Bolivia

The Andean highlands hold one of the oldest continuously significant religious landscapes in the Americas. Tiwanaku, on the altiplano near Lake Titicaca, was a ceremonial centre for centuries before the Inca, who incorporated it into their own account of origins: the creator emerged at Titicaca, and the Island of the Sun in the lake was a principal Inca shrine. When the Spanish built the sanctuary of the Virgin of Copacabana on the lakeshore in the sixteenth century they were building on a pilgrimage site that already existed.

The colonial church in Upper Peru ran extirpation of idolatry campaigns, destroying huacas and punishing ritual specialists, and produced instead a Catholicism whose surface is entirely orthodox and whose substrate is not. Potosi is the sharpest illustration. The silver mountain that funded the Spanish empire is worked to this day, and the miners maintain both a Catholic devotion to the Virgen del Socavon above ground and offerings of coca, alcohol and cigarettes to the Tio, the owner of the underground, in a figure kept inside the workings. The two are not felt as a contradiction: the church is for the surface and the Tio for below.

Offerings to the Pachamama are ordinary in construction, mining and agriculture, made through the challa libation and prepared by yatiri specialists. The Oruro Carnival, in which the Diablada dance enacts a moral drama before the Virgin, is inscribed by UNESCO.

Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have grown quickly among the urban poor of El Alto and the lowland cities, and they are generally the least accommodating of the older practices.

The Bolivian constitution adopted in 2009 did two things at once that most legal systems treat as opposites. It declared the state independent of religion, ending the Catholic Church's status as the official faith that had stood since independence. And it gave indigenous cosmovision explicit standing in the text, committing the state to respect the spiritual beliefs and worldviews of the indigenous nations and framing the whole document within a decolonising project.

The ceremony that made the point came first. In January 2006, the day before his formal inauguration in La Paz, Evo Morales was received at Tiwanaku by Aymara authorities, dressed in the tunic of a ritual officiant and acknowledged there before taking the constitutional oath. Every inauguration since has included an equivalent act, and the sequence matters: the Andean ceremony is held at the ancient site, the legal one in the capital, and neither replaces the other.

Critics made two arguments and both deserve recording. The Catholic hierarchy objected that removing its position went beyond neutrality into hostility, particularly over religious education. And some Aymara and Quechua commentators argued that state ceremonial risks turning a living practice into national folklore, performed for cameras by officials rather than conducted by the people whose obligation it is.

Alongside the constitutional recognition sits an older one. The Kallawaya, itinerant healers of the Bautista Saavedra province who carry their own materia medica and their own secret language, were recognised by UNESCO as an intangible heritage of humanity, one of the earliest such listings anywhere. Their practice is hereditary and much of its content is not published.