Andino-Catholic Rituals in Automobile Bolivia: Bendiciones, Ch’allas and K’oas Performed by Drivers from Chuquisaca

In the article, I explore different motorcar blessing rituals undertaken by drivers from the Bolivian region of Chuquisaca, while centering primary my description on the side of the doing of the rituals and only linking them on a second stage to individual meaning and theological reflections. In that way, I show that the interviewed drivers differentiate the performed rituals first of all by their components (and not by their addressees) and consider all three of them as necessary parts of Catholic faith regardless of the positioning of the clerics. The interviewed drivers attribute effects of safe driving and economic successes to the rituals, but also experience them as partly linked to accidents and incidents and by consequence increase in the aftermath of misfortunes their ritual offerings. Therefore, I conclude that drivers of automobile Bolivia through the performed rituals are reproducing a social system of reciprocity that goes beyond human counterparts and that religious synthesis in their reflections is to be understood as a reaction from below (rather than a cause) to anti-syncretistic discourses amid religious elites.