Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil [1 ed.] 9780826355324, 9780826355317

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King

anthropology | latin america | religion

—Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo, coauthor of San Jacinto I: A Historical Ecological Approach to an Archaic Site in Colombia

“L

indsey king takes readers on a fascinating journey to a pilgrimage site in northeast Brazil, the city of Canindé, where visitors come from afar to visit the House of Miracles, a shrine to the miraculous Saint Francis of the Wounds. They petition or thank the saint with a homemade milagre, a small effigy, usually in wood, that represents their illness or concern: a broken leg, a concussion, an affair of the heart. Sometimes reminiscent of the Canterbury Tales or the Easter pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Holy Child of Atocha in Chimayó in northern New Mexico, this book shares King’s quest for understanding a world entirely new to her, but ancient to those who live it.” —Martha Egan, author of Mílagros: Votive Offerings from the Americas and Relicarios: Devotional Miniatures from the Americas

Lindsey King is an assistant professor of anthropology at East Tennessee State University.

isbn 978-0-8263-5531-7 90000

University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com | 800-249-7737

9 780826 355317

Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil

“T

his is a remarkable work, concise and very precise, that helps us understand the place of pilgrimage sites in the theater of human desperation.”

Lindsey King

Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil

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he religious tradition of offering anatomical votive images made of wood, clay, or metal, dating back to the pre-Christian cultures of Greece and Rome, came to the New World with European explorers. Combined with the Catholicism of the colonizers, the religious traditions of African slaves, and the spiritual practices of the native populations, such offerings are still a vital part of life in northeast Brazil. Lindsey King’s anthropological account of the use of ex-voto images focuses on the Sanctuary of St. Francis of Wounds in Canindé, in the state of Ceará in northeast Brazil, where pilgrims offer ex-votos known as milagres in payment for healing and reversal of bad fortune. King argues that the region’s marginalized citizens turn to St. Francis to replace the medical and social services that the government has failed to provide. The author’s photographs provide valuable documentation of this unique version of an ancient custom. Not only do the offerings of milagres, tangible symbols of faith, embody prayers and encode the pilgrim’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, but, as the author shows, they can reveal information about cultural domination and resistance. King’s study probes issues of art and material culture that are often overlooked in ethnography. She reveals the ex-voto tradition’s functions of reciprocity and solidarity, showing it as emblematic of the culture of its practitioners.

Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil

Li n d se y K i n g

S piritual C urrency in N ortheast B razil

u ni v ersit y of n ew mexico pr ess a lbuqu erqu e

© 2014 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2014 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 6

libr ary of congress cataloging-in-publication data King, Lindsey Spiritual currency in northeast Brazil / Lindsey King. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8263-5531-7 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8263-5532-4 (electronic) 1. Francis, of Assisi, Saint, 1182–1226—Cult—Brazil—Canindé (Ceará) 2. Canindé (Ceará, Brazil)—Religious life and customs. I. Title. BX4700.F6K56 2014 282’.8131—dc23 2014007141 All images courtesy of the author. Cover images of hand milagre and fitas courtesy of the author. Textile pattern (gtw054) courtesy of Artville Color Rhythms, Jane Nelson © 1999 Composition by Lila Sanchez Composed in Janson 10/14; Display type is Trajan

To Frei Humberto

9. Bahia

Map of Brazil, focusing on the Northeast region.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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In t roduc tion

1

Ch a p t er 1 .   Northeast

Brazil: The Largest Area of Poverty in

 South America 5 Ch a p t er 2 .   Into

the Field 16

Ch a p t er 3 .   The

Social Functions of Ex-Votos 36

Ch a p t er 4 .   Ex-Votos: Ch a p t er 5 .   Pilgrims

Aesthetics and Forms 63

and Politics 98

Ch a p t er 6 .   Conclusions 122

Appendix

133

Notes

137

Bibliography

141

Index

153

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Ack nowledgments

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his study could never have been completed without the kindness and support of many individuals. I am indebted to the freis at the Convento de Santo Antônio, who gave me a home and lasting friendship; to DeAssis, who could understand my Portuguese when no one else could; to Adalberto Barreto, who generously shared ideas and insight; and, of course, to the pilgrims who shared the stories of their miracles with me. I also want to thank my friends in Canindé, especially Verbena, Lúcia, and Aurinede, for their invaluable generosity during my field seasons. Several people read this manuscript and helped shape it. Most important is Faye Harrison, the best mentor that anyone could ask for. Benita Howell and Rosalind Hackett offered much encouragement during my first field season. Gloria Oster read several first drafts, and Melissa Schrift kept me on the mark with the final draft. My colleagues Tony Cavender, Bill Duncan, Jay Franklin, Martha Copp, Joseph Baker, Angie Marson, and Dorothy Harville offered encouragement and support on a daily basis. My student assistant, Jami Bennett, has been invaluable and a joy to work with. I want to thank Gordon Anderson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Martha Copp, then chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, for funding my last trip to Brazil and giving me time to focus on this manuscript, and Maria Costa for her help with some troublesome Portuguese phrasing. I especially ix

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want to thank John Byram, my editor at the University of New Mexico Press, for being my champion, and Merryl Sloane, my copyeditor, for smoothing out my rough edges. Last but in no way least, I thank my husband, Alan Longmire, who has done a wonderful job of keeping me sane and happy since I first learned of these milagres twenty years ago. I appreciate you all more than you know.

