St. Martin of Porres: Emblem of a Latin American anthropology

The thesis--in the violent and unequal encounter of cultures, St. Martin of Porres is emblematic of a new anthropology--is a multidimensional contribution to answering a fundamental problem of Latin American theology. Does there exist genuine Latin American theology? This dissertation answers the question by applying a variety of methods to a non-traditional text, the "cultural text" of the popular religiosity of St. Martin of Porres to discern a genuine Latin American theological anthropology. The method of this dissertation builds upon the previous work of Virgilio Elizondo. Virgilio Elizondo's anthropology of the Mestizo is interpreted as an anthropological hermeneutical key which I call the Other-as-authentic-and-connected-subject. Virgilio Elizondo's historio-symbolical approach to another non-traditional text, the popular religiosity of the Virgin of Guadalupe, suggested that the semiotics of culture approach developed by Robert Schreiter and the subaltern approach as developed by Antonio Gramsci could be applied to the depositions given at the 1660 beatification process of St. Martin of Porres. The initial application of the semiotics approach accomplishes two things. First, it analyzes the cultural text on its own terms in order to discover the authentic dimension of Elizondo's anthropological hermeneutical key. Second, it identifies the historical context on which one can apply the subaltern approach. This context is shown to be the Valladolid debate of 1550 in which the opinions of Sepulveda, Las Casas, and Vitoria offered distinctive anthropologies in order to explain both the cultural differences and the de facto political exploitation of the Amerindian. The subaltern approach is then used to discover the "connected" requirement of Elizondo's anthropological hermeneutical key. Putting the results of these approaches together, a genuine Latin American anthropology emerges as an alternative to the one worked out in Valladolid: St. Martin of Porres is the "asymmetric" Other capable of entering into fellowship with other "asymmetric" Others in a truly Latin American anthropology which combines the issues of identity and social conflict as complementary dimensions of the truly human.