Journal of Global Catholicism - Mediating Catholicisms - Summer 2019 - Vol 3 Issue 2

Journal of

VOLUME 3 | ISSUE 2

GLOBAL CATHOLICISM SUMMER 2019

MEDIATING CATHOLICISMS

Studies in Aesthetics, Authority, and Identity

ARTICLES • Mathew N. Schmalz / Overview & Acknowledgements • Eric Hoenes del Pinal, Marc Roscoe Loustau & Kristin Norget / Introduction • Gloria Bell / Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition • Eric Hoenes del Pinal / The Promises and Perils of Radio as a Medium of Faith in a Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic Community • Marc Roscoe Loustau / Radio Maria Transylvania: National Representation, Prayer, and Intersubjectivity in a Growing Catholic Media Network • Kristin Norget & Margarita Zires Roldán / Saints, Mediation, and Miracle-talk: The Señor de los Milagros in Lima, Peru

Cover Photo: Kristin Norget

2

M AT H E W N . S C H M A L Z

Mediating Catholicisms: Overview & Acknowledgements

Mathew N. Schmalz is Founding Editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism and Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. He received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in the history of religions from the University of Chicago. He has published more than fifty articles and essays that engage global Catholicism (particularly in South Asia), Catholic theology and spirituality, Mormonism, and The Watchtower movement. He is co-editor of Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances (SUNY, 2012, with Peter Gottschalk) and author of Mercy Matters: Opening Yourself to the Life Changing Gift (OSV, 2016). Schmalz has also written more than one hundred opinion pieces that have appeared in On Faith, Crux, The Huffington Post and in the print editions of The Washington Post, Commonweal Magazine, US Catholic, The National Catholic Reporter, the Providence Journal, and the Telegram & Gazette.

He has provided expert commentary to USA Today, The New York Times, ABC's Good Morning America, NPR, CNBC, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and U.S. News & World Report, among others.

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Mathew N. Schmalz | 3

C

atholicism is often understood to be the quintessential example of a “mediating” religion. Through the sacraments, as well as through the hierar-

chical structure of the church, power—power, both secular and sacred,

is mediated, restructured, and reproduced. But as the articles in this special issue

remind us, Catholicism itself can be and is mediated—in this case through a variety of communicative technologies, both new and traditional. Such is inevitably

the case, whether one conceptually considers Catholicism as a monolithic whole or as a diverse assemblage of practices that assume different shapes contours depending upon social or cultural context. The articles in this edition of the Journal

of Global Catholicism ( JGC) probe a number of important questions: What aspects of Catholicism do these kinds of mediation reveal? How do the workings of media

technology change—and are reciprocally changed by—idioms of Catholic expres-

sion? And how do the variety of audiences of such mediations appropriate and meaningfully redeploy elements of Catholic thought and practice?

This special issue was conceptualized, developed, and edited by Marc Loustau.

Since Marc Loustau is also an original editor of the JGC, these articles move

forward various themes in previous issues particularly relating to the cross-cultural diversity of Catholic thought and practice. Much credit goes to the scholars

who contributed such insightful articles, which were revised after presentation in a number of scholarly venues including the Annual Conference of the American

Anthropological Association and a recent conference in Québec City, also organized by Marc Loustau, that examined Catholicism’s relationship to and with a va-

riety of media expressions and technologies. Credit also goes to Ms. Danielle Kane

for editing the articles with her characteristically keen eye and professionalism.

Finally, many thanks to the publisher, Thomas Landy, director of the McFarland

Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture, whose support makes the Journal of Global Catholicism possible.

VOLUME 3 ISSUE 2 | SUMMER 2019

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ERIC HOENES DEL PINAL M A R C R O S C O E L O U S TA U KRISTIN NORGET

Introduction: Mediating Catholicisms: Studies in Aesthetics, Authority, and Identity Eric Hoenes del Pinal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego. His approach to the study of Catholicism is strongly ethnographic, with an emphasis on the roles that language and non-verbal forms of communication play in shaping religious identities and subjectivities.

Marc Roscoe Loustau is Editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism and a Catholics & Cultures contributor. As a scholar of religious studies in the context of personal, social, and economic change, his research has focused on Catholicism in Eastern Europe where, after decades of official state atheism, there has been a prominent resurgence of religion in public life. Loustau has taught courses at the College of the Holy Cross on contemporary global Catholicism. He holds a Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School.

Kristin Norget is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Her research publications have addressed aspects of religious practice and Catholicism in Mexico and Peru, including the book Days of Life, Days of Death: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca (Columbia University Press, 2006), and as co-editor The Anthropology of Catholicism (University of California Press, 2017).

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Eric Hoenes del Pinal, Marc Roscoe Loustau and Kristin Norget | 5

O

ne million visitors stream through the massive “Hall of the Americas” at the Vatican’s 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition, one of the 20th century’s largest exhibitions of objects extracted in the course of the

Catholic Church’s missionary work; the Brotherhood of the Señor de los Milagros (Lord of the Miracles) heaves an image of the saint onto their shoulders and

carries it past huge crowds and massive government edifices in the Peruvian capi-

tal of Lima; although sixteen million Guatemalans listen to FM broadcasts every day, diocesan officials in the rural municipality of Cobán struggle to reach local

Catholics with a new Q’eqchi’-Maya radio station; and finally as Romania’s new Hungarian-language branch of the World Family of Radio Maria begins broadcasting, founding officials weave together evangelism with an ongoing campaign

to win political recognition of minority rights. The articles in this Special Issue, “Mediating Catholicisms: Studies in Aesthetics, Authority, and Identity,” embed a

critical ethnographic, historical, and social scientific gaze in these vivid examples.

They thus demonstrate not only the distinctively Catholic talent for and creative

fascination with mass media, but also more fundamentally how mediation processes powerfully intertwine Catholicism’s sacramental imaginary of real presence with

multiple forms of national identity and secular power. Drawing on research in Peru, Guatemala, Canadian First Nations communities, and Romania, the articles in this

Special Issue present variations on a core theme in the growing body of literature on religious mediation. A basic premise of this “media turn” holds that, in Mathew

Engelke’s words, “religion is…mediation—a set of practices and ideas that cannot

be understood without the middle grounds that substantiate them.”1 The articles in this Special Issue, therefore, each chip away at the walls that have slowly been built

up by intellectual invocations of concepts like Catholicism’s interactions with “new” and “old” media technologies; the result is a broadened view onto into a broader field of analytical intention. As Norget and Zires Roldán state, the authors in the Special Issue come together to sound the claim that, “Attention to the interaction

or enmeshment of different scales and material, mobile forms and corps of media-

tion…enriches our understanding of contemporary Catholicism, and the material 1

Mathew Engelke, “Religion and the media turn: A review essay,” American Ethnologist 37, no.2 (2010): 371.

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6 | Mediating Catholicisms: Introduction

forms and ‘multiple political, embodied, aesthetic and economic registers’ through which it is mediated across time and space.”2

The articles recognize the valuable trajectory in research that continues to pro-

duce insight into Catholicism’s variously confrontational, reciprocal, and contested relationships with media technologies.3 But insights circulating in literature on

religious mediation lead Hoenes del Pinal, Norget and Zires Roldán, Loustau, and Bell to note the limitations of the implicitly positivistic, cause-and-effect or before-after framework that informs the questions about how media transform religious practice or how religions have shaped various media fields. The authors are inspired by the ways that anthropologists like Birgit Meyer have worked to develop

a rich and dimensioned study of mediation and religious experience to generate

insights such as that voltage and charge, as well as invisible wave-like pulsation, are

synonymous with Charismatic/Pentecostal experience of the holy spirit in large group worship service driven by electronically amplified sermons and music. The

congregation’s gas-powered generator, Meyer argues, not only generates electric-

ity but religious experience too: “Loudness—to such an extent that participants’ bodies vibrate from the excess of sound—and also pastors’ use of microphones in

rhythmic sayings induce a certain trance-like atmosphere that conveys a sense of an

extraordinary encounter with a divine force that is experienced to be present, and that can be reached by opening up and stretching out one’s arms.”4 To paraphrase

Engelke, the authors take Catholicism and its core experiential features—includ-

ing and especially the real presence of divinity in the consecrated host—to be a form of mediation, constituting Catholicism as a religious form through which views and experiences of the world are shaped, substantiated, and made accessible

to people in a range of social and cultural settings. Not only is Catholicism in the 2 3

4

Norget and Zires Roldán, this issue, 96.

Robert A. White, S.J., “The Media, Culture, and Religion Perspective: Discovering a Theory and Methodology for Studying Media and Religion,” Communication Research Trends 26, no. 1 (2007): 1-21. Jeffrey Mahan, “Relating Media, Religion, and Culture” in Media, Religion and Culture: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1-20. Robert A. White, S.J, “Major Issues in the Study of Media, Religion and Culture,” in Belief in Media: Cultural Perspectives on Media and Christianity (New York: Ashgate, 2004), 197-217.

Birgit Meyer, “Mediation and immediacy: sensational forms, semiotic ideologies and the question of the medium,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 19, no. 1 (2011): 23-4.

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Eric Hoenes del Pinal, Marc Roscoe Loustau and Kristin Norget | 7

media (as seen, for example, in the constant international media presence of the Pope); Catholicism is itself a medium, a ‘living infrastructure’, as Napolitano terms

it, of institutional bureaucracy and organizational forms, people, objects, technologies, liturgical events, saints, and affect.”5

In addition to the Special Issue’s theoretical and empirical innovations, the articles

also represent the fruit of a cross-disciplinary collaborative initiative, “Mediating Catholicisms,” convened by Norget, Hoenes del Pinal, and Loustau, which, prior

to being featured in the Journal of Global Catholicism, has already generated a fruitful cross-disciplinary conversation has been existed as panel presentations at the

2016 American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual convention and 2017 American Academy of Religion (AAR) meetings, and most recently as a stand-

alone symposium with the same title in 2019 funded by the American Academy of Religion, Social Sciences Research Council of Canada, and the Catholics & Cul-

tures initiative at College of the Holy Cross. Although “Mediating Catholicisms” embraces a variety of implements and methods to create new stages, platforms, and

gathering infrastructures for the critical study of religious mediation, some participants share an overlapping concern with the Journal of Global Catholicism’s mission

is to shift scholars’ perspective on the commonplace epistemological boundaries that sustain the authoritative and taken-for-granted centeredness of the historically dominant North Atlantic academic institutional culture. In this spirit, the “Mediating Catholicisms” project convened in September 2019 an additional twelve

scholars traveled from Chad, Japan, Geneva, the United States, and Canada for a

symposium and intensive working group conversation that expanded and diversified this conversation about practices of mediation, recognizing that Catholicism’s

ontology is distinctively rooted in mediations of real presence that assume and take for granted circulations between a Roman center and multiple peripheries as well as cross-fertilizations between multiply conjoined peripheries.

5

Valentina Napolitano, “The Sacred Heart and the Religious in Movement.” Material Religion 13, no. 2 (2017): 237–239. DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2017.1302128.

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8 | Mediating Catholicisms: Introduction

MEDIATION BEYOND THE UNIVERSAL Readers of this Special Issue will immediately discern several similarities and points of contact among the articles. Loustau and Hoenes del Pinal both study new

Catholic radio initiatives that, to greater or lesser degrees, partake in the recent global upswing of Catholic interest in evangelism as a response to the growth of evangelical and Charismatic/Pentecostal movements in areas where Catholicism

once held unquestioned numerical and cultural dominance. Bell and Norget and

Zires Roldán highlight the phenomenon of Catholic mass culture. Bell introduces the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition by situating this event as a Catholic contri-

bution to the immensely popular system of world fairs and exhibitions that were part and parcel of the constitution of colonial empire; Norget and Zires Roldán compellingly argue that the Señor de los Milagros procession draws on the same

sense of being part of a mass social gathering that centers on subjective experience of overwhelming sensuous spectacle. From this angle, the articles in this Special

Issue are inspired by many of the highly performative events that have provided an evocative setting for pathbreaking studies of religious mediation, events like

new Christian mega-churches’ arena-style worship concerts and renewal and piety movements’ more-or-less dramatic efforts at evangelistic outreach in established and emerging global urban milieus.6 Many key public political performances of our

day require us to better understand not only how religion manifests itself through media technology and processes of mediation and mediatization, but also how mediatic forms affect us, in awe-inspiring, seemingly metaphysical ways through mul-

tifaceted modes of communication and aesthetic forms.7 Bell and Norget and Zires

Roldán, for instance, extend this line of thought by noting that these events may be used by lay people as opportunities to critique the Catholic Church’s tendency

to work in concert with state and political authorities. Other points of contact 6

7

See, for instance, Birgit Meyer’s writings on sensational forms and religious mediation in Birgit Meyer, “Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 4 (2010): 741-763. Ibrahim Abraham, “Sincere Performance in Pentecostal Megachurch Music,” Religions 9, no. 6. (2018), https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9060192.

Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York NY: Columbia University Press, 2009).

Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds. Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Engelke, “Religion and the media turn."

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Eric Hoenes del Pinal, Marc Roscoe Loustau and Kristin Norget | 9

between these articles are subtler but equally revealing. Bell and Hoenes del Pinal’s articles reveal the pragmatics and poetics of establishing a sense of indigeneity and

autonomy. Loustau and Norget and Zires Roldán’s contributions open a window

onto Catholics’ efforts to establish and question notions of a “legitimate family.”

Together the four pieces underscore how Catholic in four different contexts attempt to imagine their religious communities.

While it is clear that mediation processes cut across religious traditions, much of

the current research examining the impact of mass media technologies on people’s

religious lives has focused on Protestant Christianity and Islam.8 Yet in the authors’ research sites in North, Central, and South America and Eastern Europe, Catholics

have taken the lead expanding the use of and modes of experimentation with vari-

ous media technologies. In these diverse social contexts, not only is the institutional Catholic Church quickly expanding its use of the Internet and social media platforms as a way of affirming its presence in the world, but an array of global Catholic

media networks (for e.g., World Family of Radio Maria, Global Catholic/Eternal Word Television Network [EWTN], Vatican Radio) represent efforts to rework

and retool the various relationships between subjective religious experience and

global transformations. Loustau’s article, for instance, sketches out the history of one major institutional trajectory of a new effort to evangelize and renew the faith

of lapsed Catholics—the global multimedia network called the World Family of Radio Maria that now has local chapters broadcasting in over sixty countries. More

broadly, with the exception of scholars of Charismatic Catholicism, Catholicism’s mediations have been a neglected field of research in anthropology and religious

studies, leading to an impoverished awareness of other key social and institutional processes toward which the authors point with a variety of conceptual signposts

and key terms: sovereignty, colonialism, race, and hierarchy (Bell and Norget and

Zires Roldán); mission, indigeneity, devotional labor (Hoenes del Pinal); prayer, 8

See, for instance, Simon Coleman, The Globalization of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the gospel of prosperity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape. Brian Silverstein, “Disciplines of Presence in Modern Turkey: Discourse, Companionship, and the Mass Mediation of Islamic Practice,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2008): 118-153, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00005.

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10 | Mediating Catholicisms: Introduction

family, and nation (Loustau).9 The articles enhance and intensify the conversation that the Journal of Global Catholicism has hosted about the possible and potential

trajectories opened up by the loosely ordered pairing of “Catholicism” and “culture,” putting these globalizing and broadly framed notions into a tense constellational arrangement by means of the terms just mentioned. In this way, the articles in

this Special Issue at times directly challenge and subvert homogenizing views of

Catholicism and theoretical assumptions that take Catholicism to be a monolithic, static world religion and institution.

By examining an exhibition of often violently extracted art objects and a Catho-

lic parish’s experiment with indigenous language radio broadcasting, for instance, these articles recast and critically represent emerging processes of Catholic media-

tion of indigeneity as well as other historical and social objects and experiences like post-colonial ecclesiastical infrastructures, ritual and artistic creations, autonomous

indigenous groups, and individual and collective subjectivities. Mediation is synon-

ymous with Catholicism’s sacral reality even though, as Gloria Bell’s article vividly demonstrates, Catholic sacrality is not immune to either creative acts of indigenous

cultural perpetuation or devastating post-colonial critiques of Catholicism’s geopo-

litical center in Rome. “Passamaquoddy adopted rather than assimilated Catholic practices,” Bell notes, and her critical scholarly gaze transforms an object exhibited in the Vatican’s colonial exposition—a carved wooden cross—into a revelatory mediation that discloses the violence of settler colonialism and the “transitions and hardships that the Passamaquoddy peoples went through.”10

The notion of indigeneity itself, Bell and Hoenes del Pinal note in their studies of the Church’s past and present missionary activity, is unpredictably tethered to mediations of real divine presence as the foundational experience of Catholic

sacral reality. At Hoenes del Pinal’s Guatemalan fieldsite, the Catholic archdiocese has created an intentionally and explicitly indigenous-language parish serving 9

Thomas Csordas, Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). Maria José A. de Abreu, “Worldings: the aesthetics of authority among Catholic Charismatics in Brazil,” Culture and Religion (2015) 2: 175-92, DOI: 10.1080/1 4755610.2015.1058529.

10 Bell, this issue, 30.

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Eric Hoenes del Pinal, Marc Roscoe Loustau and Kristin Norget | 11

Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholics. Paradoxically, this ecclesiastical infrastructure has raised

just as many questions as it has answered about, in Hoenes del Pinal’s words, “the extent to which their culture and communities can continue to exist in their present form.”11 The Catholic Church’s own sense of its declining role as both bedrock and

generative source of national identity is both an augmentation and feedback effect

of this broadly anxious self-consciousness. Indigenous language radio broadcasts hold out hope, Hoenes del Pinal writes, that membership in a simultaneously indigenous and Catholic community “can offer a modicum of relief from the insecu-

rities and indignities of life in post-war Guatemala.”12 Post-colonial theorizations

of indigeneity, Bell notes, have drawn attention to the political stakes of cultural perpetuation by linking continuity to the potent yet ambiguous notion of autonomy. The question of how to balance these two values—autonomy and cultural

perpetuation—is also central to efforts by members of this Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic

parish to found a new radio station, a project that driven by desires to meaningfully

serve the local population, but which also feeds into crosscutting anxieties about

the indigenous Catholics’ ability to create a semi-autonomous community within the larger ecclesiastical unit of the Diocese.

The authors also highlight an important but analytically neglected political and

juridical resonance of Catholicism’s mediations. Inspired partly by Birgit Meyer’s insistence that any phenomenological, subject-centered account of religious mediation must acknowledge these mediations’ marginal or central positioning vis-à-vis religious traditions’ authorized modes of encountering divine presence, Norget and Zires Roldán as well as Bell frame these authorizing processes within post-colonial

interactions between Catholic ecclesiastical institutions and the nation-state. The public refraction of the Señor de los Milagros procession in urban Lima, Norget

and Zires Roldán write, is a multiform but hardly cacophonous series of theo-po-

litical stagings of “miraculous force and presence” through which Church and state “assert their social vision and authority.”13 In her article, Gloria Bell notes that the mediations that bind the spatial terms of Catholic metropole and indigenous 11 Hoenes del Pinal, this issue, 60.

12 Hoenes del Pinal, this issue, 60.

13 Norget and Zires Roldán, this issue, 97.

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12 | Mediating Catholicisms: Introduction

mission field are inextricably interwoven with violence against indigenous bodies, extractive exploitation of resources, and cultural devastation. “The Passamaquoddy peoples,” Bell writes, “went through…removal from their lands and attempts by

missionaries and the federal government of Canada and the United States to force their assimilation into settler society.”14 Bell’s interpretation of a Passamaquoddy

artist’s carving of Jesus on the cross, which appeared in the 1937 exhibition and remains in the Vatican’s collection, is set within a clear post-colonial framework and

spares no evocative detail in capturing the way colonial suffering mediates multiple political and spatial domains. Jesus’s suffering binds heaven and earth, yes, and

the figure’s tangible gaunt bones and unstinting grief presents God’s immersion in this directly to the viewer. Bell’s analysis calls to mind the much more famous

shroud of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which features an iconic image of the saint as

a brown-skinned Madonna. The Passamaquoddy artist uses a stylized beaver belt

and crosshatched loincloth design to evoke, “the carving traditions of figurines and

effigies used in medicine bundles and other sacred practices of Algonquin peoples of the Northeast.”15 The figure’s ovular facial features constitute this Jesus as an In-

digenous savior, Bell writes, and might also remind readers that indigenous bodies were subject to racist violence in and through the enduring support Catholic missionaries gave to phenotypical hierarchies and notions of blood and bodily purity.

Familiarity is an existentially and politically primary, yet not guaranteed, concern

for Catholic devotees in articles by Norget and Zires Roldán and Loustau, whose studies of saints’ devotions show vividly how Catholicism works through intimacy and publicity simultaneously to mediate the face-to-face, eye-to-eye encounters with saints and divine beings that historians of Catholicism have called “real presence.”16 Norget and Zires Roldán use notions like legitimacy and theo-politics to

take up an alternative stance on one of Latin America’s most compelling largescale devotional celebrations, the annual procession of a statue of the Señor de los 14 Bell, this issue, 30.

15 Bell, this issue, 29.

16 Robert Orsi, Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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Milagros in urban Lima, Peru.17 Each year on October 18th and 19th, the statue

is taken out of the Church of the Nazarenas on the shoulders of members of the Brotherhood of the Señor de los Milagros de las Nazarenas, the lay Catholic organization charged with executing the procession and, in Norget and Zires Roldán’s assessment, the event’s central collective actor. Members of the Brotherhood carry

the statue forming a devotional trail that winds its way through Lima’s colonial center, past the massive and monumental infrastructures and armatures that em-

blematize Peruvian national identity and political, republican aura: the Catholic Cathedral, seat of the Archdiocese of Lima, as well as government offices, congressional edifices, and juridical palaces. Prominent social and political actors in Lima’s

spectacular annual procession and celebration engage in “miracle talk,” which for Norget and Zires Roldán is a repetitive and conventionalized form of legitimizing discourse that demonstrates legitimacy’s status as an uncertain, emergent, and so-

cially contingent ritual end. Norget and Zires Roldán direct scholars’ gaze to the celebration’s active centers of ecclesiastical and juridical power, like Lima’s Catholic

Archbishop who uses the public space of the celebration of the Señor de los Milagros to enfold a notion of the “Catholic family” within a baroque, circuitous, and

labyrinthine cultural brushwork, all to the end of enshrining the heterosexual fam-

ily as the basic building block of a locally and nationally rooted Peruvian way of life.

Loustau’s evocation of Catholic familiarity begins with a scene from his fieldwork

in an ethnic Hungarian and Catholic enclave in Romania. Celebratory and festi-

val-style performances are also a central feature of Catholicism in Romania’s Ciuc Valley, and Loustau recalls riding home with a busload of revelers from an annual

carnival-type festival that takes place in winter before the forty-day period of fasting and repentance of Lent. He witnesses a messy family conflict that, in the midst

of this densely public and performative Catholic celebration, breaks out into the open and onto the side of the road beside a stalled bus. Authoritative portrayals of

leisure-style devotional family harmony construes this conflict as a source of shame for the family, and Loustau takes this experience as a pivot point to shift to his account of women’s prayer requests to the Virgin Mary published and circulated on 17 See also Valentina Napolitano, Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

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14 | Mediating Catholicisms: Introduction

the web site of Romania’s Hungarian-language branch of the global World Fam-

ily of Radio Maria media network. For Catholics, family is a privileged medium for divine presence, but such intimate mediations are hardly innocent, removed from structures of power, domination, and violence. Norget and Zires Roldán and Loustau’s articles show how Catholic ideals of family shape the processes by which

everyday devotees grapple with authoritative social formations within which Catholicism mediates divine presence.

Hoenes del Pinal’s article invites readers to follow him in tracing the oft-overlooked but no less socially consequential ties that bind radio to everyday social

processes, like a Catholic sodality’s effort to promote parishioner involvement in public rituals during Semana Santa (Holy Week). The Hermandad de San Felipe is one of many groups responsible for sponsoring a procession around a local city

for this annual high holiday, and Hoenes del Pinal examines the group’s radio

broadcasts calling on people to help with the procession. The medium of radio itself offers no way to confirm whether anyone is listening; its messages are one-

way broadcasts. “Without a co-present audience and with no means of getting

immediate feedback,” Hoenes del Pinal writes, “all that was left at the end of the

Hermandad’s broadcast was the hope that someone, somewhere would heed their

call.”18 While some social uses of radio mitigate this inherent problematic, others, like organizing the annual procession, situate it at the center of social process, and

even go so far as to make the potential of communicative failure synonymous with

the festival itself and with the Parish of San Felipe as an ecclesiastical identity.

By using ethnographic research to situate radio in a broader ecology of commu-

nication technologies in Guatemala, including cellular phones whose interactive

properties set an authoritative standard in the field of media practice, Hoenes del

Pinal shows that the built-in insecurities of of radio are not only problems but also potentialities that entail the creation of a particular ritual sociality defined by

mutual obligation and exchange: “The radio program’s content thus mediated this

community of religious practice across space and time,” Hoenes del Pinal writes, “positioning them as co-participants in a future activity.”19 18 Hoenes del Pinal, this issue, 54.

19 Hoenes del Pinal, this issue, 53-54.

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We hope that this Special Issue as the first publication to emerge from the larger discussion about Catholicism and media that the conveners have been hold-

ing will be a significant step in fomenting an extended conversation between anthropologists, religious studies scholars, theologians, and historians around

Catholics’ distinctive understandings and practices of mediation. We are thankful

to the editors and publishers of the Journal of Global Catholicism for providing a venue to publish our research and push ahead this conversation about mediation and Catholicism, and look forward to seeing how scholar from a wide range of disciplines will take up and push forward this interdisciplinary research project.