Introduction

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aving spent more than a decade studying a religious tradition in Northeast Brazil, I agree with the Brazilian anthropologist José Carvalho’s characterization of that country as “a great laboratory of creative and intense religious movements” (2000, 5). In laboratories, elements are distilled or change forms; different elements that are combined work together to become more potent, while other elements do not combine at all. In Brazil, I have witnessed examples of all of this. I have seen the same individuals going to Mass on Sunday and to an Afro-Brazilian temple during the week, appealing to deities from both beliefs. I have seen the same ritual manifested in different ways by different individuals hoping for similar results; they fine-tuned it to fit their particular needs. I have seen the same saint called different names by different belief groups and also by representatives of the same faith, one more dogmatic and the other more syncretistic. I have seen a community come together to celebrate a special Mass and to revere golden icons of the Church, and I have seen groups “shaping their own religious domain” (Badone 1990, 4). I am certainly not the first to say that Brazil is a land of contrasts and contradictions, nor am I the first to say that religion is rife with contestation. Almost every book written about Brazil touches on these topics.1 This book is essentially about the material culture of one belief system where there is a continuous ebb and flow of religious power. The longer I study this belief system and the art it produces, the more 1

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fluid and hard to delimit I find it. This book is about the followers of St. Francis and takes place in the shrine town of Canindé in the state of Ceará. The followers of St. Francis are for the most part found in the lower economic strata of the population. They mostly live in rural or semi-rural areas, and they all believe they have a vital one-on-one relationship with this saint. After these broad generalizations, as you will see, describing this religious practice becomes more complicated. My story begins in 1994 when I first traveled to Brazil. I have returned several times and am still just as captivated by this religious folk art tradition and the people who participate in it as I was the first time I traveled there. However, it wasn’t until I had been conducting fieldwork for some time that I realized that while my main focus of research was the folk art, it could not really be separated from the underlying beliefs. In the following pages is a documentary study of healing and hope, what the people call fé e milagres, faith and miracles, yet obviously this is not only a study of the intangible. By telling their stories and explaining their art, people shared their miraculous experiences with each other and with me, and I now share them with you. Off and on for over fifteen years, I listened to people’s stories of the miracles that St. Francis of Wounds worked on their behalf. I examined the ways they replicated these miracles in wood and clay, on paper, or in many other ways that they felt compelled to create in order to repay their part of a bargain with St. Francis. Every day, as I sat in the Casa dos Milagres, the House of Miracles, I was awed by the magnitude of human suffering, the resilience of the human spirit, and the restorative powers of human faith. I could not help but be affected. This research has been a healing experience that deepened my faith and confirmed my hopes, but that is my story. I am here to tell you theirs. These are the stories of the romeiros, the pilgrims. I have tried to place no personal judgment upon them. I have no intention or desire to refute their beliefs with scientific or medical theories, since to do so would dishonor the people who shared their miracles with me. This study is grounded in the ideas of two social scientists whose work has influenced me. The first is Lila Abu-Lughod, who promoted the concept of “ethnographies of the particular” (Abu-Lughod 1991). When searching for a methodology to record her time spent with Bedouin storytellers, she wanted to afford as much agency as possible to the men and women she worked with. Rather than analyzing the stories she was told

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and reducing them to the expected authoritative generalizations and conclusions, she left it up to the reader to take the narratives as the “truth” of the individual speakers in their own voices, thereby avoiding the typical “otherness” created by most academic investigation. In other words, it seems to me, Abu-Lughod was saying that this is what these people told her about their lives and how they do things. She was not trying to speak for all Bedouins, or even all Egyptian Bedouins, but just to represent the group of people she spoke with. In this way, I have represented the pilgrims, religious personnel, and residents of Canindé. I have recorded the miracle stories and the artistic representations of their vows and healings as they told them to me. I have recorded the way this votive tradition is enacted at the shrine of St. Francis of Wounds. This practice may or may not conform to those of other Brazilian shrines, other Franciscan shrines, or even everyone who travels to this same shrine. Making any sweeping generalizations of this practice is not my goal. All I can tell you is that this is how the people I spoke with and observed practiced this tradition. My goal is that this text help readers to gain a small understanding of and appreciation for the people who follow this religious tradition. The other individual whose work has influenced me is the French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu. His ideas regarding the production of art, what he called the “field of cultural production,” has illuminated my methodology for studying the idiosyncratic production of the mimetic votive offerings called milagres (Bourdieu 1993). The study of an art form that has a fluid sense of aesthetics and that is practiced by individuals who may only be compelled to this form of creation once in their lives is an interesting one. I have taken ideas that Bourdieu raises concerning what he termed habitus and applied them to the field of art production in Canindé. In this way I have situated the art of the milagre tradition, which is indicative of the followers of St. Francis in Canindé, within the sphere of the Catholic Church, where it functions as a reinforcement of a folk tradition operating outside the dogma of the Church and also as a symbol of identity. By operating outside the traditions of the Catholic Church, this belief system encodes the religious and social hierarchies present in the backlands of this region, where upon occasion the art produced by its practitioners is elevated to the status of folk icon, rivaling the traditional reverence usually reserved for Roman Catholic iconography.

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Northea st Br a zil The Largest Area of Poverty in South America

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ocated about a hundred kilometers inland from Fortaleza, the coastal capital of the northeastern state of Ceará, the small Roman Catholic shrine town of Canindé is situated in the harsh and infertile backlands of the sertão. Cycles of drought have historically plagued the small farmers who populate this remote rural area, which has been compared environmentally to the Australian outback. Due to the paucity of water and infertile soil, subsistence agriculture can barely be maintained. With an average life expectancy of 58.8 years, residents of the sertão have the shortest lifespan in Brazil outside of the Amazon (Araújo 2004, 34; Eakin 1997). In addition, roughly 75 percent of the population has suffered from malnutrition and related diseases, and the region has had in the past the highest incidence of infant mortality in Brazil (Eakin 1997; Nations and Rebhun 1988). This region encompasses the largest geographic area of poverty in South America. In 1998, the Economist reported that households in the sertão had an average annual gross domestic product of $2,000 (“The North-East: Politics, Water and Poverty,” 37), less than half of the domestic average, making it a political embarrassment often ignored by national and even state legislation. Perceived as an impediment to progress, until the election in 2003 of the popular Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) Northeast Brazil had been left to fend for itself as best it could, with 5

