Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil by Lindsey King (review)

For those fascinated by miraculous cures within the Catholic tradition, the pilgrimage sites that celebrate them, and the pilgrims who come there to testify to their miraculous experiences, this book will provide a very satisfying read. Lindsay King, an anthropologist with training as a folklorist, spent 15 years observing activities and interviewing pilgrims at the shrine of São Francisco das Chagas (St. Francis of the Wounds) in Canindé, a pilgrimage site in the impoverished rural backlands of the state of Ceara in Northeast Brazil. She focuses on the votive offerings or ex-votos (known in Portuguese as milagres), artifacts brought by pilgrims as thanks for their miraculous cures. Drawing on Appadurai’s formulation of “the social life of things,” she uses these objects of material culture as a focal point for exploring the pilgrims’ stories, the sources of their ill health and suffering, the underlying belief system that supports their practices, and the aesthetics of this folk art.

King notes that ex-votos are mimetic, intended to reproduce the organ, or the person who suffered the illness. Modeled in wood, clay, wax, cloth, or styrofoam, they may be made by the pilgrims themselves, commissioned to carvers, or factory-made, and they are offered to St. Francis of Wounds as payment of the pilgrim’s promise (promessa) to the saint in exchange for his resolution of their illness or problem. Their value, as pilgrims stressed to her in interviews, lies not in these objects themselves but in the act of bringing them to St. Francis. Pilgrims place them in a bin in the House of Miracles attached to the Canindé church; a few end up on display, or even in museums or private collections, but most are soon destroyed to make way for others. Not considered sacred in themselves, they are viewed rather as spiritual payment for successful intercession by St. Francis.

King analyzes these objects as encoding the pilgrims’ lives: replicas of body parts that index specific physical complaints; a large wooden cross carried to the shrine from afar by a man whose crushed leg St. Francis had healed; a life-size doll denoting a little girl lost and found. Pilgrims’ narratives collected at the shrine recount both individual miracles and more widely known mythic tales. These stories, repeated over generations, speak to diseases, stresses and injuries related to the pilgrims’ poverty, poor sanitation, and hard manual labor. The stories, the pilgrims’ socially marginal lives, and their frequent recourse to St. Francis of the Wounds, join them together, King suggests, in a shared world, as participants in a collective spiritual community, which she refers to as “the nation of St. Francis.” This phrase denotes their adherence to a form of folk Catholicism that lies outside the institutional Catholic Church and relies on worship in the home and belief in the efficacy of the saints rather than on the formal priesthood and rites of the Church. King claims that this constitutes a form of “silent rebellion” against the Catholic religious hierarchy and against the pilgrims’ conditions of poverty and marginalization.

Readers may find that ethnographic materials are sometimes more complex than King’s theoretical discussions allow for. For example, poverty doesn’t explain the expensive cars that bring wealthy pilgrims on Sundays to pay their promessas at the shrine. The section of the text devoted to theoretical framing of issues is very brief. Also, some comparison with the well-studied and better-known nearby pilgrimage site of Joaseiro do Norte would have enriched her analysis. Finally, given the analytic and aesthetic importance of the ex-votos, it is unfortunate that the many photographs of them in the text are poorly reproduced in black-and-white, making it difficult to appreciate their aesthetic value.

This said, King has produced a richly textured and well-written monograph. It will be especially useful to specialists in popular religious art and pilgrimages, and to students of Brazil...