a trinity of Christs: cultic processes in Andean Catholicism

This article uses historical and contemporary ethnographic data to elucidate the patterns of religious processes in the central Andes. It focuses on three neighboring Catholic shrines in a Peruvian rural locality. The interrelated devotional histories of these shrines are shown to exemplify processes evident in both the precontact and postcontact epochs whereby popular cults, patterned according to an indigenous Andean cosmology, are variously officialized, stifled, or controlled by emergent cultural elites. [Peru, Andes, Quechua, Catholicism, religious change]