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the result being widespread migration to industrial centers in the south, instances of lawlessness overlooked by federal and state authorities, and the continuation of a cycle of poverty and dependency for the people of the region.1 With the election of Lula, who was born into poverty in the northeastern state of Sergipe, institutional policies of rural developmental aid and programs to arrest hunger began to change the face of the Northeast. Before this president, who represented the Workers Party, was elected, the reasons that this cycle of poverty was allowed to continue were directly related to an unchecked unequal distribution of power between the elites and the masses. This struggle, where historically 10 percent of the population controlled roughly 80 percent of the resources, has been an ongoing issue. From the time of Portugal’s colonization of Brazil in the 1500s, there has been a wide disparity between those with access to wealth, power, and prestige and those without. Since Brazil was settled mainly as an agricultural resource, itself a commodity, all its resources—human and otherwise—have been viewed as fodder for capitalist ventures. After the indigenous peoples proved to be inadequate as a service population, the enslavement of Africans, already an institution in Portugal, was substituted. Slavery in Brazil was particular in that new Africans were continually brought into the country. Rather than encourage the domestic reproduction of slaves, new slaves were imported. The philosophy behind this principle can be summed up in a chilling statement from Charles Wagley: “it was cheaper to import a slave than raise one” (1963, 20). As a result there was a burgeoning population of both freed and enslaved AfroBrazilians that was much larger than the number of European landowners. The imbalance of the population continues to this day, still following the colonial template of lighter-skinned people with European ancestry most often benefiting from the majority of resources and the masses of darker-skinned people making do with the rest. Large landholdings have historically been exploited for monetary gain in the international market rather than for local profit. A small system of farms developed around this vast export-centered agriculture to supply the necessary produce for local subsistence. Gradually, larger amounts of land have been used for international mono-cropping agribusinesses, leaving little to no land for domestic supply. This imbalance in the system of land tenure in Brazil has left many small farmers without

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land to farm, and the technical advances of agribusiness have left them without jobs (Menezes 2004). While in some parts of the Northeast with a greater amount of rainfall successful operations that grow cotton and other agricultural crops are starting to have success, in this part of the Northeast many of the large landholdings, fazendas, are owned by absentee landowners, and for the most part the land is underutilized as cattle ranches or left uncultivated for future speculation. These absentee owners control the regional political and economic powers. Such control results in the underrepresentation and neglect of the impoverished majority by state and national offices and has traditionally left many of the residents of the sertão dependent upon interpersonal relationships to maximize their security and minimize their risks as they try to survive. These relationships cross and unite all strata of class, race, and gender, and create linkages that can be categorized as either horizontal or vertical. The horizontal relationships are found among peers and provide exchanges in foodstuffs, cooperative labor, and social interaction. The others are vertical, traversing the social class system. In the Northeast the two vertical institutions to which people turn for relief and assistance are the “informal” institution of patron-client relationships and the “formal” institution of the Roman Catholic Church (Forman 1975; Greenfield and Cavalcante 2006). Patronage as delineated by George Foster in his discussion of “dyadic contracts” is manifested in all facets of Brazilian life.2 Patronage theory, which explicates the one-to-one reciprocal socioeconomic relationship between patron and peasant in this agrarian portion of Brazil, has been applied to the presence of the Roman Catholic Church in Northeast Brazil and particularly to the tradition of ex-votos, the handcrafted objects used by supplicants to repay saints for their intercession with a physical or social problem. This religious tradition is based upon a reciprocal spiritual contract that is made between a supplicant (client) and his or her favorite saint (patron) and functions much like the secular contracts between patron and client. In this ritual, the supplicant promises to repay the saint after the saint has granted or fulfilled the supplicant’s request.3 In the 2010 census, two-thirds of the population identified themselves as Catholic. However, the Brazilian Conference of Bishops reported that only one in five people declaring themselves as Catholic regularly attended Mass (Rohter 2012, 45). These figures reinforce the Brazilian

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anthropologist Thales de Azevedo’s statement that Brazilian Catholicism is “relatively independent of the formal Church” (qtd. in Bruneau 1982, 28; see also Greenfield 2001). Seeds for this independence were sown during colonization when the presence of a priest in the sertão was infrequent and was usually only to attend to the needs of members of the landed society. A Mass might have been given in a plantation chapel upon occasion, which farm workers were required to attend, but religious teachings seldom filtered down to the farm workers. Consequently, a somewhat anticlerical philosophy on the part of the farm workers developed, which has brought about many interesting issues in religious politics in Brazil.4 For example, home altars rather than a formal church setting became the locus of much religious practice. Also, because of the remoteness of certain parts of the region, often a couple would have been “wed” for several years before an ordained priest might “sanctify” their union, and in the far-flung parts of the backlands, a local hero figure could become a “folk saint” of the people with a far more ardent following than one of the Roman Catholic canonical saints. Amplifying this anticlerical atmosphere is the fact that the local religion was also shaped by the syncretization of beliefs and rituals of enslaved workers brought from West Africa and those of indigenous peoples, such as the Tupi-Guarani and the Cairiri. The resulting heterodox folk Catholicism also shares some of the beliefs of other popular Afro-Brazilian religions, such as Candomblé and Umbanda, and it is often practiced in conjunction with them. My research situates the ex-voto tradition within this religious pluralism. Before proceeding further, I will explain the reasoning for my religious terminology, particularly the use of the terms “folk” and “orthodox.” The labeling of the religious practices of a people is hard to accomplish under any circumstances, but in Latin America, and especially in Brazil, this difficulty is compounded. In Brazil one finds conservative Roman Catholic practice, which mirrors the ideals upheld before the changes brought by the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II; 1962–1965). One can also find more mainstream or popular versions of Catholic practice, with a more informal Mass and congregations of CEBs (communidad[e] eclesial de base, or ecclesial base communities). These are “Catholic organizations in which clergy and pastoral agents are engaged, in one way or another, in efforts to raise political and social awareness” (Burdick 1993, 2–3; Betto 2008) and are the result of the spread of liberation theology throughout