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16 | Mediating Catholicisms: Introduction

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______. “Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s

Sensational Forms.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 4 (2010): 741-763.

Napolitano, Valentina. Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: transnationalism

and the Roman Catholic Church. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

______. “The Sacred Heart and the Religious in Movement.” Material Religion 13, no. 2 (2017): 237–239. DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2017.1302128.

Orsi, Robert. Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

______. Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Silverstein, Brian. “Disciplines of Presence in Modern Turkey: Discourse, Companionship, and the Mass Mediation of Islamic Practice.”

Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2008): 118-153.

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00005. de Vries, Hent and Samuel Weber, eds. Religion and Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

White, S.J., Robert A. “The Media, Culture, and Religion Perspective:

Discovering a Theory and Methodology for Studying Media and Religion.”

Communication Research Trends 26, no. 1 (2007): 1-21.

White, S.J, Robert A. “Major Issues in the Study of Media, Religion and

Culture.” In Belief in Media: Cultural Perspectives on Media and Christianity, 197-217. New York: Ashgate, 2004.

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GLORIA BELL

Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

Gloria Jane Bell writes about Indigenous arts and histories for academic and popular audiences. At McGill University, Professor Bell’s research focuses on exhibition histories of First Nations, Métis and Inuit arts in the early twentieth century in Italy, Global Indigenous studies, decolonizing and anti-colonial methodologies, materiality studies, and animals in art. Bell has Métis and Celtic ancestry. She has published in journals such as Wicazo Sa Review and the anthology Métis in Canada. She contributes to art publications including Canadian Art and First American Art Magazine.

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Gloria Bell | 19

O

n Sunday, December 21, 1924, Pope Pius

XI solemnly opened the holy door to the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition (PME)

(Figure 1). Standing in the central room, the Hall of 1

Americas, with the visual culture of the Indigenous peo-

ples of North America surrounding him, he welcomed tourists and pilgrims into this unprecedented exposition. Assembled in the heart of the Vatican, the PME

included specially designed pavilions showcasing art

and artifacts collected by missions across the Americas, Asia, Oceania, and Africa.2 Sponsored by Pope Pius XI, and with the cooperation of the city of Rome and Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, the exhibition featured over one hundred thousand objects and attracted

over one million visitors during its thirteen-month run.

Amidst a flurry of world fairs and colonial exhibitions, this exposition is particularly

influential in that it was the first and largest Catholic missionary display in Europe

during the early twentieth century. Materials that were sent in for the exhibition from around the globe were described as “gifts” to the Pope. Not inadvertently, the material was framed as conquests of the church, part of a long history of Roman

triumphal culture. Indeed the PME cannot be separated from its Roman environs.3 The PME, when thought of this way, ties itself back to centuries, eons, and epochs

of the glories of ancient Rome, wherein the spoils (books, antiquities, paintings, sculpture, and people) were paraded by Roman generals and troops through the streets of Rome for the ultimate glorification of the Roman Empire.4 Anthropologist Guido Abbattista notes that parading captives of the New World through the streets of Rome was done in the Renaissance era, which he calls the “trophying of 1

The “Holy Door” of the Jubilee Year tradition extends back to the 1200s. The door is opened only during the Jubilee Year and blessed by the Pope on its opening. “Mostra Giubileo,” Senato della Repubblica, accessed April 25, 2018, http://antiquorum-habet.senato.it/mostra-giubileo/.

2 John Joseph Considine, The Vatican Mission Exposition: A Window on the World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 80.

3 Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 289.

4 Beard, The Roman Triumph, 289.

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Figure 1.

Pietro Gagliardi, Pope Pius XI opening the holy door, 1924, lithograph. Ebay.

20 | Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

human otherness.”5 Pope Pius XI saw the materials sent in for the exhibition ranging from books, antiquities, paintings, sculpture, miniatures, and mannequins, to

flora and fauna, as showing Lux in Tenebris (light amidst the darkness) and sending

a message of “silent eloquence” of the heroism of missionary work.6 However, I argue that the materials made using Indigenous methods and hands were not merely

silent markers of missionary progress, but should be considered as present markers of Indigenous cosmologies and understandings.7

Materials sent in comprised secular and sacred things. Indigenous cultural belongings displayed in the exhibition including a Passamaquoddy cross is a central par-

ticipant in my narrative arc of the PME. Despite missionary positioning of sacred

and secular materials as the “gifts of the Pope” and triumphal Roman heritage, the presence of the Indigenous cultural belongings speaks to the unacknowledged Indigenous labor and the artistic and spiritual wealth of many Indigenous nations

across Turtle Island. Rather than see them as solely silent objects of the Vatican, they should be considered as “willing and unwilling” travelers, subjects and actors

with “social lives” that continue beyond the hands of their creators.8 This project

then takes up the challenge posed by Indigenous studies scholars to unbind historical silences, rereading colonial archives which are inherent “repositories of colonial

privilege” to re-center Indigenous perspectives.9 I argue that the terms used “object,” and “material culture,” and “gift” do not account for the sacred understanding 5 6

7 8

9

Guido Abbattista, “Trophying human ‘otherness’. From Christopher Columbus to contemporary ethno-ecology (fifteenth-twenty first centuries),” 29, http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/Cromohs-13651.

Frances Lord uses “The Silent Eloquence of Things” as the opening to his article and sustains the silence that Pope Pius XI perpetuates, in Canadian Missionaries/Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad, eds. Alvyn Austin and Jamie S. Scott, 205-34 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Through his encyclicals, Pius XI promoted missionary work as an active part of all orders and placed emphasis on training local Indigenous clergy in Africa and Asia. “Rerum Ecclesiae,” accessed February 13, 2019, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius11/p11rerec.htm.

Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Jace Weaver notes the “unwilling” Native travelers in The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2014), 58. See also Jessica Horton, “A Cloudburst in Venice: Fred Kabotie and the U.S. Pavilion of 1932,” American Art, 29 (2015): 60, https://doi.org/10.1086/681655.

Danika Medak-Saltzman, “Transnational Indigenous Exchange: Rethinking Global Interactions of Indigenous Peoples at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition,” American Quarterly, 62 no. 3 (2010): 594.

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Gloria Bell | 21

of materials that Indigenous perspectives bring to this discussion. Instead, I argue that the term “cultural belonging” is more appropriate and use this throughout

my research on the PME to dislocate the sovereign claims of Papal authority and

center an Indigenous frame of reference. I contend that the Indigenous materials, many of which are sacred and important historical markers in their own rights, may be thought of as having a presence both physical and spiritual within the walls of

the Vatican. PME visitors were anxious about this sacred aspect, suggesting that the cultural belongings were far more than just silent markers of missionary prog-

ress but also powerful enchanting materials that carry the weight of Indigenous spiritual ideas and thought processes.10

THE PME: ‘SILENT ELOQUENCE’ IN THE HALL OF THE AMERICAS Envision an exposition occupying the space of several neighborhood blocks, filled

with blooming gardens, ornately-designed pavilions, and models of Indigenous peoples, all within the walls of the Vatican. All of these aspects worked on the visi-

tors’ senses to create an atmosphere of reverence and spectacle.11 The burial place of

many saints and martyrs, St. Peter’s Basilica housed countless relics and reliquaries.

The Vatican also functioned as a sacred pilgrimage site as well as a reminder of the overlapping of previous pagan rites; Catholics built St. Peter’s on the pagan ruins

of Roman antiquity. Proceeding through the grounds of the Vatican, visitors would

have experienced the grandeur of St. Peter’s Square at the start of the exhibition: the Pavilion of the Holy Land and the History of the Missions. Onward through the Halls of the Americas, Oceania, and India, visitors encountered the objects

(missionary paintings, statues of martyrs, cultural belongings from diverse Indigenous communities) and witnessed an overwhelming collection of Indigenous belongings from around the globe.

Scholars in the disciplines of art history, anthropology and museum studies, have 10 Rodney Harrison, Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2013), 5.

11 For a parallel discussion of a sense of reverence in secular art institutions, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 2005), 7, https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203978719.

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22 | Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

discussed world’s fairs and museums as contested spaces of competing influences, especially for the presentation and curation of Indigenous art.12 Art historian Ruth

Phillips notes that the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, on Musqueam ter-

ritory, is nowadays a space where the museum works with Indigenous communities and that “competing claims to ownership, compensation, authority, and interpre-

tation have to be negotiated on an almost daily basis,”13 but she then traces how

previous scholarship, museum exhibitions, and world’s fairs assumed a hierarchy between Indigenous arts and the colonial powers and perpetuated the denial of Indigenous peoples’ modernity. Building from Phillips’ argument that the museum

needs to be “re-disciplined,”14 Indigenous studies scholars articulate how re-read-

ing colonial expositions and their archival holdings in colonial institutions, such as the PME, can offer different lessons on the complexities of Indigenous experience

within international case studies. As Turtle Mountain Chippewa historian Danika Medak-Saltzman notes:

… examining the historical record to shed light on transnational Indigenous encounters is not about seeking a continuous resistance movement where there is none. It is about recognizing Indigenous resistance as a continual part of Na-

tive negotiations with colonial regimes and about considering how moments

of colonial celebrations of empire may have inadvertently served anticolonial purposes by presenting the Indigenous participants with opportunities to interact across larger distances than had been practical or possible in the past.15

My methodology for the work in this essay builds on the insights of Medak-Saltz-

man, especially her creative interpretation of archival documents and Indigenous resistance via close readings of photographs of Indigenous participants at the 1904

St. Louis exposition. In addition to Medak-Saltzman, I also draw inspiration from the work of Tanana Athabaskan scholar Diane Million, who argues for emotive 12 Laura Hollengreen, Celia Pearce, Rebecca Rouse, and Bobby Schweizer, Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader (Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2014).

13 Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2011), 73.

14 Phillips, Museum Pieces, 92.

15 Medak-Saltzman,“Transnational Indigenous Exchange,” 593.

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Gloria Bell | 23

histories that consider how Indigenous peoples work through trauma and the

structures of colonial imposition on Indigenous lives, what she calls “felt theory.”

Million notes that Indigenous studies scholars, and particularly Native women, “feel our histories as well as think them.”16 This essay considers an affective approach to writing about Indigeneity in colonial archives.

Visitors appreciated Indigenous cultural belongings sent in from the missions as silent markers of conversion. Although anxieties surrounding Indigenous beliefs and

the cultural belongings that represented them remained just under the surface, materials functioned as reminders of the triumph of missionary work and the suppression of alternative religious beliefs. Thus, Pope Pius XI even situated the objects as

part of the “spiritual wealth” and cultural heritage of Catholicism.17 Paradoxically, the inclusion of Indigenous cultural belongings from the Americas bolstered the visual consumption and viewing experience of Catholic citizens through hierar-

chies of vision that also reinforced a hierarchy of race and the arts established by the organizers.18 An account in the New York Times promised that the PME would

“present to visitors the life, customs, and habits of the most obscure tribes in the remotest regions of the earth.”19 PME visitors wanted to see things the newspapers had promised, and visiting reinforced their intangible beliefs through the obser-

vation of tangible things. The organizers framed cultural belongings as material evidence of Catholic conversion and faith in the Americas, Oceania, Africa, and

Asia, all the while denying the modernity of the makers and their artistic, cultural, and spiritual ancestries and iconographic traditions.20

16 Diane Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 9 (Fall 2009): 54. Million’s affective approach also has parallels with Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), https:// doi.org/10.1353/wic.0.0035.

17 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 2005), 95.

18 Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? (London: Seagull Books, 2007), 16. See also Lynda Jessup and Shannon Bagg, eds. On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery (Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2002), https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctv16p95.

19 “Pope Inspects Exhibition: Views Preparations for Missionary Fair in Vatican Grounds,” New York Times, February 8, 1924, 5, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

20 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (Columbia University Press: New York, 1983), 35.

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24 | Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE PME The PME opened on December 21, 1924, and closed on January 10, 1926. Over one million pilgrims attended the exhibition, which occupied twenty-four specially

designed pavilions in the Pine Court of the Vatican Museum.21 From the moment

visitors entered the exhibition, the Catholic white male heteronormative ordering of vision pulled them into the space.22 Missionaries displayed cultural belongings in

glass cases and also piled them high on top of the displays. The inclusion of cultural belongings foreshadowed their permanence in the Vatican Missionary Ethnological Museum, which Pius XI opened after the closing of the PME.23 PME orga-

nizers noted that missionaries sent in 100,000 items, and from this they selected 40,000 for inclusion.24

Melding historical and contemporary missionary history, statistical data, dioramas, cultural belongings, “and a great variety of memorabilia,” Father Wilhelm Schmidt, the curator for the Pope, and his team created the exhibition like an adventure

experience.25Visitors moved counter-clockwise through a sequence of thirty-two rooms, with information posted in Italian and other languages, viewing Catholic

missionary work through a Judeo-Christian linear framework in which Indigenous

peoples could only become modern and redeemed if they converted to Christianity.

They started with the early martyrs (The Pavilion of the Holy Land, the History

of Missions, and the Hall of Martyrs) and moved to the contemporary missions, beginning with the Ethnology Room, Schmidt's special project.

21 Considine, The Vatican Mission Exposition, 26.

22 Religious studies scholar David Morgan does not discuss how white male heteronormative visions have shaped the discourse around Catholic visioning and community via visual culture. David Morgan, Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (University of California Press, Oakland, 2012), https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520272224.001.0001.

23 Angelyn Dries, “The 1925 Vatican Mission Exposition and the Interface Between Catholic Missionary Theory and World Religions,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 40, no. 2 (2016): 122, https://doi.org/10.1177/2396939316638334.

24 Nicola Mapelli, Katherine Aigner, and Nadia Fiussello, Ethnos: Vatican Museums Ethnological Collection (Vatican City: 2012), 152.

25 “Quantity and A Great Variety of Memorabilia” Vatican Missionary Exhibition (Mill Hill Missionary Society Archive Papers, 1925).

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Father Wilhelm Schmidt, Pius XI’s advisor for the PME, was an Austrian

Catholic missionary, linguist, and anthropologist, and the founder of Anthropos, an important journal of ethnology, anthropology, and missionary studies. Schmidt wrote many essays on his theory of “primitive monotheism,” which he published in

Anthropos, essentially a sounding board for his Catholic version of anthropology.26 Interested in understanding how “primitive” peoples maintained what he saw as

their “monotheistic” beliefs, Schmidt maintained that there was an inherent link

between race and belief.27 He suggested that, among tribal peoples, a belief in one God paralleled Christian beliefs. While overseeing the entire exhibition, Schmidt

took a special interest in the construction and display of the Ethnology Room, which was created to reflect his theory of “primitive monotheism,” an innovative

idea at the time, but now discredited.28 The Ethnological Hall was arranged by

Schmidt to show the “progress of civilization outside the influence of Christianity,” complete with many fetishes and other occult objects.29 Founder of the tradition of Kulturkreise, Schmidt took a missionary-based approach to anthropology that emphasized understanding the particular histories of individual societies rather than

placing cultures within a universalizing discourse of human nature.30 He believed

anthropology should be “a scientific discipline, proving the ability of Catholics to work in this field, and an apologetic discipline, proving the natural founda-

tions of Catholic doctrine.”31 Schmidt’s thesis, based on his studies in Africa, did not address the complexities of religious belief for the Indigenous peoples of the 26 Schmidt was also blatantly anti-Semitic and published writings to that effect. In the words of social anthropologist Thomas Hauschild, “his work aimed at dethroning the Hebrews as the direct predecessors of the Christians.” Thomas Hauschild, “Christians, Jews, and the Other in German Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 99, no. 4 (1997): 749, https://doi.org/10.1525/ aa.1997.99.4.746.

27 Hauschild, “Christians, Jews, and the Other in German Anthropology,” 749.

28 Wilhelm Schmidt was a prodigious author, and an analysis of his theory of primitive monotheism in relation to the ethnological debates in Europe at the time is beyond the scope of this article.

Schmidt’s racist ideas were allied to those of the Nazi party in Germany, but his Catholic beliefs were not, and for this reason he was persecuted by the Nazis in the late 1930s. See Hauschild, “Christians, Jews, and the Other in German Anthropology,” 749.

29 F. J. Bowen, “The Missionary Exhibition at The Vatican,” New Blackfriars 6 (1925): 269, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.1925.tb03478.x.

30 It should be noted that the term “Kulturkreise” was later used by the Nazis in their racial eugenics program.

31 Stefan Dietrich, “Mission, Local Culture and the ‘Catholic Ethnology’ of Pater Schmidt,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 23, no. 2 (1992): 114.

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26 | Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

Americas. His curatorial method contributed to an understanding of Indigenous Americans as primitive and uncivilized, outside the “rational” time and space of

Western exposition visitors, the normative perspective showcased by missionary expositions and world exhibitions at the time.32 As anthropologist Alison Kahn notes, “[t]he pre-contact ‘heathen objects’ were presented en masse with the implicit message to visitors that Indigenous cultures were lost and in need of guidance. Conversion to Christianity was portrayed as simultaneous with an enriched material.”33 By this, Kahn means that with conversion to Christianity, Indigenous

peoples would achieve both greater material wealth and the ability to assimilate into Western societies. A newspaper report noted that this section of the exhibition

included “a wealth of material relating to the pagan cults and rites, witchcraft, [and] conditions of life,” emphasizing the spectacle rather than the science.34 After these

first rooms, deemed the “scientific” section, visitors moved, in the Hall of Americas, onto the larger work and accomplishments of the Catholic missionaries abroad.35

For this vast and ambitious exhibition, Schmidt and his team of missionaries

worked with a variety of materials, a plethora of cultural belongings and ephemera including pottery, textiles, paintings, pamphlets, books, and photographs.36 Since Pope Pius XI had sent out a call for submissions connecting the broader commu-

nity of Catholic missionaries and converts, Schmidt had to work with whatever the missionaries submitted. The submissions’ unpredictability and variety formed

32 Alison Kahn, “Mind over Matter: A Catholic Ethnology for the Vatican’s Ethnographic Collections (1911-1939)” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 2006). OCLC Worldcat (500335678).

33 Kahn, “Mind over Matter,” 191.

34 “Vatican Exhibition is Taking Shape: Pavilions to Cost 6,000,000 Lire,” New York Times, September 7, 1924, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

35 "Vatican Exhibition is Taking Shape,” New York Times.

36 My use here of the term “visual culture” encompasses popular culture items (such as board games, posters, and photographs) and is part of the broader movement within art history to draw attention to the biases of the standard canon of art history, namely, that aspect of the discipline that only examines the work of Western artists and so-called “high art.” For more on this issue, see James Elkins, Stories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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Gloria Bell | 27

part of the importance of the exhibition as pop and pope culture.37 As Father

Penkowski, former curator of the Vatican Ethnological Collection, noted regarding the array of material donated:

They included objects from every part of the world where the Catholic missions carry out their activities. The systematic display of this heritage, arranged

according to the geographical criteria, provided in itself a wonderful panorama

of the life and wide-ranging activities of many non-European peoples in the

economic, social and artistic fields, as well as that of their magical practices and their multifarious beliefs.38

Penkowski hints at the collision, throughout this period of intense missionization and salvage paradigm collecting of “magical practices,” between Indigenous belief systems and Catholic dogma. Visitors admired cultural belongings for their sta-

tus as objects created by Indigenous peoples described sometimes as converts and sometimes as pagans.39 Materials functioned as uneasy reminders of alternative religious beliefs but also of the triumphs and trophies of missionary work. Reviewers ignored the Indigenous materials surrounding them.

UNSETTLING THE PME: COMPETING SOVEREIGNTIES: A PASSAMAQUODDY CROSS IN ROME An example of Passamaquoddy culture displayed in the PME, and still in the Vatican collections, is a statue of Christ that provides a powerful example of Passa-

maquoddy carving ingenuity (Figure 2).40 Father Pancrazio Maarschalkerweerd, the former museum assistant of the Vatican Missionary Ethnology Collection in 1937, described the statue as “an art object that is of importance, being from the

37 A call for submissions was also sent out by the curator Dino Alfieri, who organized the Fascist Exhibition, the mass appeal of which was an intentional goal of his curation. Vanessa Rocco, “Room O of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution–1932,” in Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda, from Pressa to The Family of Man, 1928–55, ed. Jorge Ribalta (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008), 245.

38 Giuseppe Penkowski, Il Vaticano e Roma Cristiana (Citta del Vaticano, Roma: 1975), 26.

39 Considine, The Vatican Mission Exposition, 108.

40 The “crucifix” was listed in AMDG, Croquis de Visite D’Exposition Recueillis Par un Des Missionnaires Exposants, Avril 1925 (Industria Tipografica Romana, Roma, 1925), 16–17. Propaganda Fide Library Collections, Vatican Missionary Exposition Papers, document B1i 30 (2).

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28 | Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

historical period and also representing the question of Indigenous art.”41 Maar-

schalkerweerd’s phrase “question of Indigenous art” suggests he at least considered the shifting hierarchies of value surrounding Indigenous art in this period, from

anonymous arts of “primitive” artists as presented at the PME to part of the “Indian Craze” to arts of diverse peoples worthy of recognition as art.42 Catholic missionaries at Passamaquoddy sent in the carving as part of the Museo Borgia Della

Propaganda al Museo Lateranense collection.43 It is the work of an Indigenous artist from the first half of the nineteenth century, with a height of 72 cm.44

The Passamaquoddy artist carved the cross out of wood from the yellow birch, a

tree with multiple layers of importance for Indigenous communities across the Northeast of Turtle Island, including the Anishinaabe and Algonquin. Anishi-

naabe writer Robin Wall Kimmerer observes that “[t]he birch forests maintained by indigenous burning were a cornucopia of gifts: bark for canoes, sheathing for

wigwams and tools and baskets, scrolls for writing.”45 The tinder of the birch is also used to light fires and is an important part of indigenous ontologies and ways of

relating to and understanding the world. Kimmerer notes that fires are central to the Anishinaabe creation stories, but they can also destroy. A particular fungus that

grows on the birch is also highly valued in traditional medicine.46 Passamaquoddy

use the birch to make baskets and carrying bags as well as for ropes and other

utility items for hunting.47 Passamaquoddy and Wendaki continue to use birch for

41 I came across this Indigenous cross made by a Passamaquoddy artist while at the Propaganda Fide Library. The Catholic order that sent it in are not listed in the record. Catholic orders amongst the Passamaquoddy since the seventeenth century include the Capuchins, Recollects, Spiritans and Jesuits. Pancrazio Maarschalkerweerd, “Plastiche Cristiane delle Terre di Missione nel Pontificio Museo Missionario Etnologico,” Annali Lateranensi 1 (1937), 16–19 (accessed at Propaganda Fide Library Collections, Rome and Society of the Divine Word Verbite Archive, Rome).

42 Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2011), 92.

43 Maarschalkerweerd, “Plastiche Cristiane delle Terre,” 16.

44 Maarschalkerweerd, “Plastiche Cristiane delle Terre,” 16.

45 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 363.

46 Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 363.

47 Frank W. Porter, The Art of Native American Basketry: A Living Legacy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1990), 21.

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Gloria Bell | 29

birchbark writing.48 In Indigenous ontologies, the birch is part of a wholistic system of relationships

between people and the earth, and a vital part of the ecosystem for animals, plants, and humans.49

The arms of the cross taper into a stylized floral design. Northeast carvers used stylized floral designs

throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries on effigies for Indigenous spiritual practices, in making ritual belongings for burial, and to

create what art historians Ruth Phillips and Janet

Berlo call “arts of the middle ground.”50 Indige-

nous artists of the Northeast were influenced by the impact of trade with Europeans, creating gifts

of exchange for diplomacy.51 Above the figure of Christ is the Latin acronym “INRI” (standing for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”). The body

of Christ has a red tint, and his hair and beard are

Figure 2.

black. The artist carved the figure out of a single piece of wood and then nailed Passamaquoddy artist,

Untitled, c. 1830, wood

it onto the larger cross behind. The minimal red-and-black color palette creates carving with pigment, a stark mood for the piece, one suitable for the agony of the figure; the viewer is in Annali Lateranensi (1937), volume 1, 19.

meant to empathize with the suffering of the Indigenous man on the cross. The Propaganda Fide artist presents the viewer with the tangible suffering of the emaciated figure; the pain manifests in the open grimace carved into his face and the lashes incised thickly across his chest. Notably, he is an Indigenous savior, wearing what appears

to be a stylized beaver belt depicted by a crosshatched garment wrapped around his

waist. The crosshatch technique of the loincloth presents an Algonquin approach 48 Alison Laforge, “Burl Bowls and Birchbark Baskets: Decolonizing Indigenous Material Culture in the Native Northeast” (MA thesis, Mount Holyoke College, 2016). https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/ xmlui/handle/10166/3803, Mount Holyoke College Institutional Digital Archive.

49 On Passamaquoddy art traditions, see also Joan A. Lester, History on Birchbark: The Art of Tomah Joseph, Passamaquoddy (Bar Harbor, ME: The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, 1993), 10.

