Cuerpos significantes y significados: muerte y ritual en el espacio rural de Cuenca (Baños y Sinincay)

Abstract

Through the ethnographic work developed in the years 2017 and 2018, based on the participant observation and interviews – semi-structured and open – this thesis seeks to recognize the instrumental and expressive functions assigned to the deceased's body and its forms of presentation and representation in the mortuary rituals. Therefore, it analyses the role of corporalities in the problematics of death and the symbolic strategies that regulate the relations between the living and the dead bodies in the rural parishes Baños and Noincay of the City of Cuenca, Azuay-Ecuador. The dead body far from being seen as a neutral entity, is shown as a meaning and significant body in the ritual context and the elements linked to the burial practice can only be understood through it.