The Purpose of Precedence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2025
Panama’s most important festivity, the annual Corpus Christi processions, featured the performance of gender and ethnicity. Celebrations involved Congo, Biafara, Bran, and other Black confraternities, as well as a longstanding dispute for precedence between members of the ship-builders’ and the stocking-makers’ guilds, who struggled for proximity to the monstrance. The most dramatic dispute in the Cathedral, however, entailed a battle for precedence between the wives of the city councilors and the spouses of the royal judges. Controversy over seating arrangements enabled the judges and city councilors to submit conflicts over their respective status to the king, who eventually allowed the judges’ wives, and even their mothers, to receive communion in the main chapel.
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