50 Ruth Phillips and Janet Berlo, Native North American Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), 90.

51 Phillips and Berlo, Native North American Art, 92.

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30 | Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

to the iconography of sacred beings. The oval almost abstract shape of the face and

the incised eyes and lips are reminiscent of faces of sacred beings on catlinite pipes and feast bowls, part of the carving traditions of figurines and effigies used in medicine bundles and other sacred practices of Algonquin peoples of the Northeast.52 Considering also that Passamaquoddy used this cross in processions, showcased how Passamaquoddy adopted rather than assimilated Catholic practices into their

carving traditions and spirituality, presenting a First Nations man as the human face of the divine.53

The adoption of Christian mythology using an Indigenous lens and an Indigenous approach to image-making is evident in this sculpture through the carving method

that presents the suffering of a Passamaquoddy man as Christ. Theologian Thomas Murray admits that “[m]any Indians’ faith may well be a synthesis of traditional Indian and Christian beliefs, because over the centuries Christian missionaries continually noted—usually with distress—how easily Native Americans adopted

portions of Christian doctrine without abandoning tribal practices.”54 The cross is

evidence of the ongoing Passamaquoddy worldview and its characteristic approach to sculpture, using a distinct visual language as part of the long continuum of visual culture practices in the medium of birchbark which also includes birchbark writing and basketry.55 This understudied cross is also a telling reminder of the series of

transitions and hardships that the Passamaquoddy peoples went through, such as removal from their lands and attempts by missionaries and the federal government of Canada and the United States to force their assimilation into settler society. It is

also evidence of the persistence of the chip-carving method and of the ingenuity of Passamaquoddy carving traditions, yet in the earliest discussion of Native American material in Vatican collections by David Bushnell, published in the American

52 Ralph T. Coe, Jonathan C. H. King, and Judith Ostrowitz, The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 201.

53 Maarschalkerweerd, “Plastiche Cristiane delle Terre,” 16.

54 R. Murray Thomas, Manitou and God: North-American Religions and Christian Culture (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 5.

55 Mark Hedden, “Passamaquoddy Shamanism and Rock Art in Machias Bay, Maine,” in The Rock Art of Eastern North America: Capturing Images and Insight, eds. Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 319.

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Anthropologist (1906), there is no mention of it. The cross is also not in the Americas catalogue, the most recent Vatican publication.

The finely carved cross is a marker of Passamaquoddy presence in the Vatican and

in the PME, and a reminder of the ongoing use of the arts by Native people to

assert their identity and adapt Christian mythologies to Indigenous worldviews.

The Indigenous figure on the cross reminds one of the seventeenth-century conversion of the Passamaquoddy and their adoption of Catholicism but also shows

how Passamaquoddy peoples retained their Indigenous spiritual beliefs and cul-

tural practices.56 Like many of the cultural belongings that featured in the PME, the current whereabouts of the cross remain a mystery, suggesting that the PME curators may have lost or damaged it. In an article from 1990, “Roman Ecclesiastical Archives and the history of Native Peoples of Canada,” Giovanni Pizzorusso

notes that “[n]o further collection history [of the cross] is available as old inven-

tories were not copied at the time of the transfer.”57 My interviews with a former curator corroborate Pizzorusso’s claim.58 The afterlives of many of the Indigenous

cultural belongings sent in for the PME remain a mystery. Many cultural belong-

ings of the Americas have either been lost, destroyed, or have disappeared. Others, such as buffalo hides from the Plains, disintegrated due to insect infestations.59 The

disappearance even of sacred items such as the cross suggests the utter curatorial disregard for Indigenous cultural belongings in addition to the way that time and neglect can erode history. As Czech-French author Milan Kundera notes, “the

struggle for power is the struggle between memory and forgetting.”60 The cross provides a powerful reminder in my larger research project to remember and articulate

the contributions of Indigenous artisans within the PME and within the Vatican collections that were neglected by missionaries.

56 Tomson Highway and John George Moss, Comparing Mythologies (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2005).

57 Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Roman Ecclesiastical Archives and the History of the Native Peoples of Canada,” European Review of American Indian Studies 4, no. 2 (1990): 24. Newberry Library Edward E. Ayer Special Collections.

58 Conversation with the former curator, November 2016.

59 Conversation with the former curator.

60 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York, Knopf: 1980).

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32 | Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

The materiality of the cross, carved from yellow birch, matters on multiple levels

of the collective memory of Indigenous peoples of the Northeast. Yellow birch

continues to remind Indigenous peoples of the respect they hold for the tree within creation stories, and the ability of this sense of connection to strengthen and

nurture Indigenous communities across Turtle Island. On an intellectual level, birch plays a central role in sustaining Indigenous mythologies. At a material level, it forms the literal basis for many arts practices, including basketry and carving

traditions.61 More broadly, the cross represents the importance of Passamaquoddy carving traditions within the adaptation of Christian stories to the Passamaquoddy worldview. As such, it is evidence of the extensive period of creative cultural

encounter the Passamaquoddy built with missionaries, and the multiple forms of cultural exchange between diverse peoples. When I first encountered this Passam-

aquoddy cross at the Propaganda Fide in Rome I was struck by its immediacy and felt that perhaps it was a metaphor for my research. Million’s affective approach to

writing histories resonates with me on the labor of working in colonial archives.

The mental, physical and spiritual struggles Indigenous studies scholars face are part of my affective labor practices that inform and motivate my research. In the

broader research project, I include my journal excerpts to center my experiences working through the violence of colonial archives. The almost tangible suffering of

the man on the cross recalls for me the competing sovereignties of Indigenous artworks in the strongholds of the Vatican but also more broadly a reminder to trace and honor Indigeneity in archives.

INDIGENOUS CULTURAL SOVEREIGNTIES: ALTERNATIVE SPACES OF INDIGENEITY Colonial archives remain fraught spaces of competing sovereignties for Indigenous

scholars and art historians; they present the violence of colonial rule and attempted jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples in their topology.62 One strategy I use when approaching and researching Indigeneity in colonial archives is to consider how Indigenous nations, artists and cultural belongings are present in material traces in 61 Lester, History on Birchbark, 11.

62 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3.

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archives and as in the case of the Passamaquoddy cross it is a matter of re-inter-

pretation and reading archives from multiple angles and sites of access. Indigenous scholars articulating multiple forms of Indigenous sovereignty, visual, cultural and

intellectual sovereignties create a decolonizing movement in writing Indigenous

art histories, and my research, as an Indigenous scholar, builds into this initiative.

Seneca scholar Michelle Raheja argues that the imaginative potential of Indigenous cultural, visual and intellectual sovereignty opens up thinking for the possi-

bility of alternative spaces of Indigeneity and a creative form of interference amidst the overt colonial aims of spaces such as the PME.63 Tuscarora scholar Jolene Rickard defines sovereignty as, “the border that shifts indigenous experience from a victimized stance to a strategic one.”64 Tsimshian scholar Mique’l Dangeli articulates

sovereignty through her conceptual framework of dancing sovereignty. Northwest

Coast Dance Indigenous protocols form a transmotion of creative expression and

cultural sovereignty. She affirms it as an expression of “self-determination carried out through the creation of performances (oratory, songs, and dances) that adhere

to and expand upon protocol in ways that affirm hereditary privileges (ancestral histories and associated ownership of songs, dances, crests, masks, headdresses).”65

Indigenous scholars, artists and activists maintain cultural being intellectual sovereignty in creative ways in an ongoing assertion of agency on Turtle Island.

Ojibwe scholar Scott Lyons argues for an Indigenous articulation of time and space that acknowledges the contemporary reality and diversity of Indigenous na-

tions. “For far too long Natives have been discussed exclusively in the past tense and for far too long modernity has been discussed as if it were strictly a Western

imposition. It is time to acknowledge not only our continued presence in history, but also the reality of Indian time on the move.”66 I draw on Lyons’ argument to build a counterpoint to the “allochronic space” created by the curators and

63 Michelle H. Raheja, “Visual Sovereignty,” Native Studies Keywords, eds. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith and Michelle H. Raheja (Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press: 2015), 29.

64 Jolene Rickard, “Sovereignty: A Line in the Sand,” Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices (Reading PA: Aperture Press, 1995), 51.

65 Mique’l Dangeli, “Dancing Chiax, Dancing Sovereignty: Performing Protocol in Unceded Territories,” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 1 (2016): 75, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767715000534 66 Scott Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 13, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816666768.001.0001 VOLUME 3 ISSUE 2 | SUMMER 2019

34 | Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

organizers of the PME, and the denial of Indigenous peoples’ modernity. In this

paper, I demonstrate that visual analysis of the Indigenous materials as cultural

belongings opens an Indigenous spatial orientation that acknowledges the contemporary reality of diverse Indigenous nations. Building from the work of Ra-

heja, Rickard, Dangeli and Lyons, the Indigenous cultural belongings articulate

an Indigenous space of subversive potential in unsettling the sovereignty claims of Catholicism, the “colonial unknowing” prevalent throughout articulations of the

PME.67 In terms of the relationship between visual culture, the PME, and fascism, the PME inspired the ideological foundations of the new state, with its emphasis on martyrdom and heroes, Christian ritual, and the hierarchy of race and culture

legitimized by colonial missionary expansion, all of which would be taken up by the fascists in Italy in the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista exhibition celebrating the Fascist Revolution.68 Writing from Turtle Island, the PME is also a reminder of

the grief Indigenous people faced and endure due to the legacies of colonial settler missionary museum practices such as salvage anthropology and a reminder of the Canadian state’s amendments to the Indian Act in 1920 when residential schools

operated by missionaries became compulsory for Indigenous children, spaces of total surveillance, trauma and no empathy. Placing Indigenous cultural belongings at the

center of this story, markers of Indigenous cultural and intellectual sovereignty flip the colonial analysis prevalent throughout the archival record of the PME and the legacies of the exhibition.

TRACING INDIGENEITY IN THE ARCHIVES ON HAUDENOSAUNEE TERRITORY (MONTREAL) Finally, I will close this essay with a glimpse at a cartouche created by French artist

N. Guerard in 1708 that showcases competing imperial cum spiritual claims for

sovereignty (Figure 3). I was recently in the McGill University Library Rare Books

and Special Collections in Montreal, Haudenosaunee Territory, with my graduate

class. I assigned the class a project to trace Indigeneity through primary sources in 67 Manu Vimalassery, Juilana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016): 1.

68 Libero Andreotti, “The Aesthetics of War: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,” Journal of Architectural Education 45, no. 2 (1992): 82, https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.1992.10734493.

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Gloria Bell | 35

archives in Montreal as well as to consider what constitutes archives for Indige- Figure 3.

Guillaume de L’isle

nous nations. The cartouche, which is part of a larger map created by cartographer and N. Guerard, Carte Guillaume de L’isle showcasing “New France,” illustrates Indigenous nations in- du Canada ou de la

Nouvelle France et des

cluding Wendat and Haudenosaunee, as well as Recollet and Jesuit missionaries decouvertes qui y ont

été faites: dressée sur

baptizing and proselyting Indigenous nations in the left and right upper corners plusieurs observations of the cartouche. The woman carrying a swaddled infant in a cradle board on the et sur un grand nombre de relations imprimées

lower left corner almost stepping outside the frame, shows evidence of the care ou manuscrites, 1708,

Rare Books and Special

Indigenous women take for their children and provides an unexpected moment Collections, McGill of unsettling missionary colonial encounter. The cartouche is reminiscent of the University Library four continents ideology espoused by Pope Pius XI at the PME and of the Greek

translation of the word “catholic” meaning worldwide; missionaries aimed to travel to the four corners of the world to convert and therefore “redeem” Indigenous

peoples. The map is visually striking for the wide areas of blank white space which showcase the cartographer’s lack of knowledge of Indigenous territories. The map

maker and illustrator never voyaged to Turtle Island but instead relied on travelers’ accounts which in turn depended on vast Indigenous knowledges, the map features VOLUME 3 ISSUE 2 | SUMMER 2019

36 | Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition

many Indigenous territories and communities including Anishinaabe, Wendat and Haudenosaunee nations. Map making played a central role in claiming territo-

ries as sovereign for the French and British imperial powers within Turtle Island.

Looking at the map today reminds me of the competing claims for sovereignty on

unceded Haudenosaunee territory and like the Passamaquoddy cross at the PME, the power of artworks to render visible Indigenous histories and spiritualities and the need to articulate beyond the “silent eloquence� of Catholic dogma.

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Gloria Bell | 37

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Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

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Maarschalkerweerd, Pancrazio. “Plastiche Cristiane delle Terre di Missione nel Pontificio Museo Missionario Etnologico.” Annali Lateranensi 1 (1937):

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Native Peoples of Canada.” European Review of American Indian Studies 4, no. 2 (1990). Newberry Library Edward E. Ayer Special Collections.

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“Pope Inspects Exhibition: Views Preparations for Missionary Fair in Vatican Grounds.” New York Times, February 8, 1924.

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42

ERIC HOENES DEL PINAL

The Promises and Perils of Radio as a Medium of Faith in a Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic Community

Eric Hoenes del Pinal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego. His approach to the study of Catholicism is strongly ethnographic, with an emphasis on the roles that language and non-verbal forms of communication play in shaping religious identities and subjectivities.

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S

abias que en Guatemala hay mas celulares que gente?” (Did you know there are more cellphones than people in Guatemala?) My cousin offered this fac-

toid while we were waiting to get a SIM chip for my smartphone. The idea

struck me as at once both preposterous and totally reasonable. “Weird, but, I guess, how else are people supposed to communicate with each other in 2016?” I responded. A brief internet search later confirmed there are an estimated 19 million

registered cellphones active in a country with a population of 15.4 million,1 so one

would presume that indeed a lot of communication is happening via cellphones.

While browsing the range of phones on display at the Claro store overlooking a

Walmart-owned Hiper Paiz supermarket, I noticed something that seemed a little

odd at first: several of the cheaper phones listed an FM radio tuner as a key feature.

I was in Guatemala to follow up on research that I had started over a decade earlier with Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholics, and one of the things that I was interested in was the role that mass-mediated communication played in their religious lives. Seren-

dipity then that these hybrid objects that seemingly joined what felt like two very

different eras of communications technology—cellphones hailing a future-looking

present of narrow-casted peer-to-peer connectivity, and radios harkening back to

older models of asymmetrical mass broadcasting—were complicating the question, “How are people supposed to communicate in 2016?”

In this technophilic age when people are increasingly connected to each other

through a proliferating array of new media platforms, FM radio may seem like a quaint technology whose time has passed; but as I hope to show here, FM radio is a

crucial medium through which Q’eqchi’-Mayas in Cobán, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala can communicate with each other en masse and as such offers them the means

for establishing a distinctive cultural space for themselves. Yet, for all its promise,

radio also raises certain problems for the creation of this imagined community.

Radio is for all intents and purposes a one-way medium of communication, and so

it is impossible for broadcasters to gauge in real-time how the putative publics they are addressing through it are responding, or if they are even there to receive the 1

Edwin Pitán, “Unos 16 milliones de celulares están registrados en la SIT,” Prensa Libre, March 24, 2016, retrieved September 15, 2018, http://www.prensalibre.com/guatemala/comunitario/unos16-millones-de-celulares-estan-registrados-en-la-sit.

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44 | The Promises and Perils of Radio as a Medium of Faith in a Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic Community

messages being broadcast in the first place. The uncertainties inherent in radio can be especially fraught for Catholic leaders in rural Guatemala as they try to create

and maintain a sense of religious community across a dispersed population through radio broadcasting.

As Brian Larkin has argued, it is an error to assume that media technologies are understood and used in the same ways in all times and at all places:

What media are needs to be interrogated and not presumed. The meanings attached to technologies, their technical functions, and the social uses to which

they are put are not an inevitable consequence, but something worked out over time in the context of considerable cultural debate. And even then, these

meanings and uses are often unstable, vulnerable to changing political orders and subject to the contingencies of objects’ physical life.2

Scholars thus need to be cognizant of the multiple ways that media can be imag-

ined and utilized, and sensitive to how they articulate with other social, cultural, and political dimensions of life, not the least of which is religion. Thus, to understand how Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholics use radio we need to begin by understanding the cultural logics that shape the use of this medium in rural Guatemala.

RADIO IN RURAL GUATEMALA Despite the apparent overabundance of cellphones in the country, they remain

out of reach for many Guatemalans. Cellphones are relatively expensive requiring

not just the purchase of the device itself but also regular payments for access; one

must have regular access to a power supply to keep them working; and data coverage can be unreliable in mountainous areas. Battery-operated transistor radios, on

the other hand, are inexpensive and cheap to use, and as such are the most basic

electronic appliance likely to be found in a rural Maya home.3 Moreover, FM radio frequencies travel across the mountainous terrain of highland Guatemala much 2 3

Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 3, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822389316.

Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil (AKA Waqi’ Q’anil), Configuración del Pensamiento Político del Pueblo Maya (Primera Parte), 2nd Ed. (Guatemala: Cholsamaj, 2004).

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Eric Hoenes del Pinal | 45

more quickly and easily than people or automobiles, and in fact the mountains

actually help radio, since some of the highest peaks serve as homes for repeaters, enabling transmissions originating from urban areas to leapfrog the cerros (moun-

tains) and reach audiences several hours of travel by land away. It estimated that radio broadcasts reach more than 99% of the population of the country,4 so that even in aldeas (villages) with no electricity one can hear the sounds small transistor

radios powered by a pair of alkaline batteries emanating from homes. In sum, radio is the means of mass-mediated communication that is both most accessible to rural Q’eqchi’-Mayas.5

Radio is used not just for commercial and entertainment purposes, but also as a means for a range of entities including the state, NGOs, and churches to disseminate their messages to otherwise hard-to-reach audiences. Broadcasters know the reach that radio has in rural areas and count on the fact that people are at home

and listening during prime times that accommodate an agricultural production schedule (dawn, noon, mid-afternoon and nightfall), so that not only is general

news aired during these times, but messages directed at specific individuals are also sent out via this medium. Paradoxically, then, FM radio broadcasts, which are

by their nature public and can be heard by anyone with receiver tuned to the right

frequency, are regularly used to directly address specific persons in the absence of

what we might tend to think of as more targeted means of communication such as telephone and mail.6 For example, community tourism organizations pay to have

an announcement read on the radio to notify hosts in cloud-forest villages that groups of backpackers are on their way;7 hardware stores regularly name people

who have overdue bills to pay along with the advertisement of weekly specials; and 4 5 6 7

Rick Rockwell, “Finding Power of Hidden Radio Audiences in the Fields of Guatemala,” Journal of Radio Studies 8 No. 2 (2001): 434, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506843jrs0802_14.

Richard Wilson, Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q’eqchi’ Experiences (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1995).

Guatemala’s mail system has not been particularly reliable since at least the mid-20th century. In true neoliberal fashion, the government gave the franchise for mail delivery to a Canadian company in 2004, and by the time of this field work, the system has all but collapsed due to budgetary issues.

Paul Kockelman, The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 21, https://doi. org/10.1215/9780822374596.

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the municipal government uses the radio broadcasts to notify individuals about pending legal issues that require their presence in town. The system works even if

the person directly being hailed by the broadcast doesn’t hear the message, because

there is a general social expectation that someone who does hear it will notify the addressee—a woman listening while cooking the day’s tortillas may hear her husband’s or a neighbor’s name and know to pass the message along, for example. This is all to say that in this context radio’s mass mediated broadcasts articulate with face-to-face social relationships to achieve their communicative ends.

In rural Guatemala sending out directed messages over expansive airwaves works well enough in the absence of other forms of narrowly-directed mediated communication. However, there is a high degree of uncertainty built into this arrangement since there are potentially myriad reasons why an addressee might not receive or

respond to the message (e.g. he was away or out of batteries, nobody thought to tell him, he chooses to feign ignorance). We must not forget, though, that this

solution to the problem of communication over distances is a contingent (rather

than inevitable) outcome of the conjunction of the particularities of the physical environment, organization of society, and culture which opens up certain possibili-

ties while foreclosing others. This has been no less the case in religion than in other social domains.

RADIO AND RELIGION Radio has played a crucial role in Guatemala’s shifting religious ecology over the

last half century. Much has been written about the religious pluralization of Latin America in the 20th century,8 and Guatemala has in many ways provided one of

the richest case-studies of the process. Protestant missionaries began to be active in Guatemala in the late 19th century, and while their churches only experienced very modest growth for most of the 20th century, this changed significantly after

8

For a discussion of this process see David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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1976.9 Since the 1980s Pentecostal and Evangelical churches (whose members are

often glossed as evangélicos or simply cristianos in contrast to católicos) experienced

explosive growth, tilting the religious demography of the country, so that by the end of the first decade of the 21st century Protestants accounted for more than 40% of the population and Catholics less than 50%.10

Scholars interested in explaining this shift have tended to focus on how Protestant Christianity introduces novel forms of social relations and imaginaries that

appeal to people in the face of modernity’s economic and political insecurities.11

The narrative that has emerged from this literature also suggests that Protestants are successful in doing so thanks in part to their mass media savvy,12 including their successful adoption of radio as a means for proselytization.

The Central American Mission—a dispensationalist Evangelical organization founded in Texas in 1888—was responsible for the earliest religious uses of radio

in Guatemala. In 1946 they began purchasing airtime on secular stations to run

their religious programming, and experienced enough success so that by 1948 they were operating their own station.13 Other missions and denominations followed suit, and though evangélico radio broadcasting was typically initiated by foreigners

(primarily based in the USA), its daily workings were quickly picked up by Guatemalans.14 Not to be left behind, the Catholic Church soon found its way into 9

Henri Gooren, “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in Guatemala, 1900-1995,” in Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America, eds. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 169-203.

10 “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region,” Pew Research Center, November 13, 2014, retrieved December 10, 2018, https://www.pewforum. org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america.

11 See e.g. Sheldon Annis, God and Production in a Guatemalan Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Living in the New Jerusalem: Protestantism in Guatemala (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1998); Kevin Lewis O’Neill,City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Andrea Althoff, Divided by Faith and Ethnicity: Religious Pluralism and the Problem of Race in Guatemala (Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515081.

12 See e.g. O’Neill, City of God, 10.

13 Garrard-Burnett, Living in the New Jerusalem, 109.

14 Quentin J. Schultze, “Catholic vs Protestant: Mass-mediated Legitimation of Popular Evangelicalism in Guatemala,” Public Relations Review 18 no. 3 (1992): 257-263, https://doi. org/10.1016/0363-8111(92)90053-2.

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the medium, with diocesan and para-church organizations establishing their own

radio stations and producing their own programming to compete with those of evangélicos.15 Today, there are at least 60 religious radio stations (out of a total of about 620 licensed stations) operating legally in the country across both the AM and FM radio frequencies.16 There is no doubt that radio plays an important role in

Guatemala’s religious ecology, although just how it does so has not been explored as fully as it might be. There are abundant references to evangélicos setting up and running radio stations as part of a generalized characterization of them as “media

savvy,” but not much extended analysis about how they conceive of these media or to what concrete uses they put them, in effect reproducing the errors that Brian Larkin warns against.

There are hints in the ethnographic literature, though, about how evangélicos construe radio broadcasts as part of their vision of religious conversion. In one of the

earliest monographs on conversion to Protestantism among Mayas in Guatema-

lans, Sheldon Annis identifies a common conversion narrative people tell in which they had experienced some loss, usually due to “profligate behavior,” before eventually coming into contact with a spiritual guide that allows them to see the error

of their ways and leads them to a conversion experience.17 Although that guide is sometimes a person (e.g. an intimate who has already converted or an evangelist encountered in a public space), it is just as likely to be a mass-mediated artifact such as a radio broadcast of a sermon or a religious tract discovered on a bus

bench. The faith that radio can serendipitously spark conversions is also attested

to by Robin Shoaps’ observation that evangélicos in Sakapulas sometimes play religious radio stations at loud volumes and with their speakers pointed outwards

in the hope that the sounds might reach the ears and then the heart of a católico 15 Edward L. Cleary, The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism in Latin America (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011), 253-4, https://doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813036083.001.0001. See also Schultze, “Catholic vs Protestant,” 259.

16 Rachel M. McCleary and José de Jesús Pesina, “Religious Competition, Protestant Syncretization, and Conversion in Guatemala since the 1880s,” (working paper, April 2011), 14, retrieved December 15, 2018, http://www.asrec.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/McCleary_Religious_Competition_Guatemala.pdf.

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neighbor.18 These examples of practices that figure mass mediated speech as a potential catalyst for individual moral change would seem to line up neatly with evangélicos’ general emphasis on evangelization and personal conversion as key compo-

nents of religious life. Without wanting to reify a difference between Protestants and Catholics, this should also spur us to ask if there are distinct ways in which Catholics might use radio to address the concerns that they find pressing.

A crucial concern for the Catholics that I work with in the parish of San Felipe

(a pseudonym) is the formation and maintenance of a church community. Though the specifics of how they have tried to do so has changed over the last four decades, the parish’s mission has consistently been framed as that of evangelizing

and catechizing rural and peri-urban Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholics in the municipality

of Cobán, with the idea that this population inhabits a distinct social and cultural

position in the region. Although San Felipe’s parish center is located in the city, its administrative area is large, dispersed, and overwhelmingly rural. The terrain that it covers is mountainous and has only a rudimentary system of roads making travel

to some parts of it onerous. Travel into Cobán to attend Mass is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming for cash-poor subsistence farmers living in the more

remote villages and hamlets. The priests who serve the parish travel to hold Mass in these communities regularly but can only visit some of them two or three times

a year. Consequently, the institutional Church’s presence in many of these commu-

nities can seem quite weak, and the parish relies on a network of native lay leaders (catequistas or catechists) to manage and maintain the religious life of each hamlet

or village.19 While this system works well enough for maintaining the ceremonial

life in the aldeas, the parish leadership also worries that if left unattended some of

these lay leaders might lead their communities in unorthodox practices and so the question of how to oversee and communicate with their constituency is a persistent one. The growth of Charismatic Catholicism in the parish since the early 2000s

18 Robin Shoaps, personal communication.

19 For more detail on how catechists are selected and trained, their duties and relationship to clergy see Eric Hoenes del Pinal, “How Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholics Become Legitimate Interpreters of the Bible: Two Models of Religious Authority in the Giving of Sermons,” in The Social Life of Scripture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism, ed. James S. Bielo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 80-99.

