e pilgrims journeying to Lourdes, France, for instance. The transformation may be of the deity, making it more powerful or otherwise altering it. There may be a transference of power, such as to the relatives of the pilgrim. Movement itself is described as ascetic: "The pilgrim's difficult, self denying, or painful movement is the efficacious action, which at certain times and places is thought to generate great power" (13). The result is a form of "heat," or "tapasya," and without this no fruit is obtained (or, as Sax puts it, "No pain, no gain"). In his book on Peru, Gavin Smith enters a world in which resistance has been a way of life for generations. This is a small village pitted against the modern state of Peru, and yet the people have made resistance and political action into a part of their daily lives to such an extent that they seem unable ever to do anything else. They act as they have been raised and as their parents acted. They have a political structure and sense that is far in advance of what might be expected in a subsistence economy. Smith says that his study addresses questions of how peasants make a living and how they engage in political resistance, but he does so by focusing on one group of people to make an argument he believes can be extended to a wider population. He uses for his analysis the settlement of Huasicancha, a village found in the central Peruvian Sierras. This is a very isolated region, remote in every sense. Even this fact adds to the political complexity since the village lies at a point where three administrative boundaries come together. To make it clear what is taking place, Sax describes the mythology underlying the two deities and the way the ritual act relates to that mythology. The people are following an ancient tradition that in turn is based on this even more ancient mythology. Everything Sax learns about the people is related to this mythology, which provides the people with their underpi |
