Jonathan and I didn’t end up going bobolee-hunting as planned on Good Friday, but during a drive out to Tamana this afternoon I came across the remains of this Good Friday bobolee hanging on a lampost along the main road in Cumuto. The bobolee is an effigy of Jesus’ disciple Judas Iscariot, and its role in life is to have the crap beaten out of it with a stick, hence the reason this one has only his trousers left. This is both to punish Judas for what he did to poor Jesus and also because bobolees are usually also stand-ins for local miscreants (e.g. politicians). As this bobolee has lost his shirt–and as so many people (still) wear cargo pants–it’s difficult to tell whom he was supposed to represent.
In searching for information about bobolees after I mentioned the word on Twitter, my Twitter contact Coty Rosenblath found this 2006 post by Guanaguanare: the laughing gull. And earlier this week, over at the Rights Action Group T&T blog, the Dread posted her own bobolee pic and put out this call:
This Good Friday we’re inviting all communities to dedicate their bobolee to one of the traitors of our national environment. Take your pick and send us a pic of your portrayal of any of the Judas Iscariots who’ve sold out our country for thirty pieces of aluminum.
UPDATE: And this just in via e-mail from Nikipedia, who’s been travelling in Venezuela: “In Venezuela they burn Judas effigies instead of beating them. We saw a big one being constructed on the outskirts of Santa Elena but we missed the burning.” Next time, we hope.
A FURTHER UPDATE: Left on my Flickr page by Luis Carlos from Venezuela: “We burn a Judas too. Always it’s a politic. This year was the minister who prohibited the alcohol for three days.”
And here’s a Judas being burned in Chile.
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