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(not to mention the presence of non-Catholic Christian churches) has further compounded the worry that the semi-autonomy of individual communities might

in some cases work at odds with the parish’s mission. Moreover, Q’eqchi’-Mayas’ attempts to re-establish their place in Guatemala following the political repression they experienced during and after the violence of the 1980s has meant that

questions of community formation and maintenance tend to be at the forefront of people’s minds in San Felipe.

Although we could subject the discourse of community as it is used in the parish to

further scrutiny, largely what people mean by the term is something along the lines

of a collectivity of people bound by reciprocal social relations that are in large part enacted through participation in activities with shared goals. As Q’eqchi’-Mayas

conceive of it, religious life is ideally something that is to be cultivated as part of a group, not as an individual (though to be sure, individuals make different efforts and take different paths to do so), through ritual practices. Members of these collectivities are understood as having ethical obligations to each other as well as

to other-than-human actors invoked by the rituals. Moreover, as practitioners of

a self-consciously inculturated Catholicism, San Felipe’s parishioners understand themselves as the bearers of a unique spirituality that is grounded in both Catholic Christianity and a Maya cosmovision.20 Some Q’eqchi’-Mayas fear that their

unique perspective on the world is being eroded by external social, economic, and political pressures, and so it has become increasingly important to them to discursively construct an identity that distinguishes them from other religious and ethnic groups in Guatemala.

For all the reasons described in the previous section, radio is the mass medium

most available for addressing the issue of community formation in San Felipe. The

following ethnographic vignettes illustrate two ways that the parish leadership has experimented with radio broadcasting as a means of bringing together people in the parish and examines how the medium itself both opens up possibilities for success as well as introduces anxieties about failure. The first of these is about how the 20 Eric Hoenes del Pinal, “Reading Laudato Si’ in the Verapaz: A Case of Localizing Catholic Teachings” Exchange: Journal of Contemporary Christianities in Context 48 no. 3 (2019): 291-301.

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Hermandad de San Felipe used radio to promote parishioner involvement in public

rituals during Semana Santa (Holy Week) in 2005. The second vignette tells of the modest successes and ultimate frustration some of the very same people experienced

when trying to start a Q’eqchi’ language radio station to serve the parish in 2016.

Though a decade separates the vignettes, they both illustrate how FM radio both enables and frustrates the creation of a Catholic community in San Felipe.

SAN FELIPE 2005: SPEAKING INTO THE AIR Semana Santa is an important time of the year for Guatemalan Catholics, who

famously enact the Passion story through a series of processions in which santos

standing on enormous biers are carried through the streets temporarily carpeted in intricately patterned alfombras made of colored sawdust. It takes a week to perform

the full cycle of processions, with each day’s event dramatizing a specific part of

the Passion narrative (e.g. Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem, his Calvary march, the cru-

cifixion, and resurrection.) Moreover, different sodalities (hermandades) attached to

different parishes take on the responsibility for sponsoring each of the processions, making the full ritual cycle a city-wide effort. They do so without any specific oversight or direct institutional management from above relying instead on the idea that each group knows the part it needs to play and will organize itself to do so.

Preparing to perform these spectacular events is, not surprisingly, a labor-inten-

sive process that demands the coordination of a great deal of material, financial, and human resources on the part of each sodality’s leadership. The colorful images

of the processions that circulate in newspapers, tourism guides, and international

publications tend to obscure the great sacrifices of time, money, and labor that go into them. Moreover, they entirely occlude the extent to which participants can

feel quite uncertain about whether their performance will ultimately succeed. This is especially true in socially marginal parishes like San Felipe, where cash is scarce and where the majority of parishioners live far from the parish seat.

The Hermandad of San Felipe is tasked with performing the Holy Wednesday

procession, and preparations for the event begin well before Lent. Although activ-

ity picks up in the weeks before Semana Santa, the qawachines (elder men) begin

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planning for it as early as January (just days after they finish celebrating the parish’s santo patron—the Black Christ of Esquipulas21—in January).

There are myriad material and financial needs to be taken care of for Holy Wednes-

day itself as well as for the smaller processions that are performed during Lent.

Although these are annual events, their success is never taken for granted nor seen

as guaranteed, and the sodality’s leaders never discount the possibility that something might go awry. Moreover, because the stakes involved in the ritual are high

not just for the sodality, but also for the larger Catholic community of the city, the

possibility that something might fail is not easily dismissed or discounted. Money is always scarce in the parish, so concerns about how to pay for materials needed to decorate the santo’s bier, as well as for the fireworks and musicians that accompany

the procession are always present. Of equal concern is that they might not be able to marshal the devotional labor needed to successfully perform the procession. After all, having fewer flowers on hand than expected to lay at Jesus’s feet would be a

much less serious blow to the ritual than a lack of penitents to help bear his weight as he winds his way through the city.

Securing man-power22 is thus a priority, and the Hermandad engages in a number

of activities to promote active participation. This includes buying airtime on the radio station owned by the diocese of the Verapaz to broadcast a program directed at the parish’s rural population.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays at about 6:50 p.m. during Lent in 2005 a handful of the sodality’s leaders would meet at the offices of Estéreo Gerardi23 which broadcasts out of the second floor of the old 18th-century convent that now serves as the 21 For a historical treatment of this religious image’s importance in Guatemala more generally see Douglass Sullivan-González, The Black Christ of Esquipulas (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1d98973.

22 The gendered language is deliberate, as it is all men who carry the santo. Women participate in the ritual in a complimentary fashion to the men. Although women carry an image of Mary, this figure is much smaller, and I never heard anyone express worries that there would not be enough women to carry out that task. Likewise, the auxiliary work that women do for the rituals, like helping prepare and serve meals at the Hermandad leader’s house, didn’t seem to be in peril.

23 This station is run by the Diocese and is named after the former Bishop of the Verapaz, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, president of the Guatemalan Episcopal Council, and martyr Juan José Geradi Conedera (1922-1998).

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seat for the Diocese of the Verapaz offices. The men would crowd into the small

broadcast booth and, with the help of one of the station’s regular employees to run the equipment, broadcast a live radio show from 7 to 8 p.m. The show consisted

of procession music, a Bible reading, a short sermon, on one occasion an interview with me about Holy Week,24 and most importantly repeated pleas for money and

participation from the listening audience. Specifically, they wanted the lay leaders of the parish’s base communities to make the trip into town to deliver their com-

munity’s monetary donations to the parish and confirm the minimum number

of people they would bring to help carry the santo on the day of the processions.

They also called on parishioners more generally to come help carry the santo in the

processions, explaining why this was to their personal benefit and how it was part of what one needed to do to be a good Catholic.

A full examination of the discourse used during these appeals is beyond the scope

of this paper, but it is worth noting that they were structured as something like ritual speeches. By using the prosodic and poetic features of ritual speech (e.g. a slow cadence and line parallelism), the Hermandad’s representatives invoked their standing as lay community leaders and religious authorities.25 In doing so, they

construed their audience as a virtual congregation with a moral obligation to follow their leadership and concomitantly play their part of the forthcoming ritual. The

funereal music they played between speeches likewise evoked the larger context

of the procession, ideally drawing listeners into the sensorium of the forthcoming ritual event and priming them for future participation.26 The radio program’s

content thus mediated this community of religious practice across space and time, 24 The interview sought to leverage my cultural capital to bolster the prestige of the event. Though born in Guatemala, and living with relatives in Cobán, I still counted as a q’an iis (literally “yellow hair,” though my hair is anything but that color) foreigner whose interest in Q’eqchi’-Maya religion and culture helped validate it in a larger social context in which it is regarded more generally with desprecio (disdain or disregard).

25 Hoenes del Pinal, “How Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholics Become Legitimate Interpreters of the Bible.” Eric Hoenes del Pinal, “A Ritual Interrupted: A Case of Contested Ritual Practices in a Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic Parish,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 31, no. 3 (2016): 365-378, https://doi.org/10.1 080/13537903.2016.1206251.

26 Although sonically quite different from Christmas carols, like them the genre of procession music connotes a distinct season in Guatemala. The music is typically only heard during Lent and Holy Week and has powerful affective connotations for Catholics.

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positioning them as co-participants in a future activity.

Yet, there was something a bit uncanny about using ritualized speech and play-

ing processions music in the radio booth. As John Peters notes, “Broadcasters, if not quite audience blind, see their audiences through a glass darkly.”27 Without a

co-present audience and with no means of getting immediate feedback, all that was left at the end of the Hermandad’s broadcast was the hope that someone, somewhere would heed their call.28

SAN FELIPE 2016: A PROBLEM OF PRESENCE It had been over a decade since I’d been to San Felipe, but in 2016 I found it abuzz

with new activity that included new evangelization projects,29 new social projects, a restructuring of lay leadership, and also a new radio station operating right out of the parish church.

Radio Cobán began broadcasting in May 2016 out of a space that had formerly

been a side chapel of Span Felipe’s parish church.30 A new door had been cut into

the main church building leading into the radio station’s reception area which was

simply furnished with a wooden table and some folding chairs. Directly across

from the door stood a wall covered in cedar paneling on which letters cut out of

white construction paper had been arranged to spell out a greeting in Q’eqchi’.

Below the lettering a plexiglass window allowed visitors to see into the broadcasting booth. Inside the broadcast booth the arm of a microphone stand telescoped

over the junction of two tables organized into an “L” shape. The desk to the left

supported the soundboard and other audio equipment, while the one to the right 27 John D. Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 210, https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226922638.001.0001.

28 Though, to be fair, they also had a good sense based on past participation and their knowledge of the current conditions in the parish of which communities could reasonably be expected to contribute money and labor to the procession.

29 The parish was deep into a project under the rubric of the Santa misión popular that sought to energize the laity by making them active participants in a new evangelization of the continent.

The project was inspired by conclusion that the Episcopal Conference of Latin America (CELAM) published from its fifth general conference at Aparecida, Brazil in 2007.

30 The chapel had previously held three old wooden crosses where people would make special petitionary prayers that included lighting candles and sticking coins, feathers, and animal hair to the crosses with tree resin.

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(beneath the window looking out to the reception area) held a computer monitor and offered broadcaster some physical space to work from. From a swiveling office chair

a single person could self-produce a broadcast. Cables ran from the broadcasting booth up through the ceiling to the transmission tower above and into the wall

shared with the church’s nave to patch into its sound system so that Mass could be broadcast live and direct. A storage space on the opposite side of the broadcast

booth from the reception area had been fitted with foam acoustic panels to create a make-shift recording studio.

Qawa Hugo,31 who had always helped with the Semana Santa program in 2005

and was one of the three people most responsible for running the station, explained

to me how a fortuitous set of circumstances had led to the establishment of Radio

Cobán. During a trip to one of the more remote corners of the parish in 2012 Fr. Michel (a Haitian priest who has a special interest in social work in the parish) had the idea to start a Sunday morning radio show so that people in the aldeas would

have some form of regular contact with the clergy between his quarterly visits. He

took the proposal to the Diocese and got the approval to go ahead with the project.

Fr. Michel’s show began broadcasting live on Estéreo Gerardi on a weekly basis. However, they soon realized that station’s commercial interests took prece-

dence, since Fr. Michel’s live show would sometimes be pre-empted to cover soccer

matches. Before long they decided that pre-recorded shows made more sense than live broadcasts, and Fr. Michel was able to secure some money through his religious order (Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae, or the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) to purchase equipment and set up a small recording studio to produce the show.

In a fortuitous twist, a couple of years after the studio was set up, a man approached

Fr. Michel to see if the parish would be interested in taking over the license of a radio frequency that he owned. It wasn’t entirely clear if the frequency had all the proper government documentation to operate legally, though, and the other priests

31 All personal names are pseudonyms.

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in the parish worried that they might end up running a pirate station32 that could

cause legal problems netting them fines or potentially jail time. In fact, well after Radio Cobán had already started broadcasting, it still wasn’t clear if the previous owners of the license had obtained it following the exact letter of the law; although as best as the parish’s lawyers could tell, San Felipe itself had obtained it legally and they theoretically had all the right documents from the state to run the station.

They were given the approval to run the station because Fr. Michel’s goal of ex-

panding his work with rural Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholics through radio was in-line

with Diocesan aims to strengthen their ministry with that population. Radio

Cobán, emanating from a parish that was dedicated to serving the Q’eqchi’-Mayas, would be a direct means of ministering to that population and would circum-

vent the programming problems that the Diocese’s two stations faced in having to

split their programming time to cater to the four distinct ethno-linguistic groups they served—Ladinos (i.e. Spanish-speaking mestizos), Q’eqchi’-Mayas, Poqomchi’-Mayas, and Achi-Mayas.33 The plan was ambitious, but given that the parish

was increasingly viewing itself as a missionary vanguard in the Diocese’s larger Santa mission popular project, it also seemed like a necessary step to take.

The station launched as an on-line streaming service while they set up a broadcast booth, built a radio tower on the roof of the church, and secured funds to lease a

terrestrial radio transmitter; and as of May 2016, they started broadcasting daily on the upper end of the FM dial. Sadly, this would not last long and a year later Radio Cobán was no more.

Given that the radio only operated for a few of months and that no one working

there had a much experience producing radio programming (nor were they be-

ing paid a salary to do so), Radio Cobán was a modest success. As Qawa Hugo 32 There are at least 240 radio stations run by Maya communities in Guatemala without proper government documentation. Mark Camp and Agnes Portalewska, “A Question of Frequency: Community Radio in Guatemala,” Cultural Survival Quarterly (2005), https://www.culturalsurvival.org/ publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/guatemala/question-frequency-community-radio-guatemala.

33 For a discussion of how the Diocese conceives of these distinctions in relation to its policies see Eric Hoenes del Pinal, “From Vatican II to Speaking in Tongues: Theology and Language Policy in a Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic Parish,” Language Policy 15, no. 2 (2016): 179-197, https://doi. org/10.1007/s10993-015-9364-0.

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explained it, the vision for the station was that it would not only bring Catholic

religious programming to the parish’s remote aldeas, but also important cultural and social programming. He and Fr. Michel wanted the station to truly be a

Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic enterprise that could help launch other projects for the

community. As their website put it, their guiding principle was, “Extoling the values of our Q’eqchi’ culture.” To do so the station would broadcast a mixture of music and talk from 5 a.m. until 7:45 p.m. Although much of their programming was

produced by other entities,34 they also broadcast the parish’s daily Masses, and had

plans to increase the amount of programming produced in-house in Q’eqchi’ for a Q’eqchi’-Maya audience. That programming would eventually include translating summaries of news and long-form journalism pieces from Spanish language sourc-

es into Q’eqchi’ and setting up a weekly health education program with a doctor; there was also talk of starting a show with a lawyer who could offer legal advice and of broadcasting live concerts of the parish communities’ marimba choirs, though these never came to be.

Despite all this ambition and the work that they put into the enterprise, in an in-

terview from August 2016 Qawa Hugo also expressed his worries that the station might not continue to be on the air for very long. The main problem Radio Cobán had was power, or, to be more specific, wattage. While the parish was able to get

enough money together to buy basic broadcasting equipment and build a radio

tower on the roof of the church, the transmitter they were leasing wasn’t powerful enough to do the work they wanted it to. The tower’s relative elevation in the city

(atop a church atop a hill) meant that their signal strength was quite good in the urban area and could even be heard in the neighboring towns of San Pedro Carchá

and San Juan Chamélco to the west. However, mountains blocked its signal from reaching rural areas north and west of the city where Radio Cobán’s ideal audience lived. The physical environment frustrated the station’s ability to reach its intended

audience, and without that audience it wasn’t clear that the station served a purpose. The people within its existing listening range already had access to a variety of

radio stations, including both Catholic and Q’eqchi’ programming, and in any case 34 For example, they ran an educational program (Escuela para todos) produced in Costa Rica, and tapped into the Guatemalan state’s radio for the national morning news.

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the parish leadership viewed the urban audience’s needs as distinct from those of the rural congregations the station was targeting. Ironically, Radio Cobán couldn’t

reach the audience that they felt needed them, and the audience that they could reach didn’t really need them.

Upgrading the transmitter was thus a priority, but it also presented a tricky financial proposition. People in the aldeas had agreed in principle to contribute money

to the station, and there were also business willing to pay to advertise on Radio Cobán,35 but those parties would only give the money once the broadcasts actually reached their target audience. The station was caught in a double-bind—they

needed money to upgrade the transmitter and expand their broadcast audience, but

they could only earn that money by broadcasting to that audience. There was some hope that donations could be found from abroad to help make the investment, but

none materialized and ultimately the plans for Radio Cobán would not bear fruit.

Less than a year after they began broadcasting, the parish had to abandon its radio license because there was simply no money left to renew it. Without the broadcasting license, the transmitter no longer held promise as it once had.

On a subsequent research trip in 2017 I found Radio Cobán’s office was shuttered.

Qawa Hugo was working part-time at Estéreo Gerardi helping to run the broad-

cast booth at the end and beginning of the broadcast day and staying overnight in the offices as a watchman. He lamented that they had had to give up on Radio Cobán, but hoped that maybe one day it would be revived if they could find financial backing. After all, the broadcast booth was still there, and the needs of the community were perennial.

A final irony to the story was that although the people for whom the station was intended likely never heard it, back in North Carolina between research trips I could navigate to their webpage and open a digital stream of Radio Cobán. Qawa

Hugo and I communicated via Facebook periodically, and if he knew I was listening he would send a greeting, mentioning my name and location alongside those 35 Rockwell, “Finding Power of Hidden Radio Audiences,” suggests that radio producers have seen rural Mayan audiences as a desirable (if niche) advertising demographic since the late 1990s, even if they have not always known how to reach them.

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of others who made up his listenership. In doing so he interpellated me into the

virtual community of Q’eqchi’ radio listeners and signaled to his audience that the station, parish, and by extension Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholics more generally had supporters far beyond the geographic limits of Alta Verapaz. Though the limitations

imposed on terrestrial radio by the conjunction of physical terrain, technology, and the vicissitudes of the Guatemalan economy and legal system ultimately foreclosed Radio Cobán’s ability to materialize a mass-mediated community locally, its parallel life as an on-line radio station briefly allowed its producers to style themselves as active participants in a transnational mediascape.

CONCLUSION These two vignettes highlight the possibilities and difficulties that radio broadcast-

ing has presented for San Felipe’s Catholics across two decades. If on the one hand FM radio offers an accessible and reliable means to broadcast messages calling on Catholics to come together as a religious community; on the other hand its very

form raises the problem of whether a one-way medium of communication can ad-

equately serve as the grounds for reciprocal social relations. When a voice calls out

over the air, will anyone respond? Is there even anyone there who could respond?

Even if they are there, what else is needed before the imagined community of radio listeners becomes a face-to-face community of social actors?

In 2005 the Hermandad used its radio broadcasts during Lent to help coalesce a community of ritual co-participants around the processions, but in doing so they

had to grapple with the possibility that not enough people might actually show up to carry it out. The calls that went out for participation did not receive a response

until the community materialized to perform the ritual. That the efficacy of those calls could not be gauged until after the fact, led to a great deal of uncertainty about the role that Q’eqchi’-Mayas played in Catholic life in Cobán.36

36 I don’t know first-hand how the 2005 season compared to others in terms of participation, but no one I talked to seemed to think that the event had failed, though there were laments that San Felipe’s procession did not draw as many people as those of other parishes. Twelve years later, however, there was a sense that the Hermandad was in trouble and that its current leadership was not doing enough to ensure broad participation. It remains an open question for me and them what the processions will look like in future Semanas Santas.

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The frustrations the parish encountered in trying to launch Radio Cobán as a dis-

tinctive voice for Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholicism in 2016 raised a related problem.

The parish’s aim was to use this technology (alongside internet radio) to help con-

stitute a semi-autonomous Q’eqchi’-Maya religious and cultural public. But what point was there in hailing this public if the signal simply couldn’t reach them? The

economic realities of the parish ultimately shut down the promise the technology seemed to hold for the parish’s religious life.

These problems point to a more constant worry for San Felipe’s Q’eqchi’-Maya

Catholics. Throughout my engagement with San Felipe over the last two decades, one recurrent theme in parishioners’ talk has been about the extent to which their culture and communities can continue to exist in their present form. In a country in which the Catholic Church’s cultural ascendance is no longer taken for grant-

ed, in which religious (not to mention indigenous) identity is typically politically charged, and in which few things ever seem stable or secure, these questions are fraught with all sorts of uncertainties and tensions. And yet, membership in these

(and other) religious communities can offer a modicum of relief from the insecurities and indignities of life in post-war Guatemala.

San Felipe’s Catholics see pressures from both inside and outside the parish, in-

side and outside the Catholic Church, and inside and outside Guatemala asking

them to alter the way they lead their lives. FM radio broadcasts may provide an

accessible way to help mediate these worries and perhaps even a communicative space through which they can build Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic counter-public, but

the outcomes of these efforts are anything but certain. And in any case other media platforms such as Facebook or WhatsApp may provide an entirely different means

of imagining the community, even if in doing so they will also inevitably give rise to other sets of problems to contend with.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Althoff, Andrea. Divided by Faith and Ethnicity: Religious Pluralism and the Problem of Race in Guatemala. Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. https://doi. org/10.1515/9781614515081.

Annis, Sheldon. God and Production in a Guatemalan Town. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.

Hoenes del Pinal, Eric. “How Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholics Become Legitimate In-

terpreters of the Bible: Two Models of Religious Authority in the Giving of Sermons.” In The Social Life of Scripture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Bibli-

cism, edited by James S. Bielo, 80-99. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009.

______. “A Ritual Interrupted: A Case of Contested Ritual Practices in a Q’eq-

chi’-Maya Catholic Parish.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 31, no. 3 (2016): 365-378. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2016.1206251.

______. “From Vatican II to Speaking in Tongues: Theology and Language Policy in a Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic Parish.” Language Policy 15, no. 2 (2016): 179197. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-015-9364-0.

______. “Reading Laudato Si’ in the Verapaz: A Case of Localizing Catholic

Teachings.” Exchange: Journal of Contemporary Christianities in Context 48, no.

3 (2019): 291-301.

Camp, Mark and Agnes Portalewska. “A Question of Frequency: Community Radio in Guatemala.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 29, no. 2 ( June 2005).

Retrieved December 20, 2019. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/ cultural-survival-quarterly/question-frequency-community-radio-guatemala.

Chesnut, R. Andrew. Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Cleary, Edward L. The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism in Latin America.

Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011. https://doi.org/10.5744/ florida/9780813036083.001.0001.

Cojtí Cuxil, Demetrio (AKA Waqi’ Q’anil). Configuración del Pensamiento Político del Pueblo Maya (Primera Parte). 2nd Ed. Guatemala: Cholsamaj, 2004.

Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. Living in the New Jerusalem: Protestantism in Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Gooren, Henri. “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in Guatemala, 1900-1995.”

In Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America. Edited by James W. Dow and Alan R. Sandstrom, 169203. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Kockelman, Paul. The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and

Portable Values in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374596.

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. https://doi. org/10.1215/9780822389316.

Lowery, Wilson H. Radio in Rural Guatemala: Three Case Studies. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Martin, David. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

McCleary, Rachel M. and José de Jesús Pesina. “Religious Competition, Protes-

tant Syncretization, and Conversion in Guatemala since the 1880s.” Working paper. Retrieved December 15, 2018. http://www.asrec.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/10/McCleary_Religious_Competition_Guatemala.pdf.

O’Neill. Kevin Lewis. City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

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Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. https://doi.org/10.7208/ chicago/9780226922638.001.0001.

Pew Research Center. “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a

Historically Catholic Region.” November 13, 2014. Retrieved December 10, 2018. https://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america.

Pitán, Edwin. “Unos 16 milliones de celulares están registrados en la SIT.” Prensa Libre. March 24, 2016. Retrieved September 15, 2018.

http://www.prensalibre.com/guatemala/comunitario/unos-16-millones-decelulares-estan-registrados-en-la-sit.

Rockwell, Rick. “Finding Power of Hidden Radio Audiences in the Fields of

Guatemala.” Journal of Radio Studies 8, no. 2 (2001): 425-441. https://doi. org/10.1207/s15506843jrs0802_14.

Schultze, Quentin J. “Catholic vs Protestant: Mass-mediated Legitimation of Popular Evangelicalism in Guatemala.” Public Relations Review 18, no. 3 (1992): 257-263. https://doi.org/10.1016/0363-8111(92)90053-2.

Stoll, David. Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990.

Sullivan-González, Douglass. The Black Christ of Esquipulas. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1d98973.

Wilson, Richard. Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q’eqchi’ Experiences. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1995.

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M A R C R O S C O E L O U S TA U

Radio Maria Transylvania: National Representation, Prayer, and Intersubjectivity in a Growing Catholic Media Network

Marc Roscoe Loustau is Editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism and a Catholics & Cultures contributor. As a scholar of religious studies in the context of personal, social, and economic change, his research has focused on Catholicism in Eastern Europe where, after decades of official state atheism, there has been a prominent resurgence of religion in public life. Loustau has taught courses at the College of the Holy Cross on contemporary global Catholicism. He holds a Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School.

