Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3161751

1527-1900

Aaron Ansell,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

When tragedy strikes in the dry hinterlands (sertão) of rural Northeast Brazil and human life hangs in the balance, afflicted people petition saints to intercede on their behalf, promising them something tangible in return. The promise affirms an oft-heard cliché in the sertão: “A vida é uma troca” (Life is an exchange). Yet whereas the currencies of secular exchange between patrons and clients consist of votes, favors, and access to state services, the spiritual currency by which one repays a saint takes the form of a homemade effigy, or milagre (miracle).Lindsey King's Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil offers ethnographic insight into the material culture of folk Catholicism by exploring the social life of the milagres and the pilgrims who deliver them to the famous shrine to St. Francis of Assisi, located in the town of Canindé, Ceará, about three hours inland from Fortaleza. Trained largely as a folklorist, King's ethnographic eye is attuned to the intersection between these objects' materiality, the legends surrounding them, and the personal narratives of affliction that invest them with meaning. These milagres, known throughout the Catholic world as ex-votos, from the Latin for “from a vow” (p. 11), are typically fashioned out of wood, plaster, clay, cloth, beeswax, or molded wax. They are shaped into icons of the very bodily afflictions that pilgrims credit St. Francis with curing — injured hands, legs, and heads, cancerous breasts or uteruses, and herniated navels, among others. Despite the time and effort that goes into their production, it is not so much the ex-voto that the pilgrims prize as sacred as it is the divine promise itself (pp. 117, 128). Most of the ex-votos are burned after they are deposited in the House of Miracles adjacent to Canindé's basilica (p. 29). The ex-voto seems to be a currency of acknowledgment specified for a particular transaction. Once deposited, it does not retain any value for recirculation. By tracing the social life of these objects, King explores how pilgrims narrate experiences of sickness, violence, and injury through the affective idiom of divine petition and gratitude to St. Francis, and she traces the solidarities that form among pilgrims who realize their shared conditions of oppression as they travel together to Canindé.King conceptualizes the ex-votos “as symbols and markers of physical health as well as of social health,” the study of which “illustrates the marginalization of the pilgrim population” (p. 13). The divine promises that they repay emerge against the background of collapsed patron-client relationships and the general failure of the Brazilian state to provide decent health services (pp. 7, 99, 100–101). In this context, St. Francis becomes “the physician, psychiatrist, friend, and patrão who will never desert them” (p. 132). King further suggests that milagres also “serve the therapeutic function of allowing these unfortunate people a way to vent their anger . . . without fear of recrimination by the dominant class” (p. 124). Yet King devotes little energy to her interpretive framework or to her engagement with scholarly literatures. Her main ambition is the collection of an empirical inventory: “I have recorded the miracle stories . . . as they told them to me” (p. 3).Still, King's account inspires important interpretive questions about the pilgrims' “silent rebellion against the religious hierarchy” of the formal church and the putative anticlericalism of the northeastern people (p. 13). She notes, for instance, that sertanejo pilgrims insist on identifying their saint by his local designator, “St. Francis of Wounds” (São Francisco das Chagas), rather than using his ecclesiastic title, “St. Francis of Assisi.” This made me wonder about the tension between the anticlericalism of the dispersed pilgrims and the “great sense of loyalty to the Church” among Canindé's residents who are succored by the Franciscan priests who dispensed an “endless supply of jobs” (p. 19). Is there an ideological split between pilgrims and residents? Or do both groups distinguish between the Franciscan order and the ecclesiastic hierarchy? On a related note, King alludes to the residents' expressed feeling that the local government “is jealous of the power of the Church” (p. 115), but these same residents ascribe (at least relative) value to local politicians when voting for them. Given that people's statements about their dealings with various authorities are highly contextual, broader inquiry into the pilgrims' other spheres of reciprocity may have tempered King's claim that “in all cases, the total credit for solving the problem was given to St. Francis, even when assistance had also come from other sources” (p. 19).With Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil, Lindsey King has made a significant empirical contribution to the ethnographic record of Brazilian folk Catholicism. The book reads like a compendium of well-written and nicely organized field notes, full of fascinating ethnographic detail and suggestions for how future scholarship might explore the intersection among material culture, popular religion, and the structural crises of human well-being in Northeast Brazil. As one who is interested in such matters, I am grateful for the material that she has provided.