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Brazil. Much has been written about liberation theology in Latin America, and the assessment of its success or failure seems to vary with each writer. In his 2003 book, Competitive Spirits, Andrew Chesnut discusses liberation theology and CEBs in particular as they are now, which he says is much diminished and only vital in rural communities where there are high levels of poverty. Taking the place of CEBs as a popular form of Catholicism are Catholic Charismatic Renewal lay groups, which he says are “the Catholic Church’s most effective response to surging Pentecostal competition” (15). Terminology used by authors to describe Brazilian Catholic religious forms are “orthodox” or “institutional” for the hierarchical Church of Rome, and “folk,” “popular,” “mainstream,” “progressive,” “grassroots,” “radical,” and “church of the poor” to describe the church of the people. (In many instances these terms can be and are used interchangeably.) 5 Canindé does not fit into any of the more urban research models described in the works mentioned above. It is a rural town with a fluid population that ebbs and flows, and its primary raison d’être is the shrine. The Franciscans who administer the shrine are definitely adherents of liberation theology, but their views are manifested individualistically rather than as one of the order. Mass can be more or less informal depending on who is saying it on a particular occasion. The welfare of the population to whom they minister is also served according to the skills and abilities of the individual priests. For example, in 1994 when I first came to Canindé, one frei (Franciscan brother) ran a radio station that broadcast religious and secular programming, another frei taught vocational training, while another traveled to remote communities to conduct Mass and to hear confessions. Additionally, tenets of popular Catholicism avoid the control of the institutional Church and support the belief in a direct and personal relationship with the sacred (Brandão 1985; Bruneau 1982). This belief is shared by the pilgrims who come to the shrine. From this description, the religious practice in Canindé should fall under the category of the “popular church.” However, the ex-voto tradition, the focus of this study, falls completely outside the dogma of the Church, both orthodox and popular. The ex-voto tradition, the entering into a contract with a saint and fulfilling the contract with an offering that mirrors the complaint, is a tradition of the people, not of the Church. It has been passed down through oral tradition, and the ex-votos, the mimetic votive

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offerings called milagres by the practitioners, are labeled folk art (Egan 1991; Oettinger 1990, 1992, 1997). Slater (1986, 1990), Forman (1975), and della Cava (1970) are anthropologists who have researched this type of religion in Ceará, and they all use the term “folk.” For these reasons, when I use the term “the Church,” I refer to the institutional Catholic Church of the priests. The ex-voto practice is, however, a folk tradition, and the practitioners of this tradition, for the most part, hold a type of belief that does not readily fit into any of the aforementioned categories. Therefore, I will call it folk Catholicism. Having received my primary training as a folklorist, this label has no negative connotation for me. The term merely means that the practices are outside the mainstream of the dominant praxis, passed down through oral tradition, based more on emotion than on intellectualization, and have their own set of shared knowledge and language. The Ex-Voto Tradition: From the Greco-Roman Empire to the Present

The rather anticlerical philosophy of Brazilian folk Catholicism is demonstrated in the ex-voto practice at pilgrimage sites such as Canindé, where the contract is between the pilgrim and St. Francis, and a priest’s intercession in this relationship is precluded. Since the mid-1700s, when the mission was created by a German order of Franciscan mendicants who left a monastery in Recife, Brazil, pilgrims have journeyed to the Sanctuary of St. Francis of Wounds (Santuário de São Francisco das Chagas) in Canindé. The mission, dedicated to St. Francis, was built at this location because of a donation of land, not because of divine instruction, such as that which led to the construction of many Roman Catholic pilgrimage locations, including the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe outside Mexico City and Lourdes in France. However, due to the cycle of poverty in this region, which had created a climate rich in charismatic beliefs, this mission was soon transformed into a pilgrimage site for the marginalized farmers of the region. St. Francis has always been associated in Roman Catholic canonical literature with thaumaturgy, the performance of miracles. Because of the challenges faced daily in this inhospitable region, the religious beliefs of the sertãnejos (residents of the sertão, backlanders) focus on survival in this lifetime rather than

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on life after death. Thus, it is logical that they would be drawn to a saint who, they are told, works everyday miracles. Also, the fact that St. Francis received the stigmata, the ritual wounds of Christ, and is often depicted bleeding from the hands and feet, something with which agricultural and other workers can strongly identify, makes him readily embraced. Soon after the mission’s founding, individuals and groups of people began to converge there to pay homage to St. Francis. Roman Catholic pilgrimage existed for centuries in Europe before the colonization of Brazil, and the Brazilian terms for pilgrimage, romaria, and pilgrim, romeiro, are derived from the Latin word meaning “traveling to Rome.” There is also evidence, albeit somewhat disputed among scholars, that certain indigenous tribes traveled to sacred areas for spiritual purposes. One group that is often singled out is the Tupi-Guarani, who reportedly roamed throughout central Brazil guided by divine direction, looking for “a land without evil” (Lanternari 1963; Ribeiro 1992; Shapiro 1987). It seems quite likely that because of the preexisting pilgrimage traditions combined with clerical encouragement, the transition from a backwater mission to an important shrine site was a relatively short one. In Canindé, most pilgrims travel to fulfill their part of a promise, a spiritual contract, with St. Francis for interceding on their behalf in some remedial fashion. The pilgrims say that they have come to pay the promise, “pagar a promessa.” This payment is usually met by the offering of an object, an ex-voto called a milagre. Ex-voto, a generic term used mostly by academics, is Latin and means “votive” or “from a vow.” It is used to describe an object given in exchange for something that has been accomplished and is also the umbrella term for any offering, including tithing, sacrificing an animal, lighting a candle, or the act of pilgrimage itself. The word milagre is used by practitioners of this tradition and is Portuguese for “miracle.” The ex-voto tradition has roots in pre-Christian beliefs and can be traced through the archaeological record to civilizations predating the ancient Greeks and Romans.6 This pagan tradition was syncretized into early Christian practices and with the movement of the Roman Empire spread throughout Europe, where it is still practiced in many rural areas.7 Spanish and Portuguese explorers brought the tradition to the New World, where it blended with compatible indigenous practices and is today a vital part of folk Catholicism from the North American Southwest to the southern tip of South America.8