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INTRODUCTION: NATIONAL REPRESENTATION ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE

W

e are living through a period of immense expansion and creativity in the field of mass media production that is reshaping Christians’ iden-

tities and global imaginaries. Anthropologists have taken note of this

trend and generated numerous studies of Evangelical Protestant and Pentecostal/ Charismatic Christian media products and institutions.1 The Catholic Church’s recent contributions to the mass media field, with some exceptions, have received relatively less attention from social scientists.2 Yet over the last thirty years, Catholics have founded several new media networks and one of these, the World Family of

Radio Maria, has grown so fast that it now has local chapters broadcasting in over

sixty countries.3 The Radio Maria branch serving Romania’s Hungarian-speaking Catholic population was founded in the mid-2000s just before I began research

in the Ciuc Valley, a Hungarian and Catholic enclave in Transylvania.4 Like the

World Family of Radio Maria, Radio Maria Transylvania has grown rapidly from a staff of three volunteers operating a single station broadcasting twelve-hours a 1

See Martijn Oosterbaan, “Mediating Culture: Charisma, Fame, and Sincerity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” in The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism, eds. Simon Coleman and Rosalind I.J. Hackett (New York: NYU Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.18574/ nyu/9780814772591.003.0009. Martin Lindhardt, “Mediating Money: Materiality and Spiritual Warfare in Tanzanian Charismatic Christianity,” in The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism, eds. Simon Coleman and Rosalind I.J. Hackett (New York: NYU Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814772591.003.0008. Rosalind I.J. Hackett and Benjamin F. Soares, New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Birgit Meyer, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015) 2 Andreas Bandak, “Problems of Belief: Tonalities of Immediacy among Christians of Damascus,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 77, no. 4 (2012): 535-555. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.728024 3 See http://www.radiomaria.org/about-us..

4 Katalin Balázs, “Mária Rádió, A Szűzanya ajándéka,” Krónika online, April 10, 2016, https://kronikaonline.ro/eklezsia/maria-radio-a-szuzanya-ajandeka/print. Ferenc Szatmári, “Az erdélyi Mária Rádió tizedik születésnapjára készülve (1.),” interview by Silvia Bereczki, Vasárnap: Katolikus Hetilap Online, April 3, 2016, https://vasarnap.verbumkiado.ro/14-szam-2016-aprilis-3/2334-panorama/4326-az-erdelyi-maria-radio-tizedik-szueletesnapjara-keszuelve-1. Ferenc Szatmári, “Ez a Rádió Csak Szeretből működik: Látogatóban az erdélyi Mária Rádió nagyváradi stúdiójában,” interview

by Judit Ozsváth, Kereszény Szó. May 5, 2011, https://epa.oszk.hu/00900/00939/00127/keresztenyszo_EPA00939_2011_05_05.html.

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day to a staff of ten full-time employees and five hundred volunteers with multiple stations offering twenty-four hours a day programming.5

In this article, I will examine the relationship between two distinct practices of sto-

rytelling that are a prominent part of Radio Maria Transylvania’s public discourse: Storytelling about the founding and rapid growth of Radio Maria Transylvania

and narrative prayer requests to the Virgin Mary for assistance. In the first section, I perform a symbolic analysis of the network’s origin narrative as it appeared in major Hungarian-language Catholic publications between 2005 and 2010. I show

that Radio Maria’s administrators liken their work to representing the Hungarian national minority’s needs before the Vatican, which they construe as a power-

ful international bureaucratic authority. Implicitly, these stories point back to the post-World War I peace negotiations as a historical trauma.6 In Hungarian public

memory, delegates to the peace conference brought maps and statistics showing Hungarians’ population distribution throughout the region that were supposed to

back up delegates’ claim that the post-War Hungarian state’s borders should be large enough to include these groups. According to this narrative, the international powers summarily ignored this evidence. They drew a new map that left large Hun-

garian-speaking populations as minorities in newly created or expanded successor states like Romania.7 My analysis therefore does not simply construe Radio Maria Transylvania’s founders’ discourse as symbolic meaning-making that facilitates

an intellectual grasp of the events that produced this new media network. Rath-

er, I follow anthropologist Michael D. Jackson in arguing that storytelling works

“at a ‘protolinguistic’ level, changing our experience of events that have befallen us by symbolically restructuring them.”8 Radio Maria Transylvania’s administra-

tors describe the network’s origin as a reversal of the fortune that befell both the

post-War Hungarian state’s representatives as well as the entire Hungarian nation.

5 6 7

8

Szatmári, “Az erdélyi Mária Rádió."

Géza Jeszensky, “Trianon, az európai tragédia,” Magyar Szemle 14, no. 5-6 (2005): 7-24.

Gábor Türke, “A ‘vörös térkép’ árnyékában,” Hungarian National Archives, June 2, 2014, http:// mnl.gov.hu/mnl/ol/hirek/a_voros_terkep_arnyekaban. Ignác Romsics, “Hónapokig rajzolgatták a trianoni határokat száz évvel ezelőtt, ” accessed July 17, 2019, https://foter.ro/cikk/20181206_ honapokig_rajzolgattak_a_trianoni_hatarokat.

Michael D. Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 14-5.

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Radio Maria Transylvania’s administrators both reinforce their position as leading

representatives of the Hungarian nation and also authorize a notion of the global Catholic Church as an institution responsive to statistical and scientific evidence.

In the next section, I introduce and provide social context for the collection of

listeners’ petitions to the Virgin Mary that I subsequently examine in this article’s third and fourth parts. I use several ethnographic vignettes to situate the practice

of narrating petitionary prayer between two Catholic Church- and state-spon-

sored practices of cultural creativity. On the one hand, the Catholic Church has

often encouraged devotees to publish prayers about their family life as a way to involve them personally and financially in emerging devotional initiatives like new saints’ cults and shrines.9 On the other hand, a state-sponsored revival of “traditional Transylvanian Hungarian culture” has encoded a bourgeois gender ideology that

insists family problems belong to a “private sphere” and should not be discussed

with “outsiders.”10 In the third and fourth sections, I analyze examples drawn from my own collection and Radio Maria Transylvania’s online archive of prayers. Ra-

dio Maria Transylvania hosts a twice-weekly prayer request program during which devotees call and recite their prayers on the air. Radio Maria Transylvania also

invites devotees to publish prayers through an online form at https://www.mariaradio.ro/imaszandek/. I examine texts published on the Radio Maria Transylvania

web site between 2011 and 2015, which I accessed and analyzed beginning in 2013.

It is true, as many historians and anthropologists have noted, that listeners direct-

ly contradict neither the Church’s nor the traditional culture movement’s gender ideology. However, looking for such a categorically oppositional stance can actually

obscure a nuanced and sensitive understanding of how devotees use prayers to draw unexpected conclusions and create subtle but significant distinctions.

9

Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Suzanne K. Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

10 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400843008. Krisztina Feherváry, “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 67, no. 3 (2002): 369-400, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0014184022000031211. Krisztina Feherváry, Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2013).

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Acts of petitioning powerful others for assistance on behalf of a family are cen-

tral features of Radio Maria Transylvania’s storytelling—on behalf of a national family in the case of the network’s origin narratives and a natal family in the case of prayers to the Virgin Mary. The trope of representing the family and the exis-

tential experience of objectification—becoming an object acted upon rather than

an author of one’s own story—therefore stands behind both these distinctive forms

of narrative practice. In addition, these storytelling practices help construct Radio Maria Transylvania’s predominant view that its fate as an organization is depen-

dent on relations with other institutional actors and their practices of delegation and representation, a view that dovetails with related notions circulating in Tran-

sylvanian Hungarian communities that institutions are the major social actors in the global social field constructed by the Catholic Church.Taken together, these

narrative practices provide an account of how Radio Maria Transylvania’s pro-

gramming shaped the identities and global imaginary of its listeners during the period of its rapid growth.

NATIONAL MASTERY PLAY ON THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S INTERNATIONAL STAGE Ferenc Szatmári, a Catholic layperson and leader in a group promoting devotion

to the Virgin Mary of Medjugorje, founded Radio Maria Transylvania in 2003. In

his accounts of the network’s early days, Szatmári describes a personal narrative arc from skepticism to enthusiasm mediated by a sense of service to the Hungar-

ian national community—a calling to use this position to represent Transylvania’s Hungarian Catholics on an international stage.11 Szatmári’s first introduction to

the World Family of Radio Maria was inauspicious. Two network representatives paid an unannounced visit to his group’s headquarters. A colleague asked him to

take the meeting by saying, “Some people are coming from some radio thing to see us and I don’t want to be alone.”12 He then admits that, at first, “I did not take the

whole thing too seriously.” But then he participated in one of the World Family of Radio Maria’s international congresses where he saw countries as far afield as 11 Szatmári, “Ez a Rádió Csak Szeretből működik.”

12 Szatmári, “Ez a Rádió Csak Szeretből működik.”

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Africa and Asia “representing themselves.”13 When he agreed to take on the role of president, but with a condition that implied how he viewed Transylvanian Hungarian Catholicism’s relationship with the Vatican:

I told them I would take on the role, but only if we could establish either two separate radio stations—one Romanian and one Hungarian—or one with two

equal amounts of Romanian and Hungarian programming. They blanched at this, but I had come equipped with precise statistics showing denominational and national distributions. I explained everything to them. They understood and agreed to support the station.14

Szatmári takes pride in the forethought that he demonstrates in predicting his

hosts’ ignorance about the population and distribution of Transylvania’s Catholics. In Transylvania, there are more Hungarian-speaking Catholics who practice the Latin-rite Mass than Romanian-speaking Catholics who use the Eastern- or

Greek-rite Mass. In Romania as a whole, Hungarian-speaking Catholics outnum-

ber Romanian-speaking Catholics. Brubaker, et. al document numerous instances of Transylvanian Hungarian minority intellectual elites using statistical representa-

tion to represent the community’s needs before state and international institutions.

Establishing parallel ethnic cultural institutions was also a primary desideratum in

these cases.15 Szatmári came prepared to defend his national minority community’s

need for equal representation and financial support with these statistics organized as documentary evidence. The fact that he successfully persuaded the World Family of Radio Maria’s Vatican officials sends the message to readers—some of whom

might be skeptical in the same way that Szatmári once was—that they should have confidence such bureaucratic reason is authoritative in the emerging media institutions of the global Catholic Church.

Lurking behind Szatmári’s account is Hungarian intellectuals’ desire to redress a

sense of historical injustice from the period following World War I. A staple of 13 Szatmári, “Az erdélyi Mária Rádió.”

14 Szatmári, “Ez a Rádió Csak Szeretből működik.”

15 Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox and Liana Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 149-52.

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contemporary Hungarian public memory is a story about the post-War peace ne-

gotiations in which Hungarian delegates brought scores of maps and statistical

information—including one document now known infamously as “the red map” (a vörös térkép)—describing the geographic and numerical distribution of the

Hungarian national population.16 Nationalistically-minded commentators bolster public estimation for this evidence by describing it as the accomplishment of a

large team of researchers who worked under challenging conditions to produce a masterful collection of statistical information. In the words of one journalist, “The

Hungarian delegation traveled to the peace negotiations in January 1920 carrying a comprehensive and detailed collection of material of surpassing scientific quality.”17

Such high estimations underscore the callousness and lack of concern on the part of the victorious Allied powers: “The negotiators took no notice whatsoever of ei-

ther the map nor any of the rest of the excellent Hungarian scientific data.”18 Many

Hungarians today point to this story as evidence that international negotiators rudely disregarded their concerns and even discounted, demeaned, and disempow-

ered them. Szatmári’s story turns the tables on this narrative that so-often reminds Hungarians of their impotence on the world stage. Unlike the tragic Hungarian

heroes of the post-War peace conference, Szatmári is able to successfully mobilize evidence testifying to Hungarians’ presence in Romania. By recounting a story that

follows the path of a well-known model only to result in an unexpectedly positive outcome, Szatmári’s account of Radio Maria Transylvania’s origin is an example of

what Michael Jackson calls storytelling as “mastery play.” Mastery play is a typical response to traumatic experiences, Jackson writes, in which the authors of games— like the authors of stories—“rework and remodel subject-object relations in ways that subtly alter the balance between actor and acted upon.”19 Szatmári’s story ulti-

mately makes himself, as a representative of the Transylvanian Hungarian national minority, into an effective player in the World Family of Radio Maria’s bureaucrat-

ic decision-making. By doing so, he strikes a subtle and negative contrast between the Catholic Church and the secular international community that moved on from 16 17 18 19

Türke, “A ‘vörös térkép’ árnyékában.”

Türke, “A ‘vörös térkép’ árnyékában.”

Türke, “A ‘vörös térkép’ árnyékában.”

Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling, 16.

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the post-War peace negotiations to form the League of Nations, an organization whose descendants are today’s United Nations and the European Union. If these organizations ignored and forgot Hungarians’ representatives, the Catholic Church will pay attention to Szatmári and Radio Maria Transylvania.

PETITIONARY PRAYER AND THE HUNGARIAN CULTURAL REVIVAL Bourgeois European populations have long sought to prevent the public airing of private familial conflicts, resentments, and disagreements—an inclination rooted

in the early modern establishment of hegemonic distinctions between self-con-

trolled bourgeois and libertine aristocratic and working-class populations.20 Today, the movement to revive traditional Hungarian culture in Transylvania—a movement driven largely by bourgeois cultural activists and intellectuals—takes the lead

in popularizing and authorizing these overlapping discourses about class, family, and public/private spaces. In the Ciuc Valley, grade-school teachers were some of

the most avid consumers and producers of traditional Hungarian culture. Educators were often eager to teach me about traditional “local idioms” (tajszavak), but

their definitions often revealed more about themselves than the world they were trying to describe. During one conversation with a group of teachers, they tried to

illustrate the definition of an obscure rural Hungarian slang term I had just heard: bütürmec. They laughed together as they explained that this derogatory word—the

equivalent of “crude” (durva)—could be used to describe a drunken village man

who stands around watching his children fight in the street while others look on.

In addition to this word’s meaning, two other things came across via this vivid il-

lustration. First, these urban bourgeois intellectuals’ interest in reviving Hungarian traditional culture served to distinguish themselves from the libertine rural work-

ing classes. Second, my friends also seemed to harbor a profound fear of admitting

that they had experienced or one day might have to experience something like this.

More than just a subject for joking, elites sought to actively discipline others to keep familial discord private through their various leadership activities as orga-

nizers of traditional cultural festivals and programs. No experience illustrated this 20 Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism, 44.

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disciplinary activity more clearly than an exchange between family members I observed one evening as I accompanied a village group to the valley’s carnival cele-

bration (farsang temetés), a highlight of the annual government-sponsored festival cycle. The group’s leader was a high school art teacher in the Ciuc Valley’s largest city. Although the teacher began the bus ride home by taking over the bus driver’s

microphone and leading us in prayer, he spent the rest of the trip standing in the

aisle leading traditional folk songs on his violin. At various points, a young man, big and burly in his late teens, stopped by my seat to make conversation and offer

swigs of plum brandy while also trying to persuade me, and anyone else who would

listen, to get off the bus early for a party he had heard something about. During one of his visits to my seat, I learned that his younger brother and mother were also

on the bus, while his father was at home, but was only in Transylvania for a short

time while he waited for word from an acquaintance about a construction job in Hungary.

Twenty minutes later, when we arrived at the village where the party was taking

place, the young man turned aggressive as his mother and younger brother followed him off the bus, urging him to continue home. At one point, he had his

younger brother in a headlock and struck him while the mother and others were

shouting, “Stop! Stop!” At various times, people called to the art teacher for help, but he remained in the back of the bus. Either he did not hear them or he did not

want to, because he continued playing music and did not acknowledge these hails.

Finally, after about fifteen minutes, the mother and younger brother gave up and we pulled away, leaving the young man to attend the party. The younger brother

and mother remained visibly upset for the rest of the ride home, involved in quiet conversations about what had transpired on the side of the road.

When I related this incident to other acquaintances, they agreed that the art teacher’s behavior had been consistent with his belief in keeping family problems private. I never met this family again, and thus have no way of knowing if the mother

ever called on the Virgin Mary for help in moments when, as hard as she might try

and as much as others might ask her to, circumstances prevented her from abiding by the dictum that such problems be kept in the family. But when I heard women JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM

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call in to Radio Maria and describe situations like this one—families stressed by

labor migration, alcohol consumption, and aggression—I often thought back to that night beside the bus, and wondered if she was one of these women who were

asking Virgin Mary to help them inhabit a lifeworld in which they were forced to publicly air familial conflicts.

RADIO MARIA TRANSYLVANIA’S PRAYERS BEYOND THE MODERN PILGRIM The first thing that becomes clear, on reviewing petitions published through Ra-

dio Maria, is that anthropologists’ efforts to erect a distinction between “religious” and “secular” pilgrims, no matter how much “epistemological clarity” it provides

for researchers, is an artificial construction that has little bearing on the practice of Radio Maria Transylvania’s listeners.21 For some scholars, secular travelers are

defined by their preference for handwriting anonymous notes in shrine “intention books.” Religious pilgrims, in contrast, extravagantly narrate their experiences and relationships with divine beings.22 The problem with mapping anonymity and performance onto the categories of secular and religious is that anonymity is first a

pragmatic and situated tool by which people intersubjectively construct lives and worlds before it is an abstract scholarly category. Participants in Transylvania Radio Maria’s prayer request program often insist on voiding their anonymity by

announcing their identities and their hometowns on the air. For instance, during the February 25, 2011 prayer request program, “Renáta Mihály from [Csík]szereda

[Ro.: Miercurea Ciuc]” offered a prayer for, among other people, “My dead father; for myself so that I can keep to a good path; [and] for my mother’s health so

that she can take care of the family.”23 Devotees frequently name deceased friends and relatives on whose behalf they are offering prayers, much like surviving family

members announce the anniversaries of relatives’ deaths in newspapers.24 When 21 Peter Jan Margry, ed. Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World New Itineraries into the Sacred (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 30, https://doi.org/10.5117/9789089640116.

22 Margry, Shrines and Pilgrimage, 25-6; Frey, Pilgrim Stories.

23 For other examples of remembering the dead in this way, see the prayer from “A Mother from Csik [Ro.: Ciuc],” on February 15, 2014 for “my deceased love.” Teréza Srepler, on February 16, 2014, names in her prayers for the dead, “József Orosz, his son Géza, and Pál Srepler.”

24 See also, Szilvia Lukács, February 24, 2014, from Csíkdánfalva (Ro.: Dănesti).

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devotees provide the full names of those on whose behalf they are praying, they are also inviting listeners to pray for these devotees in need.25 The Virgin Mary’s petitioners are especially keen to name friends and family members who have been

hospitalized, often as a way to help the ill feel less isolated and alone. On March

21, 2014, Valéria Szőcs asks for prayers for Klára Bogos who had recently been hospitalized, and requests that other devotees also pray for her recovery.26 Sándor

Csegőldi, from Marosludás (Ro.: Luduș) prays: “For my dear wife’s improvement.

She is sick and tied to her bed. Please say a prayer together so that she will recover her ability to speak and to be relieved of her suffering.”27

Not only are devotees willing to shed their anonymity when they pray, whether

they call, email, or text message, they are hardly the isolated individuals that appear in the typical scholarly accounts of “modern” European pilgrimage. Devotees often speak directly to the specific people they are praying for since they expect that

these people are listening to Radio Maria Transylvania and praying to the Virgin

Mary at that moment. A caller on January 6, 2011 asks the Virgin Mary to “hear my daughter Erzsike’s prayers. Please, I ask you, Virgin Mother, change her fam-

ily situation. We, the listeners of Radio Maria, will be praying together with my daughter.” Ibolya writes in an email on January 13, 2011 asking Mary to support

“those who are praying for me.” It is especially typical for mothers and daughters to exchange prayers back and forth through Mary, as in the case of a caller on

January 13, 2011 who announces, “I would like to greet my mother with all my

prayers, Beáta Gulyás, who is listening to Radio Maria at this moment. From her

25 See also, Gabriella Ferenczi from Csíkszereda (Ro.: Miercurea Ciuc), March 7, 2014, who offers a prayer for the members of her Rosary group and her grandmother.

26 March 10, 2014. See also Erzsébet Benkő’s prayer for her children, “Piroskáért, Mancika és Nándor, for their health and peace,” from Görgényüvegcsűr (Ro.: Glăjărie), March 17, 2014. Devotees will give their own names if they feel they are the ones in need of Mary’s help. Anna Bugja from Csíkszereda (Ro.: Miercurea Ciuc) wrote in to the web site on February 22, 2014 to “offer this reading for myself.” Births are also joyous occasions on which devotees often offered prayers in their own names. Mónika Keresztes from Csíkmenaság (Armășeni) gave thanks to Mary for, “last but not least our soon to be arriving child with which the Virgin Mother and God blessed us.”

27 July 13, 2014.

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daughter Erzsike in Csik [Ro.: Ciuc].”28 Mary’s devotees often expect that their

acquaintances, friends, and neighbors will recognize their voice when they call to offer their petitions to Mary, even when they do not name themselves. One devotee

told me that her goddaughter recognized her voice when she called the radio sta-

tion while her husband was having surgery and began praying right then and then.

These new forms of religious practice at the Csíksomlyó pilgrimage site are not so much a vehicle for modern individuals to be left alone in order to find meaning in

their lives, but rather the prayer requests establish ties of reciprocity and systems of favors and debts that endure and bind devotees to each other and Mary over time.29

This sense that devotees are bound together with Mary through long-term recip-

rocal exchanges of prayers and intercessions is especially clear when they choose or feel obliged to remain anonymous, since many expressed the conviction that Mary

already knows their needs, desires, and problems. “A Listener” from Balán (Ro.: Bălan) begins her petition on February 20, 2014 by addressing Mary: “My dear Virgin Mother, you already know what kinds of problems I’m struggling with, take me into your grace and give back my soul’s peace.” This conviction is helpful when

devotees are struggling with a difficulty that is especially shameful or embarrassing, allowing them to anonymously ask for help without having to unduly discomfit themselves when greater harm might come from such disclosure. Far from pilgrims who are surreptitious or silent because they are ashamed to talk about the “religious

dimension,” what comes across from reading such prayers is devotees’ pragmatic oscillation between concealment and revelation effected within the context of intersubjective relationships with divine and human counterparts.

28 Devotees expect and know that people will be praying for them and thus involved in events in their lives. They often send serial prayer requests: Mária in Switzerland offers this urgent prayer on July 17, 2014: “I would like to prayers tomorrow for my sister-in-law for the Virgin Mother to help her and that her operation should be successful.” The next day she writes, this time in all capital letters, “I would like to this current Rosary for my sister-in-law who is being operated right at this moment. I ask for the Virgin Mother’s help.”

29 Margry, Shrines and Pilgrimage, 22.

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GENDER, WORK AND ILLNESS IN PRAYERS TO THE VIRGIN MARY It is a commonplace observation among scholars of gender in Eastern Europe

that religious groups have led the charge for a “re-traditionalization” of gender

after the fall of socialism.30 Transylvanian Hungarian Catholic writers deploy the Virgin Mary to send the same messages as religious elites elsewhere in the re-

gion. For instance, they often say that women are betraying the nation by refusing to bear more children and that women should leave the workplace to focus on

motherhood.31 While it may be true that Radio Maria Transylvania’s listeners do not directly confront, contradict, or question these messages, looking for such a cat-

egorically oppositional stance—often referred to as “resistance” to religious elites’ power—can actually obscure a nuanced and sensitive understanding of how dev-

otees use prayers to draw unexpected conclusions and create subtle but significant distinctions. Devotees’ prayers about work help illustrate this point. The Virgin Mary’s female devotees ask for help for their husbands and sons as they search for

local jobs, often in the hopes of avoiding labor migration that could disrupt family

30 Anya Bernstein, Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 99, https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/ 9780226072692.001.0001.

31 Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism, 28-33; Brubaker, et. al, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity, 297-300. See also Michelle Rivkin-Fish, “From ‘Demographic Crisis’ to Dying Nation: The Politics of Language and Reproduction in Russia,” in Gender and National Identity in Twentieth Century Russian Culture, eds. Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 151-73. Elizabeth C. Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 139142. An article in Sunday provides the occasion for a priest to comment on the special responsibility that mothers have to Transylvanian Hungarians: “The most painful point of the Hungarian folk is that they are not bearing children, the blessing of children, so much anymore….I wanted mothers to sense how responsible they are for the nation….” The article appears in the May 11, 2011 edition of Sunday. Father Dénes Incze uses his weekly column on morality in the February 26, 2012 edition of the Catholic weekly magazine Sunday to cajole his female readers to have more children by quoting a common saying: “One is none. Two are few. Our people will only begin to multiply at three.”

