indigenous peoples in Central and South America Christianity stood and stands for conquest, colonialism, discrimination, and the repression of indigenous lifeways has not inhibited the development of indigenous Christian theologies. Rather, within indigenous theologies, Christianity, with its controversial history, is seen to stand in a productive tension with Indigenous Spirituality. This paper examines this productive tension between Indigenous Christianity, Indigenous Spirituality and Western Christianity. It asks how both Christianity and indigenous spiritualities become (re)presented, (re)positioned and made meaningful—co-constituted—in relation to one another in a variety of ways in the public discourses of the World Council of Churches and Central and South American Indigenous Theologians. The paper shows how, from the point of view of indigenous theologies, to be simultaneously indigenous and Christian is to be engaged in an ongoing problematizing of questions of authenticity.

El presente artículo revisa comparativamente el papel de las políticas públicas en la situación de los pueblos indígenas en aislamiento en dos países, Brasil y Perú. Presenta los grandes paradigmas que han dominado las políticas nacionales sobre los pueblos indígenas en la Amazonia, la asimilación (o integración) y la autonomía, analizando cómo han afectado la situación de los pueblos en aislamiento en el pasado y cómo lo hacen hoy en día. Como estudio de caso, desarrollamos el de los indígenas mashco piro del río Alto Madre de Dios (Madre de Dios, Perú), que pone de relieve la complejidad de la aplicación de las políticas en el terreno, en un contexto de crecientes amenazas para los territorios amazónicos. Finalmente, exploramos las problemáticas relaciones entre las políticas relativas a los indígenas en aislamiento con aquellas relacionadas a la economía y el uso del territorio, las cuales se encuentran estrechamente ligadas en la región amazónica.

This article examines the role of socio-moral space in people’s experiences of divine presence. More specifically, it addresses the questions of how social others influence people’s experiences of God and Satan among the indigenous evangelical Yine people of Peruvian Amazonia, and the consequences these interactions have for the individual believer and the collectivity. For the Yine dreams are a privileged site of human encounter with other-than-human beings, and they also feature centrally in their Christian lives. It is in dreams that they interact with angels and sometimes with the devil. By examining Yine evangelical dreams as mimetic points of encounter involving not only the dreamer but also transcendent beings and fellow believers as active agents, the article shows that Yine experiences of God’s presence cannot be conceptualised as an individual matter, but are highly dependent on the social other: they come to be as co-acted experiences of the divine.

The editorial presents the conference "Religion and Politics" arranged by the Centre for the Study of Christian Cultures at the University of Turku in November 2018. Articles 3-7 of the current issue are based on papers presented at the conference.