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There are several methods pilgrims use to pay this promise. Ronald Finucane in Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (1977) categorizes them as replicative, animate, inanimate, and exuvial. These categories will be dealt with later more extensively, but here I will give a brief description of each. The replicative milagres are by far the most common in Canindé and are the main focus of this book. They typically depict afflictions of the human body but occasionally illustrate other subjects, such as animals, houses, or occupational equipment. Most often they are carved from wood, but they are also fashioned from clay, paper, cloth, wax, Styrofoam, and other materials. In Canindé, each ex-voto is a one-of-a-kind artifact created by the pilgrim or commissioned from a neighbor or relative. The range of artistic ability is vast, but each milagre is a tangible symbol of physical or psychological pain. I look at each as a work of art and a symbol of faith. Animate votive offerings most often are displayed through the physical actions of the pilgrim, such as walking a great distance to reach the shrine or creating a situation that causes mortification of the flesh: traversing the concrete steps to the shrine or circumambulating the basilica on one’s knees. Less commonly found are animate offerings of sacrificial animals. Inanimate offerings range from lighting candles to monetary tithes, while exuvial offerings are basically anything that comes from the human body, including hair or nail clippings, dried umbilical cords, kidney stones, and the like. Milagres as Social Texts

Referencing Bourdieu’s ideology, this book documents the ex-voto ritual in Canindé, examining the milagres as artifacts that tell the life stories of the pilgrims who journey to this shrine. To the majority, these people are subordinated within interlocking hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. By examining this religious folk tradition, defined in this rural shrine and practiced in others scattered across Northeast Brazil, my study focuses on what this ritual practice reveals about the “dis-ease” of the social body from the perspective of the Northeast’s rural population.

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This project focuses on material culture, the ex-votos, to tell the stories of the people who make the pilgrimage to Canindé. By using the artifacts as symbols and markers of physical health as well as of social health, a type of epistemology can be developed that illustrates the marginalization of the pilgrim population and may illuminate the wider population they represent. This study adds to the growing literature on votive offerings and practices in Brazil and around the world and will serve as another link in the historical literature examining the diffusion of the Greco-Roman votive offering tradition throughout Europe and the Americas. Through this study, encoded meanings related to spirituality, power, and resistance will be elucidated. Living until Lula’s election in a world full of uncertainties due to governmental corruption and neglect as well as an inhospitable environment, the majority of the population assumed a position of submission in order to survive. I examine the politics of submission and the silent forms of rebellion that have been waged against this type of social system. One method of ensuring continued survival is by negotiating advantageous religious relationships by repaying divine favors with an ex-voto, a type of spiritual currency, if you will. I argue that this tradition, by precluding intercession from the priest, serves as a form of silent rebellion against the religious hierarchy and instills in the practitioner a sense of empowerment and religious agency. I also explore the therapeutic value of making a tangible symbol of disease and then “giving it away”; I feel that pilgrims are further empowered by having a direct connection with their recovery. Last, I illustrate the social functions of the ex-votos within the pilgrimage community by examining in detail their metaphorical use as symbols, in social organization, and in folk narrative. There are several studies in the literature of the sertão, but most of them focus on the large cattle ranches and farms farther north. Candace Slater’s work regarding the miracle stories about the Brazilian folk saint Padre Cícero in the Roman Catholic shrine town of Juazeiro do Norte is based in an urban setting. Padre Cícero Romão Batista (1844–1934), a Roman Catholic priest, developed a large following in the northeastern state of Ceará after a series of “miraculous” events occurred. During the catastrophic drought of 1877–1880, in which one-third of the state’s population died or emigrated, Padre Cícero’s efforts on behalf of the

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remaining people gave him wide popularity. After he administered the communion host to a woman during Mass in Juazeiro where the host “turned into the blood of Christ” in her mouth, his fame as a miracle worker spread throughout the Northeast. There followed a long series of miraculous events that were attributed to Padre Cícero. Today his shrine is the most frequented in Northeast Brazil. Because of the popularity of Padre Cícero’s shrine, Juazeiro has become a large commercial center for the surrounding rural region (Slater 1986; della Cava 1970; Ribeiro 1992). No holistic study of Brazilian ex-votos has been published. Most works are either exhibition catalogs or chapters in books dealing with general folk art studies, and few of these are in English. Articles by Bercht and Frota appear in the 1989 House of Miracles exhibition catalog from the Americas Society Art Gallery in New York. Mota (1968) and Cardoso (1983) are two additional Brazilian writers who have done research on this subject. These works set the stage for cross-cultural comparisons by Marion Oettinger (1990, 1992, 1997), Martha Egan (1991), Doris Francis (2007), and Eileen Oktavec (1995) on the votive offering tradition in other parts of Latin America, Spain, the United States, and the rest of the world. To situate this research in the broader field of Brazilian religious heterodoxy, Ruth Landes’s work on Candomblé (1947), Diana DeGroat Brown’s exploration of Umbanda (1979, 1986; see also Brown and Bick 1987), Stephen Selka’s study of Afro-Brazilian religion and ethnicity (2007), David Hess’s study of Spiritism (1990, 1994), and José Carvalho’s work on religious plurality (1999, 2000) are highly recommended. Most helpful to my research, however, was the guidance of the Brazilian anthropologist and psychiatrist Adalberto Barreto, without whom my work could not have been undertaken. Barreto’s vast body of work on the ex-votos and their relevance in the areas of psychiatry and public health is the most complete study of this tradition to date. 9 My initial introduction to the ex-voto tradition in Canindé occurred in 1994, and my last field season was during the summer of 2011. My field methods and my reasons for choosing them are discussed in chapter 2. Included in that chapter are detailed descriptions of my field site and a reflexive explanation of my positionality as a field researcher and a middle-class, white, North American female.10 Issues with which I struggled, such as culture shock, authorship, and faith, are discussed.