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routines and reciprocities.32 In these cases, women pray also for their husbands and sons to be spared from workplaces that maim and leave bodies broken and

wounded. For instance, I. Balog, on February 18, 2014, asks that her son Nor-

bert, find a “well-paying, accident-free job.”33 When young men find work abroad, women do not ask that they come home or blame them for leaving. Rather, they

pray that Mary remain with them and protect them from harm. Marika from the Gyergyó (Ro.: Gheorgeni) valley asks for a prayer for “my children who are

working in foreign countries…Protect their everyday activities with your mantle, Mary.”34 Finally, Emese, writing from London on April 6, 2014, offers that day’s

Rosary to the Virgin Mother, “For our health and that we have work.” Whereas Csaba Böjte and other elites use petitions to Mary to reprimand female devotees when they ask for help so that their male relatives find employment, women like

Emese turn the idiom of the devotion to their own uses, sidestepping Böjte’s efforts to turn them into reviled examples of disordered desire and improperly dependent

relationships with the saints. Their prayers to Mary allow them to become one of

a large group of women who struggle with the same reality of poverty, joblessness, insecurity, and loneliness. Women praying to Mary for their distant loved ones or giving thanks for their own jobs while living abroad become agents of mutual

32 For examples of devotees praying for men to find jobs, see Melinda, February 13, 2014: “And for the Virgin Mother, help us all and my husband to succeed in finding a job.” “An anxious mother” from Márosvásárhely (Ro.: Târgu Mureș), February 20, 2014: “I ask for a prayer for my son who is in big trouble because he is without work. Please, God, help him to find work.” János from Székelyudvarhely (Ro.: Odorheiu Secuiesc) asks God to help him “find a job during these difficult times.”

March 18, 2014.

33 “I. Balog” is given as the residence for this entry, with the name, “A Mother.” However, since I. Balog does not correspond to a place name in Transylvania, but rather resembles a common name, I have included it as the devotees’ identifying information. February 18, 2014.

34 February 15, 2014. See also Babi from Csík (Ro.: Ciuc) writing on June 6, 2014: “I offer all my prayers today for pilgrimage, for the Pope, for my children living abroad, for their spiritual and physical wholeness…Jesus and the Virgin Mother of Csíksomlyó and every saint of God please come to our aid!” On February 17, 2014, “Listener” from the Sepsiszentgyörgy (Ro.: Sfântu Gheorghe) offers that day’s Rosary to Mary so that she will “protect my little son who is far away at work.” Erzsébet from Csík (Ro.: Ciuc) asks for a prayer for her grandson, “Who is working abroad and struggling with many problems. Virgin Mother, help him!” February 24, 2014. An anonymous devotee from Márosvásárhely (Ro.: Târgu Mureș) writes, “I would like to give thanks for the grace that my son has arrived in a distant country. Continue to help him make a life for himself where there is faith.” March 3, 2014. Ildikó from Gyergyóditró (Ro.: Ditrău) asks for prayers “for my husband working abroad.” March 27, 2014.

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understanding and laudable champions of an institution—Radio Maria Transylvania—that has the support of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy in Rome.

What becomes clear from reading devotees’ petitions is that there are distinct dif-

ferences in the way devotees and elites engage with the Virgin Mary, with the result that anthropologists ought to use caution when assuming that religion con-

tributes to “re-traditionalized” gender messages after socialism.35 Where Catholic

elites hold up Mary as the ideal woman and use this idealized picture to request that women give up jobs to have more children, female and male devotees often ask Mary to help female kin find work. On November 24, 2013, Eva Lukács

from Temesvár (Ro.: Timișoară) asks Mary for an “appropriate workplace for my

daughter.”36 Edit from Csíkszentkirály (Ro.: Sâncrăieni) asks Mary to ensure that

she safely delivers her first child and that, afterwards, she is able to “keep my job.”37

On February 25, 2014, Zsolt from Miercurea Ciuc asks Mary to help his wife suc-

cessfully complete an “entrance examination for a job.” Finally, Mary is petitioned not just for any kind of work, but she is asked to provide quality employment, as in the case of Mária, writing on March 17, 2014, who asks for “a good job for my

daughter.” Petitioning Mary for a daughter, sister, mother, or wife to find quality work helps devotees avoid the moral approbation of Catholic elites.

Devotees often turn to Mary with their worries about relatives suffering from addiction to alcohol, giving voice to concerns that the Transylvanian Archdiocese

does not dedicate significant resources and priests rarely speak about from the

pulpit. Although alcoholism can be a shameful experience for family members and something that many of my acquaintances tried to keep from me, Radio Maria’s 35 Bernstein 2013; Dunn 2004; Krassimira Daskalova, Caroline Tomic, Karl Kaser, and Filip Radunovic, eds. Gendering Post-Socialist Transition: Studies of Changing Perspectives (Vienna: Lit Verlag, 2012).

36 February 14, 2014.

37 See also the prayer from Julia in Csíkszereda (Ro.: Miercurea Ciuc) on February 26, 2014: “I beg you, my Virgin Mother, help against wicked and bad people and allow me to keep my job. Give me patience and health in these difficult times. Keep away everything bad. Thank you.” “A Listener,” writes, “I ask a prayer for health, peace, and so that my mother will find a better job. Thank you very much.” March 4, 2014. Zsuzsa from Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc) asks Mary to “sustain my job” on March 9, 2014. Kinga from Sepsiszentgyörgy (Ro.: Sfântu Gheorghe) asks for help in “finding a workplace” on March 11, 2014.

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listeners often provide significant identifying information in their prayers, thus suggesting that they want their relatives who have this disease to be publicly recognized. A devotee who identifies herself as Éva Karda from the village of Csíkszentdomokos (Ro.: Sân Dominic) asks Radio Maria’s listeners to pray “for my husband

to be freed from drink and for my entire family.”38 The prevalence of prayers dealing

with a father-in-law, uncle, or cousin’s alcoholism indicates not only the way in

which illness brings together extended families in the Ciuc valley, but also the way in which the corrosive effects of illness radiate outwards through these same net-

works. On March 24, 2014, an anonymous devotee, most likely a young man, asks for a prayer for “my girlfriend’s father who is an alcoholic. I ask you, Lord, help him free himself from the temptation of drink.”

Mary is frequently asked to help relatives confined to hospitals by illness, and

the ways in which devotees call on Mary in such settings provide an alternative intersubjective account of religious change in a global setting. Prayers publicized

through Radio Maria also deal with hospitals and healing, with devotees often petitioning for help to avoid such institutions or for strength to persevere during

extended treatments. On February 18, 2014, Mónika from Brassó (Ro.: Brașov) asks Mary to ensure that her daughter, Emőke, “does not to go back into the hos-

pital again.”39 “A Five Year-Old Girl,” who did not provide a residence, asked on February 19, 2014, “Please, I ask everyone to pray a little bit for my mother, that

her eye heals with medicine and that they don’t need to operate on her.” Prayers for safe and healthy births are a recurring concern for devotees.40 Mary often mediates

between medical professionals and devotees, deviating the power of the former when it seems that treatments are exacerbating an illness. “I am Piroska Szabó

38 See also Veronika from Kézdivásárhely (Ro.: Târgi Secuiesc) who asks God to “heal my sibling from the slavery to drink and to return to a good path.” February 19, 2014.

39 For other prayers on behalf of the sick, see “A Listener,” from Sepsiszentgyörgy (Ro.: Sfântu Gheorghe), February 17, 2014: “I would like to offer this week’s worth of Rosaries and Masses for my sick husband, so that the Virgin Mother heals him. Thank you.”

40 On February 19, 2014, “An Everyday Listener” from Csíkszereda (Ro.: Miercurea Ciuc) offers Rosaries for “my soon to be born child.”

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from Csíkszereda (Ro.: Miercurea Ciuc),” one devotee introduces herself on July 12, 2014,

I would like to ask for a prayer for my healing [gyogyulásom] because I have had muscle weakness for seven years and this most recent moment has not been the

best due to some strong medications and bad thoughts. Even my eyelids have begun to droop. Recently I have been well and then suddenly I was again at-

tacked by bad forces and I’m not well. I’m asking for this prayer for my release [szabadulás] and for my brain to be cleansed.

Chronic and recurrent illnesses like the one Piroska is suffering from are Mary’s purview, and thus this petition is also example of the way the Mother of God is often present amid devotees’ deepest despair, loneliness, and isolation.

When death is inevitable, Mary helps devotees face this reality while still maintaining hope for diminished suffering. On March 26, 2014, Julia from Sepsiszent-

györgy (Ro.: Sfântu Gheorghe) offers a prayer for her father, “Whose tumor was discovered just recently and day by day is getting worse. I ask, dear Lord, be kind and don’t make him suffer but rather call him to you as soon as possible.” And after

a loved one’s passing, Mary is given thanks for reducing the agony of a death that

could have been much worse: “I have recently asked multiple times for prayers for

my grandparents in their suffering,” a devotee named Anna writes on March 23, 2014, “I would like to thank everyone and the dear Lord, because they both passed after a relatively short period of suffering.”

First, it is difficult to argue that the public profile of the Szekler Transylvanian

Hungarian minority is comparable to a “fortress” in light of the publicly circulating

prayers offered by many devotees who live abroad. In the six-month span from January to June 2014, devotees offered prayers to Mary from Israel, Austria, Hol-

land, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, England, the United States, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Germany, and the generic “Across the Ocean,” (tengerentúl). But beyond their far-flung places of residence, what comes across powerfully on reading these prayers is the way in which Mary is invoked: Mary is most often asked by her

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Virgin Mother of Csíksomlyó, “for the healing of my one-year old son, for the

health of my loved ones, and for myself.”41 On February 28, 2014, Judit Merket, writing from Holland, offers her gratitude to Mary for answering her prayer: “I

would like to offer this Rosary out of gratitude for the grace I have received, for my children, for my husband’s mother, sibling, and his family. For the healing of two illnesses.”

As these prayers also suggest, Mary is instrumental in helping families lessen the pain of distance and mend the relational bonds that are often stretched to the breaking point by separation. Mary provides this kind of healing by keeping distant

relatives present in the lives of devotees: “I would like to offer this Rosary for my family, my husband Ervin, my mother, my bother István, [and] my husband’s par-

ents and siblings,” writes Emese from London, “I ask you, Virgin Mother, to give health and peace to our family.42 And because sudden health crises put even greater

stress on familial relationships, these are often the moments when Mary is called upon for help: András in Germany offers this petition on May 5, 2014: “I would

like to offer the following prayer for my family. May the good Lord give health and

endurance while I am far away from them and please let my wife’s medical tests be successful.” On June 5, 2014, “Gerti” in Germany names “my dear aunt Anna who was always helping so many people” and asks the Virgin Mother of Csíksomlyó to intervene in her healing after “yesterday’s serious accident.”

Although the prayers of parents who are residing in Transylvania often express a

sense of sadness when they see their children changing into people they do not recognize, the prayers of parents who have moved to Hungary or further abroad 41 April 10, 2014.

42 The date for this prayer is April 7, 2014. See also Erzsike writing from Germany, March 27, 2014: “Thanks be to my Virgin Mother! For the fulfillment of my petition!!! I continue to ask my Virgin Mother to intercede with the Holy Son and to bring our petitions before him. Protect my children, parents, us, and my siblings from sickness and trouble. May there always be love and understanding between us. May we be able to help and love each other with pure hearts! Thank you, my dear Virgin Mother, for your intercession. We feel your power very much and that you are beside us.

Thank you very much!!!” K. Z. writes from Italy on May 2, 2014: “I thank you. I thank you for everything, our good Father. I ask you to forgive our sins and help us day by day to be better. Thank you for letting me reach this year and continue to give my life meaning. Help me keep to the true and the good and defeat my temptations.”

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sometimes convey a sense that their children’s transformation under the influence of these places is an even greater betrayal and rejection. Anna Ázbe, writes from Sándorfalva in Hungary on July 4, 2014, “Dear Virgin Mother, I ask that you re-

turn all three of my adult children and my grandchildren to the true religious path, because I raised them to be religious but unfortunately the contemporary world

has ruined them.” “A Listener” from Germany asks for Mary’s help and protection

so that, “with the help of my prayers, my child will be able to change and live a life pleasing to God.”43

Like prayers for the sick, petitions that bind devotees together across national borders speak to the way Mary helps devotees sustain profoundly intimate relation-

ships, which, in this case, is a need made harshly urgent by distance and separation: Judit from Márosvásárhely (Ro.: Târgu Mureș) asks for prayers for the Lakatos

family in Toronto to “save their marriage which is in crisis. My dear Virgin Mother and every saint,” Judit continues, “be intercessors in heaven and help this marriage heal, since both sides are suffering and their seven year old child is suffering the

worst harm.”44 Labor migration puts distinctive pressures on adult women when

they are apart from their children during critical rites of passage. Today, women working abroad ask Mary to be there for their daughters as they give birth for the first time. Ildikó calls on Mary from Israel on July 4, 2014:

I would like to ask for a prayer for well-being and health for my parents, for my

three children’s health and happiness, for my daughter’s soon-to-be-born child, and for my own health and protection, that the Virgin Mother and the good

Lord should help and protect us from evil in the midst of this great distance, so that we can meet my parents and children in health and well-being, if the time comes to return home.

43 The date for this prayer is February 17, 2014. See also “A Soul,” writing from an unknown location, March 11, 2014: “I ask for intercessory prayers for conversion and proper, good thinking in the lives of my two sons, my daughter, and my grandchildren.” Magdi from Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc), March 18, 2014: “I would like to ask a prayer for my cousin Szilveszter and Antal my nephew. My dear Virgin Mother, help them find the right path and give them strength to support life.”

44 See also “An Everyday Listener,” April 25, 2014, writing from Germany: “I ask with my prayers today for the Virgin Mother’s help and protection for a former colleague who is in the Csikszereda [Miercurea Ciuc] hospital. I ask for her speedy healing and recovery.”

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As in this prayer, Mary eases the uncertainty of not knowing when or even whether

one will return to one’s kin. Mary is also there for her devotees as they struggle with

needs and desires at the end of their loved ones’ lives. The Mother of God takes the place of distant relatives at hospital bedsides, and later tends to the pain of those who cannot attend wakes and funerals. “A Listener” from Germany asks for prayers

for her daughter living in Transylvania, “whose little baby died” on March 12, 2014.

On March 31, 2014, Margit Urszuly offers this prayer from Sweden:

I ask for prayers for both my godmother’s passage into heaven and at the same

time for my aunt who is just today making her final journey. Because of the great distance, I cannot be there next to the coffin, but I ask the true God and

the Virgin Mother to reward her for everything, for every loving moment of

care-taking. May her tired body rest and her soul come before the Savior. May the Lord give solace to her loved ones and wipe away the tears of their pain.45

Mary helps her devotees turn departed loved ones into memories of loving-kindness. And she remains beside her devotees when they cannot attend the rites of

passage that are so critical to the process of being able to adapt to a changed world after the death of kin.

The act of petitioning a powerful other for help is a central feature of Radio Maria Transylvania’s public discourse. The media network’s founders and administrators justify their position as representatives of the Transylvanian Hungarian national

community by describing their success petitioning powerful Catholic officials on

behalf of the national family. Their storytelling is a form of “mastery play” and reverses Hungarian representatives’ powerless presence at the post-World War I peace negotiations. The network’s Transylvanian founder recounts a similar case in

which he needed to persuade bureaucrats about Hungarians’ presence in Romania 45 See also Magdolna Fodor’s prayer from Sweden, April 6, 2014, “I would like to offer this Rosary for my brother Antal’s passage into heaven. May the good Lord give him eternal rest.” Terézia György, writing from Ireland, remembers her deceased grandparents in Gyergyóremete (Ro.: Remetea) on March 29, 2014. The Czumbil family in “Freising-Germany” commemorates the death of “our brother-in-law János Bíro, who passed from among us a week ago.” May 26, 2014. Dalma writes from Manchester writes on August 7, 2014: “I pray today’s Rosary together with Radio Maria for my beloved friend’s passage into heaven who died yesterday at 2:30AM after a long suffering. May God give her rest and comfort to her family. I ask the Virgin Mother of Csíksomlyó to offer our sister Katalin into her holy Son’s grace.”

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and their need for a separate Hungarian Catholic media network. Like before, he used statistics and documents to make his case. This time it worked; he won

the Vatican’s financial support for a Hungarian-language Radio Maria network in Romania. Radio Maria Transylvania’s listeners also use the trope of representing

the family to a powerful other. They describe various existential experiences of ob-

jectification—becoming an object acted upon rather than an author of one’s own story—including unemployment, illness, and being apart from family members

during important life cycle events. This symbolic device and process of becoming a narrative subject unite the two storytelling styles and lends Radio Maria Transylvania’s overall public discourse an overall orientation and existential direction.

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Jeszensky, Géza. “Trianon, az európai tragédia.” Magyar Szemle 14, no. 5-6 (2005): 7-24.

Kaufman, Suzanne K. Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Lindhardt, Martin. “Mediating Money: Materiality and Spiritual Warfare in

Tanzanian Charismatic Christianity.” In The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism, edited by Simon Coleman and Rosalind I.J.

Hackett, 147-160. New York: NYU Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.18574/

nyu/9780814772591.003.0008.

Margry, Peter Jan, ed. Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. https://doi. org/10.5117/9789089640116.

Meyer, Birgit. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015.

Oosterbaan, Martijn. “Mediating Culture: Charisma, Fame, and Sincerity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” In The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and

Evangelicalism, edited by Simon Coleman and Rosalind I.J. Hackett, 161-176. New York: NYU Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.18574/ nyu/9780814772591.003.0009.

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Orsi, Robert A. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Rivkin-Fish, Michelle. “From ‘Demographic Crisis’ to Dying Nation: the Politics of Language and Reproduction in Russia.” In Gender and National Identity

in Twentieth Century Russian Culture, edited by Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux, 151-73. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006.

Romsics, Ignác. “Hónapokig rajzolgatták a trianoni határokat száz évvel ezelőtt.”

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Szatmári, Ferenc. “Az erdélyi Mária Rádió tizedik születésnapjára készülve (1.).”

Interview by Silvia Bereczki. Vasárnap: Katolikus Hetilap Online. April 3,

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Rádió nagyváradi stúdiójában.” Interview by Judit Ozsváth. Kereszény Szó.

May 5, 2011. https://epa.oszk.hu/00900/00939/00127/keresztenyszo_ EPA00939_2011_05_05.html.

Türke, Gábor. “A ‘vörös térkép’ árnyékában,” Hungarian National Archives, June 2, 2014. http://mnl.gov.hu/mnl/ol/hirek/a_voros_terkep_arnyekaban.

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KRISTIN NORGET AND M A R G A R I TA Z I R E S R O L D Á N

Saints, Mediation, and Miracle-talk: The Señor de los Milagros in Lima, Peru1 Kristin Norget is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Her research publications have addressed aspects of religious practice and Catholicism in Mexico and Peru, including the book Days of Life, Days of Death: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca (Columbia University Press, 2006), and as co-editor The Anthropology of Catholicism (University of California Press, 2017).

Margarita Zires Roldán is a Research Professor in Communication and Politics at the Metropolitan Autonomous University-Xochimilco, México. Themes of her research over the past several years have concerned mediatic representations of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico and the USA; religious imaginaries and social movements in Mexico; and social media, rumors, and violence in Mexico. More recently she has collaborated with Kristin Norget on a research project focused on saints, media technologies, and the Catholic Church in Mexico City and Lima, Peru.

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O

n the hot afternoon of October 19, 2013, a middle-aged man, a repre- Figure 1.

The Señor de los

sentative of the Confederation of Peruvian Workers (Confederación de Milagros procession

in the Plaza de Armas,

Trabajadores del Perú, or CTP), one of the country’s largest public-sec- Lima, Peru, 2017. tor unions, delivered a long discourse at one of the public stages (estrados) erected Photo by Kristin along the route of the annual two-day procession of the Señor de los Milagros

(Lord of Miracles) in the central district of Lima, Peru. The man’s speech began, in typical manner, as a passionately offered litany of appeals to the beloved saint, known as the patron saint of Lima and the focus of the largest Catholic procession in Latin America:

The Confederation of Peruvian Workers pays tribute to the Lord of Miracles, asking for blessings for our leaders, for all of Peru, so that together we can fight

for a country that is more just, with social justice, with enough bread and free-

dom [pan y libertad]. Lord of Miracles, Lord Christ of the poor, Lord Christ 1

We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), which generously funded the research on which this article is based. Many thanks also to anonymous reviewers for this journal whose comments helped improved this article greatly. We are very grateful to Mr. Carlos Paredes and formidable undergraduate students at the Pontificia Católica Universidad de Perú (PCUP)—Diana Safra, Alexandra Díaz; Sergio Sarabia, Sergio Tirado, Sebastian Delgado; Eliana Caballero—for their generous assistance with our fieldwork and collection of data, and their continuing friendship.

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of Pachacamilla: here are your people, your community, here are the people of

Lima who present themselves to beg for your forgiveness [clemencia]. My Lord, Christ of all peoples, Christ of the ill, Christ of miracles, Señor, your mercy for our faith....2

The man’s forcefully articulated words, initiating with an expectable petitional

script for blessings from the Señor de los Milagros, were met with polite atten-

tiveness from the crowd present. A couple of minutes later however his speech suddenly veered away from more expectable religious themes and launched into

sharp criticism of the government’s pro-Fujimori (a reference to the imprisoned former President) political line:

….Here are Christ and the workers that were victims of a fujimontesinista dic-

tatorship, that got rid of 350,000 workers. Just like the new law just passed,

which is also against workers.3 My Lord, blessings, give us your protection, your blessing. Lord, you are so great, my Lord, what a blessing it is for all of us to have you so close.

At this point, shrill whistles, hisses and screams erupted from the crowd: “Booooh!

Booooh!” “Ssssssssssss!” Noticing these signs of public opposition, a woman on the stage beside the representative removed the microphone from his hands, and called

for prayer. The crowd joined her in collectively reciting the Lord’s Prayer and soon calmed down. A large man standing near us, a member of the Brotherhood of the

Señor de los Milagros de las Nazarenas, the lay Catholic organization charged with 2 3

Stop (estrado) at the Confederación de Trabajadores de Peru (CTP), October 18, 2013. “Pan y libertad” (Bread and Freedom) is a version of a well-known Latin American leftist revolutionary slogan.

The colloquial term merges the names of former autocratic President of Peru Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) and of Victor Montesinos, head of Peru’s intelligence service, who together were complicit in an array of crimes, including bribery, corruption, embezzlement, drug-trafficking, and human rights abuses (in 2009 Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison). The law the CTP director referred to was President Ollanta Humala’s extension of a labor reform project begun by Fujimori: “La Ley del Servicio Civil,” passed in July 2013, aimed at a more efficient re-organization of the administration of public service employees, but worsened their conditions of employment and led to the termination of employment of some 320,000 workers. Unions such as the CTP were strongly opposed to the reforms. Pablo Timoteo, “Informe PuntoEdu: Todo sobre la Ley de Servicio Civil,” Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, June 17, 2013, https://puntoedu.pucp.edu.pe/ noticias/informe-puntoedu-todo-sobre-la-ley-de-servicio-civil.

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executing the procession each year, extended his palpable sentiment of disapproval: “That guy came to speak about his own problems,” he muttered loudly, to no one in particular, “and there was nothing there for the Señor.”4

“Nothing there for the Señor”: The Brother’s words suggested that the man’s allusion

to the reality of a horrifically violent period and one of the most controversial, yet still popular, presidents in contemporary Peruvian history, his brief appeal for fair treatment or Peruvian workers, was somehow not acceptable. The man’s sponta-

neous mixing of devotion to the Señor and an overtly anti-Fujimori line of politics, the “irruption of heterogeneous being”5 in his remarks, ruffled what had been up to that moment the procession’s smooth, scripted surface. Apparently, for most people

present at least, a tacitly enjoined reciprocity of some kind—in this very public, sacred space, at this significant moment—had not been fulfilled. The moment was

one of the most striking and perplexing for us during the procession that day and made us reflect hard on the kind of public arena that the procession offered: Why

did so many members of the crowd reject this particular overtly political discourse, yet did not object to the many others we heard that day? How does this elaborately and overtly traditional Catholic saint celebration mediate local, national political identity in today’s nominally secular Peru?

Every year, the image of the Señor de los Milagros is taken out of the Church

of the Nazarenas on the shoulders of members of the Brotherhood, and through two long days (October 18 and 19) snakes through the heart of Lima’s colonial center past the public buildings and institutions that are most emblematic of the

country’s national political identity—the Cathedral, the Archdiocese of Lima, the

Government Palace (Palacio del Gobierno), the Republican Congress, and the Judicial Palace (Palacio de Justicia), among others.6 In this highly charged context, as a 4 5 6

“Este pata viene a hablar de sus cosas, y nada para el Señor.”

Daniela Gandolfo, The City at its Limit: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

There are also processions on October 6 and October 28 that are part of the wider annual celebration of the Señor; we focus here on the main procession days of October 18 and 19. The main, well-known stops are at the Presidential Palace, the Palace of Justice, the City Hall, the Archdiocese of Lima, the Hospital de los Niños, the Congress building, and the San Jorge Prison. The anda also stops at churches, prominent businesses, banks and newspapers, and other organizations and public buildings (e.g., the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Attorney General’s Office, fire stations,

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complexly interpellated, vital entity, the Señor has a central role in a sensual and ornate ritual worlding in which Catholics nurture their devotion to this much-beloved saint while the Peruvian nation and the powers that constitute it are un-

derlined, performatively, materially, and affectively. This orchestrated ideal world

is ephemeral, existing for just a couple of days, but its effects—and affects—are enduring.

This article is based on ethnographic research over several years on technologies

of mediation and Catholic saint celebrations in Latin America, including the procession of the Señor de los Milagros in contemporary Lima.7 A range of scholarly

writings on the procession has drawn attention to the complex history of the Señor, including his syncretic (pre-Hispanic and African) origins;8 and the saint’s role in

the articulation of identity for Peruvian diasporic communities.9 In this work we approach the celebration in Lima as not merely as a performance of local or na-

tional sacred (i.e., Catholic) significance for devotees, but also as having a critical

7 8

9

police stations, prisons and penitentiaries, schools, colleges, and universities, other hospitals, markets, municipal offices, national political party offices [Partido Popular Cristiano or PPC], and union offices [Pensionistas Municipales de Lima, Confederation of Peruvian Workers, or CTP], and the elite social Club de la Unión. People also offer more spontaneous or impromptu homages throughout the route.

Our analysis is based in years of fieldwork (carried out principally in the years 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2017) involving participation in the celebration and interviews, and analysis of media sources (print media and television programs, and social media).

E.g., Raúl Banchero Castellano, La Verdedera historia del Señor de los Milagros (Lima: Inti-Sol, 1976). María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Pachacamac y el Señor de los Milagros: Unatrayectoria milenaria (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1992). Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Historia del Santo Cristo de los Milagros (Sanmartí, Lima, 1966). Julia Costilla, “’Guarda y custodia’ en la Ciudad de los Reyes: la construcción colectiva del culto al Señor de los Milagros (Lima, siglos XVII y XVIII),” Fronteras de la Historia 20, no. 2 (2015): 152-179, https://doi.org/10.22380/2027468813. Julia Costilla, “Una práctica negra que ha ganado a los blancos: símbolo, historia y devotos en el culto al Señor de los Milagros de Lima (siglos XIX-XXI),” Anthropologica 34, no. 36 (June 2016), https://doi. org/10.18800/anthropologica.201601.006. Camilo Gómez Torres, “The Procession of the Señor de los Milagros: a Baroque Mourning Play in Contemporary Lima,” MA thesis, Dept. of Anthropology, McGill University, 2015. Susy Sanchez Rodriguez, “Un Cristo moreno 'conquista' Lima - Los arquitectos de la fama pública del Señor de los Milagros (1651-1771)," in Etnicidad y discriminación racial en la historia del Perú, eds. S. Carrillo et al. (Lima: Instituto Riva Agüero, 2002), 65-92.

E.g., Karsten Paerregaard, “In the Footsteps of the Lord of Miracles: The Expatriation of Religious Icons in the Peruvian Diaspora,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 7 (2008): 10731089, https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830802230380. Larissa Ruiz Baía, “Rethinking Transnationalism: Reconstructing National Identities Among Peruvian Catholics in New Jersey,” Special Issue Religion in America 41, no. 4 (1999): 93-109, https://doi.org/10.2307/166193.

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normative political role in Peruvian society more broadly. As we discuss later, a

focus on the divergent ideological and other discourses and interests which may be encompassed by Catholic pilgrimage-like celebrations in Latin America and elsewhere is, of course, not new.10

Nevertheless we are concerned here to both widen and nuance this political lens by examining the annual Señor de los Milagros procession in Lima within a more extensive, heterogeneous “pilgrimage field”11 that includes the saint’s shrine, various

institutional interests, actions and discourses, and material, physical spaces, both

secular and sacred. It is precisely the relationship between sacred and secular power that is of particular interest to us here. In this essay we build on the above-mentioned work that has highlighted the layers of historically shaped social and polit-

ical complexity inherent to saint pilgrimage celebrations, yet push this perspective further to explore performative aspects of the procession in relation to the shaping of the normative subjectivity/ies in Lima and Peru far beyond the spatial and

temporal bounds of this particular procession. Inspired by the work of political

philosophers Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben and others, recent anthropological

works on Catholicism have developed the analytical frame of political theology, highlighting how key notions in modern secular political doctrines—including sovereignty and authority—are grounded in theological world views.12 Thus, we

draw on this body of research by examining the Señor de los Milagros’s celebration in contemporary Lima not merely as a symbolically rich arena for devotees’ mutual engagement with the saint, but also for the production of a specifically Catholic 10 See, for e.g., John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, eds., Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (NY: Routledge, 1991). N. Ross Crumrine and Alan Morinis, eds., Pilgrimage in Latin America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991). See also Hillary Kaell, Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (New York: New York University Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814738368.001.0001.

11 Simon Coleman, “Pilgrimage as Trope for an Anthropology of Christianity,” Current Anthropology 55, no. 10 (2014): 281-291, https://doi.org/10.1086/677766.

12 E.g., Valentina Napolitano, “Theopolitics and the Americas,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Barcelona, Spain, May 25, 2018.

Valentina Napolitano, “On a Political Economy of Political Theology: El Señor de los Milagros” in The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader, eds. Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano and Maya Mayblin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 243-255, https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520288423.003.0019. Chris Garces, "The Cross Politics of Ecuador’s Penal State," Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 3 (2010): 459-496, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01067.x.

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Peruvian national identity and the legitimation of power and authority by representatives of both Church and State.

We note that we regard legitimation not as a certainty or fait accompli secured or

underlined by the procession, but as an uncertain ritual end that is performatively emergent and socially contingent. The legitimation-seeking performances in the

procession we are concerned with are interactions with the Señor by prominent leaders of the Catholic Church (most notably, the Archbishop), the State (the

President), and a gamut of government and public agencies and organizations. In this context, we examine “miracle-talk,” a particular mode of discourse that is a

petition to the saint for his blessing and protection, as much as it is a bid for public vindication of the petitioner’s actions and status. In the procession of the Señor de

los Milagros, miracle-talk is not “just” devotional speech. It forms part of the miraculous (lo milagroso) as a wider register of visceral, embodied affective experience

with both popular and theologico-political force.13 Thus, while “miracle narratives” have been discussed by other scholars foremostly as sites of individual experiences of Catholicism as “lived religion,”14 we focus on how Church and government representatives make appeals to the Señor’s miraculousness to cloak their public state-

ments and actions in a veil of ultimate truth and moral status.15 These utterances

take on particular significance within Peru’s current neo-liberal democratic regime, 13 Kristin Norget, “Mediatization of the Miraculous: a politics of saint & spectacle in Lima, Peru,” currently under review for publication, 2019.

14 E.g., Robert Orsi, Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) Marc R. Loustau, “Risking a Miracle: Transcendentally Oriented Improvisation and Catholic Charismatics’ Involvement in a Transylvanian Canonization,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 31, no. 3 (2016): 335-350, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2016.1206229.

15 In an early work, Thomas Kselman takes a similar approach to such a political deployment of "the miraculous," drawing attention to how the Catholic Church in 19th century France promoted national and regional miracle cults and narratives, especially among members of the middle and upper classes, as a way of defending itself against Enlightenment rationalist philosophers who were weakening its social power and influence (in Andrea Dahlberg, “The Body as a Principle of Holism: Three Pilgrimages to Lourdes,” in Contesting the Sacred, eds. John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, 30-50 [London: Routledge, 1991], 31). Our approach however highlights the use of the miraculous by a range of institutional authorities besides the Church, and miracle-talk’s performative, experiential dimensions. Thomas A. Kselman. Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

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where pressures from civil society groups are ever-rising for religious pluralization, secular education, and gender, sexual and reproductive rights, and more transparency in governance, challenging the Catholic Church’s previously privileged social and cultural status.

Our discussion thus offers an account of the annual celebration of the Señor de los Milagros not as a simple reiteration of timeless Catholic Peruvian or local Li-

ma-based (Limeño) tradition, but as a phenomenon constituted at interlinked local,

national and global scales, and across a range of material fields, bodies, and objects.

We argue that we should not underestimate the role of such public religious ritual

performances in the constitution of governance in contemporary Latin America, where values and desires of secular, global modernity are entangled with public

collective events which triumph Catholic tradition, as well as the continued cen-

trality of religion in national social and political life. Our research shows the Señor de los Milagros celebration as an arena that throws into sharp relief what normally remains largely hidden: the deeply religious nature of the constitution of social authority and sovereign rule in Peru.

MEDIATION AND MIRACLE-TALK The theme of mediation and saints emerges from a basic yet critical concept of Catholic theology, as divine beings like the Señor de los Milagros are seen as critical intercessors of God’s will and grace. Yet throughout the contemporary Cath-

olic world, massive public celebrations of certain historically resonant saints, as multi-dimensional triggers of affective forces of identification and attachment, also figure in the emplacement of both Catholic Church presence and authority and a divine anchoring of apparently secular national political orders.16 Attention to the interaction or enmeshment of different scales and material, mobile forms and

corps of mediation (saints, brotherhoods and lay organizations, and individual and 16 Kristin Norget, “Popes, Saints, Beato Bones and other Images at War: Religious Mediation and the Translocal Roman Catholic Church,” Postscripts 5, no. 3 (2011): 337-364, https://doi.org/10.1558/ post.v5i3.337. Kristin Norget, “The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Spectacle of Catholic Evangelism in Mexico,” in The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader, eds. Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano and Maya Mayblin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 184-200, https://doi. org/10.1525/california/9780520288423.003.0015. Norget, “Mediatization of the Miraculous.”

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collective bodies of Catholic devotees), enriches our understanding of contemporary Catholicism, and the material forms and “multiple political, embodied, aes-

thetic and economic registers”17 through which it is mediated across time and space.

In Peru and elsewhere in Latin America, the deep cultural embeddedness of the

cult of the saints and their shaping of national histories, sensibilities, and sociality

means that saints and their public collective commemorations are often key mediating grounds or even bellwethers of salient social processes and transformations.18

In the diverse, unequal and fragmented setting of Peru’s capital city of Lima, what we call miracle-talk both unites and differentiates Peruvians: first, particular contours of the miraculous as a space of consciousness, affect, and devotion are formed

out of popular interactions with the saint and faith in his marvellous powers, making the miraculous, “lo milagroso,” a source of agency and autonomy within a

deeply unequal social order. The discourse of the CTP representative cited at the

beginning of this article is an example of such miracle-talk—a ritual address to the Señor operating as a public claim to the speaker’s moral legitimacy—that articu-

lates such a popular socio-cultural positionality or even broader collective mentalité.

Yet this is not to reduce such miracle-talk to instrumental social ends, for as part of

a meaningful world of devotion it is far more. During our research Limeños told

us countless moving stories of the miraculousness of the Señor, as demonstrated

by particular occurences of good fortune or healing in their lives, especially in moments of acute distress, suffering or deprivation (e.g., “When my baby was about to

die, the Señor arrived to me [me llegó] and saved him”; “At the worst moment, when our family had nothing to eat, and after I prayed and prayed, the Señor appeared

to me in a dream, saying everything would be OK; the next day, my father found a

job.”). As Robert Orsi has pointed out,19 in the hands of the faithful, miracle narratives surrounding a saint allow for the expression of human will, desires, imagina-

tion, and moral vindication which is not possible in other corners of everyday life.

As an all-powerful and compassionate healer, savior, consoler, and companion, the 17 Napolitano, “On a Political Economy of Political Theology,” 252.

18 See Robert Orsi’s Thank You, St. Jude for a masterful portrayal of the responsiveness of devotional cultures surrounding saints to important junctures in U.S. social history over the last century.

19 Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude.

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Señor de los Milagros offers a profound, intimate sense of connection for millions of devotees, of all social backgrounds.

At the same time, during the Señor de los Milagros procession in Lima the Catholic Church and the state dedicate themselves to a theologico-political staging of

the miraculous force and presence as they assert their social vision and authority. It is here that miracle-talk—an utterance made in a register of both ambiguity and expectancy—dovetails with the potentiality that Agamben underlines as key to the

power of systems of sovereignty in relation to the state of exception, a sovereignty exercised in part by the potential “legal” suspension of law. In fact, in his Political

Theology20 political theorist (and ex-Catholic) Carl Schmitt, following Rousseau, uses the divine miracle as the theological paradigm of the state of exception, as

both manifest sovereign or divine power, by means of the interruption or suspension of the order of normal or natural law.21 Along these lines, we seize on the discursive force of miracle-talk as allowing the invocation of the miraculous nature of

the Señor de los Milagros in its reference to a transcendent, indisputable truth, one that is outside of itself and which forecloses all openings to contestation. In this

way then, representatives of both Church and state undergird their social and mor-

al authority and status by means of their simple presence during the procession, or through public addresses they make to the Señor. Moreover, miracle-talk acts

through “devotional bodies”22 by cultivating specific or preferred modes of “being

Catholic.”23 In such public declarations, miracle-talk should not be seen as a sincere petition of the devout, or mere rote, ritual utterance, but rather a practical bid to directly influence the social world.

Given the excess of signification inherent to the miracle, it occupies unstable so-

cial ground, and is vulnerable to epistemic rupture. As an idiom of experience, the 20 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).

21 Bonnie Honig, “The Miracle of Metaphor: Rethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and Schmitt,” Diacritics 37, no. 2-3 (2007): 79, https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.0.0029. Jeffrey Bussolini, “Critical Encounter between Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault: Review of Recent Works by Agamben,” Foucault Studies 10 (November 2010): 108-143, https://doi.org/10.22439/ fs.v0i10.3121.

22 Napolitano, “On a Political Economy of Political Theology.”

23 Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude.

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miraculous is constituted as much by theological teachings or Church directives

as it is by the diverse existential worlds of the devout who place their faith in the saints. Yet miracle-talk as a discursive genre, either as saint apparition story, hagi-

ography, miracle narrative, or as public ritual petitions like those we examine here, has a particular performative force. It substantiates and affirms the authenticity of a saint’s omnipotence, and establishes both a regime of verisimilitude or truth-

likeness to the claims of which it speaks, as well as a horizon or background for the interpretation of quotidian reality.24 Moreover, in Lima, as a material embodiment of the miraculous the Señor de los Milagros is the consummate mediator of

baroque Catholicism, a sacred aesthetic that has emphasized, over the centuries, extravagance, lushness, beauty, sentimental illusion and emotional excess as a mode

of performance and devotion. This baroque aesthetic form also enfolds a deeply felt intimacy and familiar knowledge (conocimiento) of the Señor de los Milagros as a vital, sentient human/non-human being, which reflects indigenous and African sensibilities within the performance.25

HISTORY: THE PERFORMATIVE MAKING OF A SAINT Appreciating the cultural phenomenon of the Señor in the context of his proces-

sion requires conceptual frameworks alert to the meaningful landscape from which the Señor emerges in a phenomenological, experiential sense. In his repeated tracing, over many centuries, of a sacred path through the heart of Lima’s evolving colonial urban terrain, the procession of the Señor has played an important part

in creating the city as a palimpsest in De Certeau’s terms, a cumulative layering of

heterogenous places which still bears the inflections of previous significations and

practices.26 The procession of the Señor is hence replete with an array of “spatial

24 Margarita Zires, Las Transformaciones de los Ex-votos Pictográficos Guadalupanos (1848-1999) (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Verveut, 2014), https://doi.org/10.31819/9783964563040.

25 Norget, “Mediatization of the Miraculous.”

26 In De Certeau’s words, “Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body.”

Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 108. See also Gandolfo, The City at its Limit.

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practices”27 imbricated within the “moving layers”28 that produce Lima as a distinct place, throwing into relief the saint’s procession as a dynamic, exceptional space in which multiple fields of force, and worlds of experience and being, converge.

From its origins in a poor neighborhood on the fringes of colonial Lima, the history of the cult of the Señor de los Milagros in Lima maps out his gradual appropriation by Church and viceregal authorities—a movement from the social and po-

litical margins of the city to the core of institutions of colonial power and control.

The cult began in the mid-17th century within the mostly African and indigenous

peripheral neighborhood of Pachacamilla, among mostly African slaves and free blacks who, as members of a cofradía or religious brotherhood gathered regularly

in a small building where one of them had painted an image of a crucified Christ.29 After an earthquake in 1655, the building collapsed, except for the wall containing

the Christ image. Spurred on by this miracle, and promoted by Jesuit catechists, the

saint’s cult gradually gained visibility and popularity among local criollo (American-born European) elites and regal authorities, who made attempts to contain and

manage it.30 Eventually, in 1671, the Viceroy ordered the shed holding the painting to be converted into a chapel, and the subsequent co-optation of the saint’s image and his cult by crown and Church authorities enabled the transformation of the Señor into a public institutional spectacle.

Most city residents we spoke to during the procession and members of the Her-

mandad of the Nazareñas acknowledged the African-inflected origins of the cult.

This association lingers today in the conspicuous predominance of black and mulato Peruvians in the Brotherhood, despite the fact even they and other Limeños

still affirmed their perception of the “mestizo” character of the procession’s significance in its contemporary form. Nevertheless, signs of indigeneity and afro-iden-

tity are evident throughout the celebration, troubling the dominant homogenizing narrative of Peruvian nationalism. The multiple facets of the Señor’s identity, for 27 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991).

28 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108.

29 Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Historia del Santo Cristo de los Milagros (Sanmartí, Lima, 1966).

Costilla, “’Guarda y custodia.’”

30 Costilla, “’Guarda y custodia,’” 154.

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example, are reflected in the names by which he is known—the Lord of Paca-

chamilla (Señor de Pachacamilla), the Brown Christ (Cristo Moreno), the Lord of Earthquakes (Señor de los Temblores), and the Lord of Marvels (Señor de las Maravillas).31 The Señor is hence interpellated in complex ways, his identity perfor-

matively constituted in the course of sacred spatial practices throughout the route of his procession and in people’s everyday lives. He bears the traces of an Andean or African telluric deity while being a powerful symbol of Catholic faith and the

Peruvian nation. Hovering on the edges of many surfaces of signification, the Señor embodies the threat of transgression—the potential for the abrupt carnivalesque

release, through acts, behaviors, or other expressive modes, of repressed identities

and desires into the public sphere of dominant, acceptable society.32 This may partly explain the clear concern with the demonstration and maintenance of order within the procession, as we describe later.

The urban terrain through which the Señor travels is heterogenous also in religious

terms, for although the procession (and the majority of the national population) is Catholic, over 14% of Peruvians are now evangelical Protestants, a figure that

appears to be steadily on the rise.33 Moreover, Peruvian society is dominated by a particular breed of conservative Catholicism, which has its origins in the beginning

of the 20th century, and has shaped the mode of neoliberal governance that first arose in the 1980s.34 Espoused by several prominent Peruvian Church leaders since

the republican period, including Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, current Archbishop

of Lima, this fundamentalist, “integral” Catholic ideology sees Catholic faith as 31 See Gómez Torres, “The Procession of the Señor de los Milagros,” for more focused discussion of the significance of the names by which the saint is known.

32 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). Gandolfo, The City at its Limit.

33 Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática (INEI), 2017, https://www1.inei.gob.pe/prensa/ noticias/inei-difunde-base-de-datos-de-los-censos-nacionales-2017-y-el-perfil-sociodemograficodel-peru-10935. The National Evangelical Council (CONEP) however estimates that evangelicals represent at least 15 percent of the population. Evangelical Christianity arrived in Peru in the early 1900s.

34 Jeffrey L. Klaiber, Historia Contemporánea de la Iglesia Católica en el Perú (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru, 2016). Matthew Casey, “Del fascismo a la pastilla del día siguiente: La derecha católica y sus propósitos en el Perú contemporáneo” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Lima, Peru, April 30, 2017).

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the rightful foundation for all social and political action, and rejects a priori the separation of church and state that is the lynchpin of secularism.35 Thus, while

a new Constitution implemented in 1979 finally legally formalized the principle of “religious freedom” and the separation of church and state, the Constitution also declares that “the State recognizes the Catholic Church as an important element of Peruvian historic, cultural and moral formation and cooperates with it.”36

Also marking the beginning of Peru’s ambiguous status as a modern, “confessional” yet nominally secular nation was the government’s signing, in 1980, of an official agreement or “concordat” with the Holy See.37

Alongside this ambiguous secularization, neo-liberalist reforms and successive

campaigns of urban renewal in Lima in the 1990s have resulted in the privatiza-

tion of public properties and natural resources, and an alteration of the meaning of public, civic space, as exemplified by various attempts (through, for example, vast

projects of architectural restoration, or the expulsion of street vendors) to recu-

perate the “lost splendor”38 of its colonial center. In this context, the Señor de los Milagros procession today is a defiant, lavish enactment of vibrant, syncretic di-

vine presence within and across contested (and ambivalently and unstably secular)

public city space. The accord between Church and State in Peru, and the meanings

of the categories of the secular and the religious, are made and re-made through constant negotiation, a friction that contributes to the potency of public Catholic 35 Cipriani is also a member of Opus Dei, a semi-secretive rightist Catholic organization active in Peru since the late 1950s. Another prominent conservative movement in Peru is Sodalitium Christianae Vitae. Catalina Romero, “Religión y espacio público: catolicismo y sociedad civil en el Perú,” in Religión y Espacio Público, ed. Catalina Romero (CISEPA, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú [PCUP], 2008), 17-36.

36 See Article 50, Political Constitution of Peru (Congress of the Republic, September 2009), 18, http://www.congreso.gob.pe/Docs/files/CONSTITUTION_27_11_2012_ENG.pdf.

37 The Concordat guarantees clergy salaries similar to state employees and exemption from certain taxes, and that Catholicism remains the only religion taught in public schools. Romero, “Religión y espacio público." Carlos Valderrama Adriansen, “Religion and the Secular State in Peru,” in Religion and the Secular State: National Reports, eds. J. Martínez-Torrón and W. Cole Durham, Jr. (Provo, Utah: International Center for Law and Religion Studies, Brigham Young University, 2010), 549-557. The dominance of integral Catholicism and its authoritarian nature belies the internal diversity within the institutional Church in Peru, which saw the rise of liberation theology and the intervention of Church representatives in public political arenas, sometimes in opposition to the government.

38 Gandolfo, The City at its Limit.

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performances in Lima like the Señor’s main October procession. Thus, while many

city residents do not attend or participate in the celebration of the Señor, the President and other politicians make a special point of doing so. Below we move on to examine why this is so.

THE PROCESSION The procession of El Señor de los Milagros is what Mauss called a “total social fact” (fait social total), one of those unique phenomena that condense domains of

significance across a wide range of social and cultural spheres. The Señor is a gift, a sacrifice that flows into both affective and material economies, the complexity of the celebration posing a considerable challenge in ethnographic terms. Our ac-

count below balances some important details of the procession—an overwhelming experience for either a devotee or a researcher—with attention to its overall mediating form, concomitant modes of sociality, and aesthetic tone.

Recent scholarship on pilgrimage-like phenomena like the Señor de los Milagros procession has moved beyond the classic Turnerian universalist structural paradigm

fixated on the liminality, holism and communitas seen to underlie such events,39 or the “contestation” analytical frame focused on the divisiveness and struggle between secular and religious discourses,40 to regard pilgrimage as an event imbri-

cated in a much larger and semiotically layered field. Simon Coleman for example, has pointed out the limitations of both communitas or contestation perspectives

in their common conceptualization of pilgrimage as a unique and bounded sacred context and category of action, which has placed it in, “an ‘apart’ culture within a

theoretical and ethnographic ghetto.”41 The result, Coleman underlines, is a prob-

lematic elision of pilgrimage’s articulation with processes of social and political

transformation both within the lives of individual pilgrims or devotees and within 39 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Transaction Publishers, 1969).

Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).

40 E.g., Eade and Sallnow, Contesting the Sacred.

41 Coleman, “Pilgrimage as Trope,” 186. See also Simon Coleman, “Do you believe in pilgrimage?: Communitas, contestation and beyond,” Anthropological Theory 2, no. 3 (2002): 355-368, https:// doi.org/10.1177/1463499602002003805. Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman, Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism (University of Illinois Press, 2004).

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a wider cultural, institutional, and material landscape. We agree with Coleman’s

criticisms of the conceptual ghettoizing tendencies in the theorization of pilgrim-

age, but aim to push this critical approach even further by highlighting the unique, rich baroque semiotic fabric of the Señor de los Milagros procession as situated within the ideological shifts within the broader secularizing context of neo-liberal Peru and within the Catholic Church at local, national, and global scales.

At many world-renowned, mass Catholic pilgrimage shrines in Latin America and elsewhere (e.g., the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City), the divine image awaits visitors passively at an altar or other sacred site. Similar to a pattern seen in other

saint and festival celebrations throughout the Catholic world, however, the Señor

de los Milagros commemoration sees the saint image literally take leave of the church (in Lima, the Templo de las Nazarenas) his “residence” (hogar) during most

of the year and, on top of his elaborately adorned litter or anda, moves under the

safeguard of the Hermanos through the core of Lima, only to return at the end of the two days to his symbolic “home.”42

The procession of the Señor de los Milagros affects not only individual pilgrims as

part of a trajectory of personal devotion as people seek out the Señor for favours, for healing, or to fulfill a promesa or vow. People may come to accompany the

image for only part of the procession or for several hours at a stretch. The event is also a (controlled) rupture in the daily life in civil, religious and political spheres

in which these spheres blend, and the profile of the city is thereby transformed visually, symbolically, and materially. Limeños hang purple balloons, images and banners from the balconies of homes or on businesses aligning the streets. Traffic

is re-routed, wreaking havoc and eliciting complaints from many members of the

general public. The celebration is a cultural performance in the most capacious 42 In Lima there are actually two images of the Señor de los Milagros: the original painted image is in the Church of the Nazarenas, and is visited throughout the year by pilgrims from all over the world, while the image of the Señor that moves in the procession is a replica or surrogate of this original painted image. This replica, and the Holy anda or litter on which it sits, remain housed in a special room within the church. Politicians and members of elite families request private audiences with the Señor to pray and request his blessings. At one moment in the year the two images are side by side, an occasion that attracts more visitors since anyone is allowed to touch, even if briefly, the image and the anda. Gómez Torres, “The Procession of the Señor de los Milagros,” 32-33.

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Figure 2: Map showing the route of the procession on October 18, 2017.