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In chapter 3, I define the role that the ex-voto tradition plays in the lives, individually and collectively, of its practitioners. I have broken the chapter down into subheadings reflective of these roles. By taking an inventory of the physical afflictions depicted by ex-votos, I was able to discern the underlying social ills. Utilizing both my observations and the stories pilgrims told me, I discuss these physical and social ills in detail. In the same fashion, the roles of religious reinforcement, social reciprocity, and folk narrative are also explored in this chapter. Since my research primarily records the material culture of this tradition, the aesthetics and materials used to create the ex-votos and the different modes of fulfilling the spiritual contracts are vital to the study; these are discussed in chapter 4. In addition, I describe both the mass-produced, commercially crafted ex-votos that are beginning to appear in Canindé as well as the traditional, handcrafted, one-of-a-kind milagres. In chapter 5, I discuss the life of the typical sertãnejo with whom I spoke. The politics of power, marginality, and poverty and the roles they play in the folk Catholicism practiced by the pilgrims are detailed. Also, the politics of the institutional Church as contested by the popular and folk ideologies of the people are outlined. In chapter 6, I expand upon points highlighted throughout the text. These conclusions cover such topics as the social and cultural construction of disease, cross-cultural examples of the healing power of art, and the therapeutic value of the ex-votos. I also examine the pluralism of religion in Brazil and the place of the ex-voto tradition in it as well as the parallel definitions of faith among the followers of St. Francis and the institution of the Catholic Church. In the appendix, I have included the questionnaire that I used in Canindé and some statistical information gleaned from the questionnaires.

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n the introduction to Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, Victor Turner writes of the “inner significance” of objects, of their “eloquent silences” that “cry out for interpretation” (1982, 11). When I read this statement I knew exactly what he was speaking of, because I had felt the inner significance of the Brazilian ex-votos the first time I saw them. I was in a graduate medical anthropology class and the professor brought in a few of his collected ex-votos. As he held them up we, as a class, tried to surmise what medical problem underlay the creation of each one. If there were obvious signs of physical trauma the object could “speak to us,” and we could narrow down causation. For example, one of the figures was covered in red spots of paint, depicting a tropical rash. Another ex-voto was a piece of wood that had been carved into a rough heart shape with a photograph of a young boy glued onto its surface. We decided this meant that the young boy had been born with a problem with his heart. However, in many cases, the trauma was ambiguous or missing and we were left with only “eloquent silence.” I made the decision to investigate the ex-votos, to listen to their stories, to try to give voice to the silences behind these intense and powerful works of art. This decision led me to Canindé, where I observed and talked with pilgrims who had come to the shrine of São Francisco das Chagas to pay their promise to St. Francis.

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Field Site: Canindé

Canindé is in the northeastern backlands of Brazil, about three hours inland from Fortaleza. The Northeast was the site of the earliest European colonization of Brazil in the sixteenth century. The coastal plains were ideal locations for growing the valuable crop of sugarcane, which eventually allowed Portugal to become the leading sugar producer in the world. However, as sugar production in the Caribbean grew more competitive, Brazilian market prices fell and the culture built on sugar plantations and the slave economy came to an end. This decline resulted in much of the coastal population moving into the semiarid interior, where the government encouraged new settlement. Subsistence agriculture and the raising of goats and cattle became the principal economic activities. With this influx of population the periodic droughts that traditionally plagued the interior region became a more serious problem. Although this is a semiarid region, not a desert, and rainfall is typically twenty to thirty inches per year, that is insufficient to support successful commercial agriculture and often not enough to irrigate a small crop garden (Baer 2007; Robock 1963). When the rains come, they are abundant but short-lived. The Economist reports that sometimes half the annual rainfall can occur in a one-day event. Because the parched earth is impenetrable, the rains cause flash flooding and then the waters evaporate, making irrigation impossible (“The North-East: Politics, Water and Poverty,” 36–38). Also, the rainfall is scattered: it may rain in one area, but there will be no rainfall even a mile away. The times of sêcas (drought) are catastrophic, but even so, “[traditionally] the most basic problem of the Northeast is not the periodic drought but continuing poverty” (Robock 1963, 8; International Fund for Agricultural Development 2010). Subsistence agriculture leaves no room for human error or nature’s variability. In times of drought, the hunger that is synonymous with this region becomes amplified. In the past the government attempted to ameliorate the desperate living conditions in the sertão by building small reservoirs to hold water for times of severe drought, but corruption, graft, and the overwhelming magnitude of the problem made these attempts ineffectual. There have also been institutional and government-supported low-income housing and low-interest loans for homeowners. Most of this

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funding has helped a great deal in larger urban areas, such as Fortaleza, the state capital, but it has yet to saturate the outlying areas of the sertão. The small-time local farmers of the Northeast have historically grown foodstuffs for local and national markets, while the large farms produce for export. Gradually, more and more land has been transferred to agribusiness for international markets, leaving the yeomen, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers without land. This in turn has created a shortage of food for the rural people. Urban people have more money with which to buy food, leaving a deficit in rural areas (International Fund for Agricultural Development 2010). During my first residence in Canindé, I realized that it is an unusual town, reminiscent of a company town, but in this case the “company” is the Catholic Church. Because of the land tenure system in Brazil, many people are left homeless, or their situation is so desperate that they must move elsewhere in order to survive. Urban areas are filled with favelas, shantytowns that house the poor. Many of the favela residents are migrants from rural areas who have come to the city in the hope of finding a better life. Unfortunately, in many cases, because these rural migrants have no marketable skills they are only trading one desperate situation for another. Another alternative that many people have taken is to move to shrine locations like Canindé, where the Church will take care of them. For several generations, individuals and entire families have come to Canindé knowing that the Church will take them in and give them shelter, food, and even employment. Most of the land and the houses in Canindé are owned by the Catholic Church and administered by the Franciscan order. The houses are given to those who need them. To my knowledge, there are no homeless people in Canindé. Every morning the parish office feeds the parish workers and anyone else who needs a meal. There are full-time day-care centers that feed preschool children breakfast and lunch everyday while their parents are employed in some fashion by the parish or elsewhere. Women serve as cooks, housekeepers, and laundresses for the monastery or work in parish-owned operations, such as the hospital, an old-age sanitarium, a religious conference facility, the parish offices, day-care centers, or the main shrine complex of buildings. If they have education they may be employed as secretaries in the parish offices and some municipal offices or work in the religious bookstore. Men work as drivers for a