From a pamphlet issued by the Hermandad de las Nazarenas and the Archdiocese of Lima.

sense, stimulating local trade in traditionally associated items such as small images

of the Señor, estampitas (printed saint images), purple habits and veils, and foods such as the iconic sweet pastries or turrones.43 The procession is replicated at various local and regional scales throughout the country, and in Lima, in schools, business-

es, hospitals, and prisons. The Señor de los Milagros becomes the leading topic of local newscasts, and his image is splashed across the front pages of newspapers and

magazines sold everywhere on stands and shops across the city. During the “Purple

Month” of October, football teams stake their claim on the Señor for good fortune in their matches. Reproductions of his image appear in homes, cars, businesses and taxis. Narratives of the devout—thanks or petitions made to the Señor by individuals, families, organizations, and companies—proliferate in the newspapers, and are

further examples of the way that the devotional culture of Señor extends into all domains of everyday life.44

The procession is an assault on the senses: the flows and eddies of the multitude; the procession’s plodding, laconic pace; the ever-cycling mournful, sonorous, plain-

tive music; the vivid, sumptuous splendor of flowers and sea of bodies uniformly

clothed in purple and white lace; the thick clouds and pungency of incense, all within the shabby elegance of the historic center of Lima itself. In this unfolding 43 Our point is that “cultural performance” does not preclude such commercial elements as part of the web of relationships and flows of significance and value encompassed by the celebration.

44 Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude.

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ritual drama, the Señor—alive and interactive—is a central actor and interlocutor.

He is “charged” (in all senses) as the consummate mediator, joining the individual bodies of Limeños (and national body of Peruvians) of all classes and races. He is addressed in the procession not as “just” an image, a mimetic copy or representation

of “something else,” but as a vibrant, sentient entity. Along his path of movement, the Señor engages in a dialogue with devotees, and they welcome him with affectionate and reverential greetings and thanks: “Fuerte el aplauso para el Señor de

los Milagros!” (Let’s give strong applause for the Lord of Miracles!); or “Le damos

gracias por el amor de la familia, por la salud…” (We give him thanks for the love of our family, for our good health…). Thus, without saying anything, the Señor communicates volumes. He is shown love, devotion, passion, and respect and, according

to Limeños we spoke to, he returns it in abundance, bestowing on devotees the gift of his spectacular presence and divine blessing. He moves, greets, and sometimes

interacts with other saints (e.g., the Virgen de Santa Rosa de Lima, the Virgen de Corchacas, and San Martin de Porres), with whom the Señor engages in a dynam-

ic, gestural mutual salutation. He is also said to “sleep” on the night of October 18 (the first main procession day) in the Church of Carmen in the popular, poor Lima

neighborhood known as Los Barrios Altos. Adding to this conflation of divine

aura and everyday familiarity, Señor is both the Spanish version of “Mister” or “Sir,” but it is also “Lord,” denoting his sacred status. The saint is spoken of as “visiting” each place where he stops, and he is greeted with terms of endearment—my Padre, Mi Viejo (my Old Man) or Papa Lindo (Beautiful Father), Nuestro Cristo Moreno

(Our Brown Christ)—as people welcome him as a beloved and extra-ordinary (i.e., sacred) guest. At each of the Señor’s programmed official stops, he receives an of-

ficial homage (homenaje), and act of tribute, which consists of an offering (ofrenda) of a welcoming speech by representatives, and an instrumental or choral musical

performance, from “criollo” or “chicha” (popular genres blending African, European, and Andean music), to classical genres, and extravagant flower bouquets.

The Señor de los Milagros, this Lord of Miracles, is a transcendent yet immanent

and earthly presence that is nurtured and re-nurtured during his traversal through

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sea of purple bodies of the Hermanos synchronized along the long and slow path, the heavy odor of the plumes of incense, in the tears that can be seen in so many devotees, and in the majestic gold- and silver-laced image of the Señor. The pro-

cession then is solemn but not reserved, both hugely public and painfully intimate; its atmosphere at times loud and intense, at others, calm and peaceful, even almost silent.

Within the elements of anti-structure in this extra-ordinary event—its disruption of the routine, pace, tone and texture of everyday urban life in Lima—a rigid structure also prevails, exemplified by members of the Hermandad who are responsible

for carrying out the core events of the procession.45 If the Señor de los Milagros

is the star of this ritual show, the Brotherhood (composed of around 6,000 members—men and women) distinguishes itself from the crowd as the event’s central collective actor. It performs, at least for the duration of the Señor’s recorrido or perambulation, a microcosm of harmonious yet hierarchical order. The procession is tightly orchestrated, with members of the national police corps (PNP), other

municipal police officers and security personnel, sometimes even soldiers, strictly maintaining the separation between members of the crowd and those of the Her-

mandad by means of a thick rope or soga. Thus, the soga marks an arbitrary dividing

line between the potentially unruly crowd outside of it, and the sacred space inside, focused on the Señor’s litter or anda, and the group or cuadrilla of Hermanos bearing it at any given time.

The strongly hierarchical internal order and hermetically sealed exclusive nature of the Hermandad (Brotherhood) de las Nazarenas can be seen as reproducing a

certain kind of Catholicism which mirrors certain deeply entrenched moral ideals of traditional Peruvian society. These principles of order extend along the lines of

a starkly gendered division of labor in the procession. Brothers of the Hermandad conduct themselves according to masculine ideals of physical might, stoicism, and 45 Here we draw on Turner’s conceptualization of structure as “an ordered and rule-governed arrangements of relationships between groups and institutions and between statuses and roles that persists through time despite changes in the identity of individuals who occupy particular positions” (in Badone and Roseman, Intersecting Journeys, 3.), and anti-structure as aspects of ritual that reflect a liminal freedom or release through a behavioral or symbolic inversion or subversion of the constraints that structure imposes. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process.

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honor. Carrying the Señor is a matter of physical strength but also encompasses an

experience of suffering and penitence (sacrifice) that is profoundly corporeal and sensual. In the words of one Hermano, who had carried the anda in the early morn-

ing and would continue his accompaniment until the next afternoon, “Afterwards there is no pain, you don’t feel tired; it’s magic.” (“Luego no hay dolor, uno no siente cansado. Es magia.”)

As sahumadores (incense blowers) and cantoras (hymn-singers), the veiled wom-

en in the procession perform with a different kind of sacrificial devotional body, walking, sometimes barefoot, slowly backwards in rows for hours at a time before the image, limpiando (cleaning or purifying) the path of the Señor, singing his

praises, as they gaze at the image of the Virgen de la Nube painted on the other

side of the Cristo image that is the Señor. “The Señor is rarely without song; the

whole route we sing to him, the whole route,” Gisela, the leader of the Cantoras explained to us. “For all of us the Nazarene [el nazareno] is a marvel; the emotion is indescribable My Señor! He is omnipotent, he softens the heart of even the toughest [mas rudo] men and women, the toughest human being.”46

At many of the pre-designated anda stops there is a change in the cuadrilla, follow-

ing a script of elaborate gestures and acts (the placement of the litter on the ground, the removal and replacement of the candles and flowers, the arranging of the new cuadrilla of Hermanos and the raising of the litter), down to the last detail. On

occasion the raising of the anda departs from the predictable script if the Brothers’ raising of the massive weight has not been perfectly executed and a suspenseful

wobbling ensues, only to be recovered moments later and synchrony reestablished.

Having borne the anda for the length of their assigned trajectory of a hundred me-

ters (roughly an hour), and thus fulfilling (cumplir) their obligation, the Hermanos walk toward the back of the soga and then out of the core area.

Thus, by means of a continual series of repeated ritual action, a scripted and pat-

terned constant flow of people, objects (candles, flowers), the Señor performs a poetic mapping of sensorily vibrant divine space. Yet as mentioned, the spaces 46 Interview with GF, leader of the Cantoras, Hermandad de las Nazarenas, May 2017.

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through which the Señor moves are tightly managed in terms of public accessi-

bility of the public to the anda. The controlled division and occupation of space in

Lima’s civic core creates an impression that the Señor de los Milagros is a seamless extension of ecclesiastical property and identity, even while the diverse devotional and spatial practices of other participants along the route (e.g., the impromptu

cheers, and shout-outs to the Señor as he passes, the intimate personal prayers

and petitions whispered in his presence, devotees who sneak into the sacred cordoned off area around the anda to get closer to the Señor, etc.) may seem to contest this total control. The procession can thus be seen to encompass a continuous

vacillation between elements of “timeless” ritual communitas and apparent fixedness of structure, and others that signal toward the heterogeneity of Limeños’ ex-

perience of the Señor, even if this diversity almost never translates into people’s outright acts of opposition within the event itself.

MIRACULOUS ACTS OF LEGITIMATION The procession thus allows a constant and compressed interaction between Peru-

vians, the Church, state institutions, and the Señor himself. The event is organized over several months by the Hermandad del Señor de los Milagros, yet this coor-

dination is supervised by the Archbishop of Lima (in the years of our fieldwork, Cardinal Luis Cipriani). The Señor’s planned trajectory changes slightly from year

to year: petitions for stops of the anda are vetted first at the Archdiocese by the Archbishop, who then chooses what he deems as the appropriate stops (24 in total) before they can be made official.

Many public and political institutions appear during the procession offering hom-

enajes, each with their own agenda, and the Señor can be seen as the mediator or judge of these intentions. This highly visible and conspicuous space possesses a

moral resonance that has the transcendent referent of the Señor de los Milagros, making the event is a very public site or arena of interlocution: rich rhetorical

statements are made at each stop of the Señor, when people take advantage of the moment to thank the saint for his protection and blessings, and to solicit more

for the year to come; the saint is asked to “illuminate those governing,” “protect

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procession emphasize how collective fates are placed in the hands of the Señor de

los Milagros: the good performance (desempeño) of the institutions, the well-being

of the economy, and so on—in other words, the life-blood of the development of the country of Peru as a whole.

In this context, the space of the miraculous serves its role of sanctifying and le-

gitimating political action, as a potentiality at least. On the Señor’s sacred stage, everyone’s behavior is also scrutinized and judged carefully: there are firm, deeply entrenched expectations of how one should demonstrate respect to the saint, and

so the site becomes a space for evaluating people’s moral worth. The pragmatics of this ritual context demand that each interlocutor be recognized as a visible and

credible addressee of the Señor, to insert themselves in a particular language of

identification vis-à-vis the saint, and to appeal to the Señor de los Milagros, as interlocutor, to accept their petition. With their discursive actions, such speakers can be seen to claim public space through a delicate balance of improvisation and

routine, a script of sanctioned and expected techniques and gestures. If such public

acts of discourse deviate from acceptable themes of address (as illustrated by the case of the CTP union representative mentioned at the beginning of this article)

their speakers run the risk of being rebuked or even ostracized. For such moments

represent communication ruptures, a break-down of the tacit, delicate pact of sacrifice and exchange—one of words, of affect, of physical touch and acts of penitence

and devotion. These ruptures expose the heavy weight of the Señor in the creation and disciplining of political credibility and integrity, and of moral Peruvian (Catholic) subjects.

At certain stops (paradas) on the official route expectations of propriety of comportment are particularly elevated, for these are sites most closely associated with

social status and state/Church authority. Nowhere is more exemplary of this point

than the Señor’s stops in the Plaza de Armas (Plaza Mayor) of Lima, where Peru’s religious and political powers are concentrated. When the Señor arrives at the Pla-

za on October 18 (the first of the main procession days), he makes stops, in turn, at the Governmental Palace (where he is received by the President), the Munici-

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of Lima, and the Cathedral (where the Archbishop delivers an important speech), and then the national Congress building, where he is paid homage by the congresistas (congressmen and women). At this stage in the anda’s route, many people have accumulated in the Plaza, and several media units are erected just in front

of the governmental palace, the symbolic seat of national government. Here, the

close physical juxtaposition of buildings and of representatives of Church and State makes manifest a symbiosis of religious and secular powers that, as we discuss, goes deeper than mere appearance.

When the Señor arrives at the governmental palace, the President (accompanied by his cabinet members) is expected to come out to welcome him and pay him homage—presenting him flowers and sometimes even kneeling before him—and customarily stepping in to help carry the litter for a few minutes. While such displays of deference to religion and religious-political collaboration would likely evoke

upset in more virulently anti-clerical yet still predominantly Catholic countries in Latin America such as Mexico, where liberalist secular ideologies shape public

opinion more strongly, here in Peru such gestures of pious humility are part of the

stuff of the everyday. Our point here however is not so much the flagrant openness of this apparent collusion, but rather its strongly moral aura. Such formal, official

greetings made to the Señor are utterances and actions that index this particular space of Lima as part of the core of national authority.

In this potent encounter of the respective heads of earthly and heavenly realms, the

actions and behavior of the president are closely monitored and subject to public judgment. Since the president makes no public verbal greeting, but remains entirely silent throughout his interaction with the Señor, his “proper” or competent exe-

cution of expected rites and his conduct as a faithful devotee are especially salient.

This point in the procession is covered carefully by local and national media outlets, who tend to focus on matters seen to demonstrate apt moral character: for example, did the president carry the image? Did he don the purple tunic? Was he respectful

before the Señor? Behavior deemed appropriate becomes the stuff of photo-ops, while breaches of expected comportment are severely condemned. In 2012, during the first time we witnessed the procession, in President Ollanta Humala’s second JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM

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year in power, he and First Lady Nadine Heredia exited the Palacio de Gobierno to Figure 3.

Screenshot of website

greet the Señor over ten minutes “late,” and were subject to boos, jeers and whistles showing former from the crowd, and harsh criticism both in news stories and via social media. One President Ollanta

Humala carrying the

man in the crowd outside the Palacio commented loudly: “He [Humala] thinks anda of the Señor that even God is going to wait for him!”; “He lacks manners!” yelled another.

The gaff was also seized upon by television and newspapers, which sported headlines such as, “Ollanta Humala and Nadine Heredia booed [pifiados] in the pro-

cession of the Brown Christ [el Cristo Moreno].”47 One tweet we read that day said, “What a terrible boo-ing Humala and the First Lady received, after leaving in the lurch the Purple Christ! Ambition and power made you blind!” The next year, in

2013, Humala appeared quickly from the governmental palace and that year even carried the Señor, thereby redeeming himself in the eyes of the public. And over the remaining years of his tenure (which ended in July 2016), it seems he made

sure to fulfil his compromiso (obligation) to the saint, down to the last detail. There is a vicarious excitement here, in this reversal of roles, the sight of the head of 47 “Ollanta Humala y Nadine Heredia pifiados en procesión del Cristo Moreno,” Peru 21, October 18, 2012, https://peru21.pe/politica/ollanta-humala-nadine-heredia-pifiados-procesion-cristo-moreno-50882.

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de los Milagros with members of the Fourth Cuadrilla of the Hermandad de las Nazarenas, outside the Palacio de Gobierno, Lima, Peru, October 18, 2014.

Source: Peru.com.

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government deferring to the Lord of Miracles, the savior of the poor and powerless. Yet while the rules of gift and sacrifice enjoined in the performance are accessible to all, they must be followed in an exact manner.

The Catholic Church too uses the space of the miraculous to couch its political

statements as transcendent, absolute Truth. We cite one polemical homily Archbishop Roberto Cipriani delivered in 2015 during the main procession day (October 18) to illustrate such a deployment of miracle talk:

The Señor de los Milagros has passed through all the stages of our fatherland

[patria]. He has seen governments change, whether Peru has won in football.

The Señor de los Milagros is the great witness of the history of Perú, that’s why we love him so much, because he is Peruvian. [….]

We ask the Señor de los Milagros, protect the family, so that they may be close to their children and grandparents and so the family may be the central

place [el lugar central] of the entire country: the family, made up of father, mother, children, grandchildren, grandparents. The Señor de los Milagros wants

that miracle. That the family rises again, united, and so we say to him: “have compassion.”

The Señor de los Milagros takes care of human life. We don’t want to treat any-

one badly, but we cannot say that abortion is a right. Abortion is not a right, it’s a crime. So we ask the Señor de los Milagros, please make for me that great miracle: “abortion no, life yes.” These are normal things: life, the sick, the mar-

riage of a man and a woman. The Church, with much love [cariño] is holding

out its hand to everyone to help us, but it is not saying that we should keep quiet about what Jesus has taught us.48 [author emphases]

Cipriani’s words here address the Señor as an interlocutor, the recipient of his solicitation. Yet by means of statements such as “The Señor de los Milagros wants 48 Homily of Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, “Santa Misa por la Nación y la familia peruana,” Plaza Mayor de Lima, Sunday, October 18, 2015, http://www.arzobispadodelima.org/blog/2015/10/18/ homilia-en-el-santa-misa-por-la-nacion-y-la-familia-peruana.

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that miracle…,” Cipriani can also be seen to ventriloquize the Señor, conveying

the saint’s (supposed) message in his stead. In this discourse, and many others, the Archbishop uses the public space of the celebration of the Señor de los Milagros to

elaborate on the Roman Catholic Church’s current theological discourse of “life,” centered on the heterosexual family, as the basic building block of a locally and nationally rooted Peruvian way of life.49 In this and other homilies, the Archbishop speaks to Peruvian Catholics (both in Lima and the millions in Peruvian mi-

grant communities around the world) through the image of the Señor, and bodily, affective metaphors such as love (amor, cariño, compassion) and the (nuclear, heterosexual) family, the privileged unit for the reproduction of (“integrist”) Catholic faith and moral society.50

The above examples illustrate how the Catholic space of the Señor’s procession

both defies and counters the public “secular” space of the state and at the same time, articulates and upholds it. The question remains, however, of how to explain the

evident concern by political leaders to follow through with the enjoined protocol of the event. Our survey of television and newspaper coverage during our research

brought up several news stories commenting on other politicians, from judges, to ministers and members of congress, who have made a point of being seen to take

part in the ritual, including all of Peru’s presidents during two decades of military dictatorship and since then.51 Alan García (president 1985 to 1990; and from 2006

to 2011), often carried the image as an Hermano (for almost fifty years) in the

9th Cuadrilla. Politician Alberto Andrade carried the Señor during his first year as mayor of Lima in 1996. Yet the Señor de los Milagros also serves as a theolog-

ico-political instrument even outside the official days of his annual celebration.

Few Peruvians can forget, for example, May of 1990 when, during a heated pres-

idential campaign, then Archbishop Augusto Vargas authorized the “taking out” of the saint in a procession protesting the support given by evangelical Christian 49 For an explanation of the “culture of life” in the Church’s theology of the “New Evangelization,” see Valentina Napolitano, Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.5422/ fordham/9780823267484.001.0001.

50 Norget, “Mediatization of the Miraculous.”

51 Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975); Francisco Morales Bermúdez (1975 to 1980).

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groups to Fujimori’s presidential candidacy. The event was firmly disapproved of

by progressivist Catholic bishops who accused the Archbishop of using the Señor in promoting a “crusade-like” Catholicism (catolicismo de cruzada)52—once again exposing the cracks in the apparent coherence of local and national Peruvian Catholicism and in the Church’s dominance of Lima’s public sphere.

Such acts would seem to support our argument that the procession of the Señor

de los Milagros is a public performance of the miraculous, a resource created

from the dialectic of history and theology, which is key in the public affirmation of the rightness and moral legitimacy of rule, or even simply the assertion of a

political position. Again, an opposition between structure and anti-structure is at play, for such performances of piety and moral rectitude contrast with the reality

beyond the purple curtain of the Señor de los Milagros. For example, both presidents whose tenure spanned our research (2011-2017)—Ollanta Humala and Pedro Kuczynski—are currently, respectively, in prison (Humala) and a fugitive from

justice (Kuczynski) for human rights crimes or corruption.53 Humala’s predecessor, Alejandro Toledo (2001 to 2006) was also entangled in a corruption scandal, and in April 2019 committed suicide in the United States before he could be extradited

back to Peru to face trial. Alan García is currently under investigation for “financial irregularities” during his two presidential terms. Garcia’s second presidency

followed, of course, that of Alberto Fujimori, Peru’s autocratic ruler from 1990 to 2000, who in 2009 was sentenced to 25 years in jail for human rights breaches in

the war against the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas, and was later convicted of embezzlement and corruption.

We bring up the cases above since they point to something striking in the apparent normalization in Peru of such instances of crisis, scandal, hypocrisy and betrayal at 52 Evangelical Christian members of Congress are also expected to pay respects to the Señor. (Dr. Véronique Lacaros, personal communication, Lima, Peru.)

53 In 2017, Humala and his wife were arrested on charges of corruption and currently are serving 18 months of pre-trial detention while being investigated on money-laundering and conspiracy charges. Humala’s successor Pedro Kuczynski resigned in 2018, just ahead of the public exposure of another corruption scandal. See, for e.g., Sonia Goldenberg, “Does Peru need a Special Prison for Former Presidents?” New York Times, August 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/ opinion/does-peru-need-a-special-prison-just-for-ex-presidents.html.

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the same time as these politicians’ elaborate, carefully regimented displays of hu-

mility and piety before the Señor. Even with the regular publicizing in the media

of politicians’ alleged acts of corruption and other ethical breaches, including those of the president, in our experience open articulations during the procession of criticism or opposition to such public performances of devotion were extremely rare.

The miracle and the miraculous thus express both the limitation of power and its legitimation. Public performative solicitations—in word or deed—of the blessing

or help of the Señor de los Milagros made by such political figures are only entreaties, not perlocutional statements. In Peru, as elsewhere, the miracle makes sover-

eign or divine power evident by means of the arrest or interruption it represents in

the normal or natural law governing the mundane order; it refers to an exceptional, unassailable reality and truth whose potency lies in invisibility, in faith. Miracle-talk

in this sense can be understood as a “sacrament of power” in Agamben’s terms; like the oath, miracle-talk is “situated at the junction between religion and politics,” a speech act “that only possesses a signifying content, without stating anything in

itself. Its function is the relation it establishes between the word uttered and the

potential invoked,”54 the potential here residing in the “efficacity” of the connection with the realm of the divine.55 The invocation of lo milagroso through miracle-talk

by Peruvian politicians thus appears as a sincere demonstration of faith, a sincerity not manifest by behavior or actions in the mundane world, but rather in the ritual space of the Señor, which appears to allow a moral status to “stick,” even if not permanently, to its speaker.

CONCLUSION As a staple performance of Peruvian national and Catholic tradition, the annual

procession of the Señor de los Milagros in Lima condenses struggles between multiple social sectors, even if these struggles may never be openly articulated during

the event itself. By analyzing the procession in relation to socio-political trans-

formations, we have pointed out how it cannot be understood as a boundable, inherently unique sacred phenomenon. The procession of the Señor is not merely 54 Benaviste, in Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, trans.

Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010) 11; emphases added.

55 Bussolini, “Critical Encounter.”

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a timeless reiteration of an annual religious ritual, but a baroque Catholic perfor-

mance with specific affective registers and a multi-sensorial materiality of power which operate on the bodies of individual participants within Lima’s vibrant urban

landscape. Through processes of repetition, the differentiation of space and actors, and the privileging of certain ritual acts and discourses, the procession projects an elaborate baroque worlding of ideal Catholicism. The resulting potent ritual defies

certain neo-liberal and other democratizing forces in Lima that push toward the recognition of religious diversity and a stronger civil society, and laicización56 or a

greater separation of religion (i.e., as represented by the Catholic Church) from education, public affairs and state governance.

We have focused on lo milagroso and miracle-talk as key aspects of legitimation processes for various social actors. Miracles hover at the tenuous fold between

the visible and the invisible, the potential and the impossible, of inner, subjective personal experience and “exterior” socially accepted extraordinary reality.57 As

a mediation of personal, intimate faith, the framework or field of lo milagroso is an ambiguous experiential ground as it draws from both popular sensibilities and theological, doctrinal categories and logics.58 The Peruvian Church appeals to lo

milagroso, a discursive genre and an affective tone of experience, as a way of producing a certain visceral register of Catholic experience and mobilizing the mys-

tical foundations of the Church’s moral and social authority.59 But a harnessing of

the potency of miraculousness surrounding saints in this way is not just a Peruvian

phenomenon, since it is part of the modus operandi of today’s Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, post-Vatican II teachings, policies and practices point toward the

Church’s reinvested energy in a neo-baroque promotion of saints and saintly relics in the mapping of the contemporary Catholic regime.60

Miracle-talk and other public interactions of actors of the state with the Señor de 56 Roberto J. Blancarte, "Secularism and Secularization," in The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, eds. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen C. Dove, trans. José Adrian Barragán (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 331-345.

57 Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude.

58 Norget, “Mediatization of the Miraculous.” Margarita Zires, “Los imaginarios del milagro y la política,” Versión 17 (2006): 131-160.

59 Norget “Mediatization of the Miraculous.”

60 Kristin Norget, “Blood, Wax and Papal Potencies: Neo-Baroque Catholic Relics in Mexico,” forthcoming in Material Religion (2019).

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los Milagros, especially those of the president, expose the merging of (Catholic)

theology (transcendence) and its immanence in Peru’s earthly institutions. As “a situation in which God decides to suspend or contravene the normally operating

laws of nature,”61 the miracle exemplifies Agamben’s idea of the state of exception, key to sovereign power. The current increasing incorporation of media technologies

in the production of public Catholic performances like the Peruvian Señor de los Milagros procession and other saint celebrations in Latin America allows lo mila-

groso to multiply its effects through augmented dimensions, potentially reconfiguring in the process both subjects and publics. Given these circumstances, we need

to take seriously the mode of the miraculous, including its potential for fortifying transcendent authority, as a critical source of social and political power.

61 Bussolini, “Critical Encounter,” 119.

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