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few of the priests and perform gardening and maintenance duties. The Church also owns a zoo and a small museum that employs several men and women. There seems to be an endless supply of jobs to be filled, and rarely are people supported who choose not to work. For example, the monastery is painted on a regular basis, even if it doesn’t need it. At first I naïvely thought: how vain, how selfish of the Church to waste money on such a luxury when people are going hungry. After being in town longer, I realized that by painting the monastery, and then the parish offices, and then the hospital, men are allowed to receive aid from the Church and keep a sense of self-respect. Almost everyone I have become friends with who lives in Canindé works for the Church in some capacity. As one might imagine, they have a great sense of loyalty to the Church and the priests. The only antagonistic relationship in the town seems to be between some of the state and city government officials and the Church over control of the city’s future. St. Francis of Wounds and the House of Miracles

Because of the wealth of the Catholic Church and its status as the majority landowner and property owner in Canindé, little economic relief comes from national or state social services. São Francisco das Chagas serves as one source of aid to which many people turn. I have spoken with hundreds of people who credit St. Francis with either healing them or facilitating a positive solution to a problem. These problems range from serious issues of health, domestic violence, substance abuse, homelessness, and unemployment to lighter issues of romance, school performance, athletic events, and lost objects. In all cases, the total credit for solving the problem was given to St. Francis, even when assistance had also come from other sources, such as the medical or legal professions. Pilgrims come to Canindé from all over the Northeast to fulfill their promise to St. Francis. Pagando as promessas (paying the promises) can be accomplished in several ways. For many people the sacrifices and hardships they make to undertake the long journey to Canindé fulfills their promise; others choose different activities. I have observed women cutting off their beautiful hair, people circumambulating the basilica on their knees, purchasing and lighting candles, carrying heavy crosses, wearing

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Pilgrims wearing batinas enter the Casa dos Milagres.

The Basílica de São Francisco, Canindé, Brazil.

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brown robes emulating that of St. Francis, walking distances with heavy stones on their heads, and lighting fireworks. However, the most prevalent way of paying the promise is by creating a mimetic ex-voto representative of the promise and depositing it in the receptacle in the Casa dos Milagres. After Assisi in Italy, Canindé is the most visited shrine dedicated to St. Francis in the world. As a result, it has grown into a fairly large town of over 25,000 people. There are several schools, a regional hospital, and a substantial commercial district with branches of the prominent banks in the Northeast. The current basilica, which replaced an earlier chapel, was built in 1910. In 1923 the Vatican declared the Santuário de São Francisco das Chagas a basilica, and during 1926–1927 improvements to create the current cruciform floor plan were made on the structure. The rococo interior plaster work was installed in 1945. The basilica is an imposing building. It towers over Canindé and can be seen from miles away. The basilica is situated so that it catches the breeze through the four side doors, and the long rows of pews are often the most refreshing place in town to sit. Adjacent are the House of Miracles and the parish offices. In front of the basilica is a huge square, half of which is a park with benches; the other half is covered in paving stones. On Sundays, this paved area becomes a parking lot for the buses and trucks full of pilgrims. On the outside of the square are souvenir shops and luncheonettes, which cater to the religious visitors. The souvenir shops hire young boys to sell religious trinkets to the visitors. The boys carry big wooden posts in the shape of a cross. On these crosses are plastic key chains and pieces of jewelry in fluorescent colors that say something about Canindé, St. Francis, or the shrine; small plastic statues of St. Francis; and brightly colored fitas. Fitas can be purchased outside any major shrine or cathedral in Brazil. They are ribbons printed with the name of whatever saint is celebrated at that particular location and are the cheapest souvenir one can buy. There is a ritual that has grown around fitas, which gives them a kind of magic all their own. After you buy a fita, you make a wish. You then wrap the fita around your wrist or ankle, tying a knot after each round, until you have three knots. You cannot remove the fita until it literally rots off. Doing so would not only make your wish not come true, but would bring forth untold misfortune. If you leave the fita in place, your wish will supposedly come true. People of all classes, races, and genders in every part of Brazil wear fitas.

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A souvenir stand near the basilica.

Fitas and a keychain, typical souvenirs from Canindé.

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Interior of the Casa dos Milagres before the renovation.

Until the spring of 2011, the House of Miracles was one large room that opened to the paved area around the basilica by huge metal gates that rolled into the ceiling, making one side of the room almost entirely open. Another side of the room was fronted by large wooden bins. It is into these bins that the ex-votos were deposited. Above the bins were large photographs of the Italian town of Assisi and the shrine dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi. The long wall parallel to the open side was completely covered with photographs left by pilgrims. There was a small room behind this large room, which displayed some of the more spectacular ex-votos left over the years. In that room there was a sign that explained that similar ex-votos could be seen in the small museum near the monastery. Behind the wall where the bins were located were rooms where pilgrims could give their confessions to a priest. In 2011 the head of the monastery worked with some of the local women of the church to refurbish the Casa dos Milagres. Walls were knocked down and the original room was expanded to include a beautiful area where visitors can purchase religious materials. He also decided to bring many milagres that had been in storage to the Casa dos Milagres to permanently display. The changes enhanced the feeling of the room and served to simultaneously educate visitors and

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Interior of the Casa dos Milagres after the renovation.

Milagres hanging on the wall in the Casa dos Milagres

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reinforce the powers of St. Francis. Now pilgrims spend a great deal of time in the Casa dos Milagres looking at the ex-votos and photographs lining the walls. Field Sight

When I got off the bus in Canindé for my first field season, it was midday. It was the time of soneca, the nap that comes in the middle of the day to escape the blistering heat. No one was on the street. The sun was so bright, so intense, that I was blinded. I stumbled into the meager guesthouse across from where the bus let me out and tried to figure out how long my money would hold out if I had to pay for lodging. I had way too much luggage, including one suitcase that held nothing but books, fifty-two to be exact. I had been forced by the airline to pay for extra baggage, but having a book to read was my way of escape, and to have this security blanket was worth parting with some of my grant funds. After a few days in the pension and after quite a bit of confusion, my own miracle of finding permanent housing eventually occurred. I had come to Brazil the previous summer to enroll in an intensive Portuguese course at the university in Fortaleza. During that time I made contact with Adalberto Barreto and also visited the shrine in Canindé. After returning to the United States, I asked Barreto to work with me on my project. He agreed and volunteered to arrange housing at the convento in Canindé for me. I had assumed that convento translated into “convent.” I then inferred that I would be staying with the Irmãs de São Francisco, the nuns devoted to St. Clara, the sister institution to the Franciscan brotherhood. I asked someone at the pension where the convent was and eagerly set off to meet my new housemates. It was the morning of my first full day in the town. I was suffering a bit from culture shock, but I was full of the adventure of being an anthropologist, even if a fledgling one. I got to the convent and knocked on a heavy wooden door. Rather than the door opening fully, a small portion at eye level opened, much like the peepholes illustrated in old black-and-white movies about speakeasies during the Prohibition era. This seemed a bit unusual even in my mild state of culture shock, and I forgot all the Portuguese that I had worked so hard to learn for the previous year and a half. Somehow, I managed to introduce myself and

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struggled to explain that Dr. Barreto had arranged for me to stay with them. After several confusing minutes, I was made to understand that the sisters in this convento were cloistered. This news was quite alarming to me because it meant that in order to live there, I must take a vow to never come out! In my rapidly growing state of panic, it was clear that this would be counterproductive to my research. The sister grew more and more tired of dealing with me, and I was eventually told to go a few blocks away and talk with the Franciscans. The hatch in the door was then summarily closed. Having not been raised in the Catholic faith, my only picture of a monastery came from reading novels such as The Name of the Rose, and I felt sure that a woman living in one would not be acceptable. Needless to say, I was astonished when I arrived at the monastery and instead of finding a man in a hooded robe, I found a man in running shorts and sneakers, stretching prior to taking a jog. I was so discombobulated by then that I was practically in tears, and Frei Elias (the jogger), who soon became a good friend, somewhat reservedly told me I could stay at the monastery until I found another place. In the end, the freis generously allowed me to stay with them for my entire field season, and I have stayed there ever since. After those first few days, I calmed down and started the routine of what most of my days in Canindé would become. I went to the Casa dos Milagres every day and was delighted that I could actually make myself understood, at least to DeAssis, a young man who worked there. It is funny in retrospect, and I feel sure it is not uncommon for young anthropologists to have the necessity for a translator, even though only one language is being spoken. For the first month or so, my classroom Portuguese and the Portuguese spoken by the locals were mutually unintelligible. I would say something to DeAssis in Portuguese and he would then repeat what I had said to whomever I was trying to communicate with. Fortunately, the need for this intercession was short-lived, and soon I was progressing in my fieldwork and the dreaded culture shock was being held at bay. I missed my family and friends, but my homesickness was not too bad. The worst thing was how much I missed my cat, Percy. On one of my first Sundays in Canindé, I was sitting in the monastery courtyard reading and preparing myself for the crowd of pilgrims who would be flocking to the shrine, when I noticed a small, thin

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white cat in the garden. Percy back home in the northern hemisphere was solid black. I loved the fact that here in the southern hemisphere I could have a solid white cat. It seemed predestined. I walked over to the animal, delighted with the thought of having a cat friend, but noticed it was acting strangely. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was very sick. I tried to find a priest, but they were all at the basilica. I talked with the women who worked in the kitchen, but they seemed unconcerned. I asked where the veterinarian lived, the animal doctor, but the concept was foreign to them. I then ran to the basilica, found a priest, and told him about the cat, only to find him unconcerned as well. Anger welled up in me. I went back to the monastery and sat, sobbing uncontrollably, and watched the poor cat in its death throes. I cried the entire rest of the day, but slowly I realized my cultural unawareness. I realized that in a situation where existence can be a daily struggle, where just getting a child to live through infancy can be an accomplishment, caring if a stray cat lived or died was a luxury these people could not afford. I got it. Here was a different world from what I, a middle-class, white woman from the United States, was familiar with. Shaken and humbled, I finally began to see, and I began to be an anthropologist. Every day, I would walk the several blocks from the Franciscan monastery, the Convento de Santo Antônio, where I stayed, to the town center where the basilica is located. At first, I was an object of scrutiny to the locals and the pilgrims, and some days I felt like I was walking the gauntlet. Very few non-Brazilians visit the shrine, and it was obvious to all that I was not a normal visitor. My height and light skin, not to mention a backpack full of expensive camera equipment, a tape recorder, and a notebook in which I was forever writing, singled me out to everyone as foreign. The townspeople quickly learned that I was staying at the convento, which gave me immediate legitimacy. And after my cat episode, which everyone knew about within a few hours, I seemed to be seen more clearly. From that time forward, I was treated more as a friend rather than a stranger. I was kidded about cats for the duration of my initial stay by everyone from the priests to the man working in the post office, and that teasing continues to this day. Interestingly, during my first visit, most people living in Canindé assumed I was a nun: I was living at the monastery and I wore shapeless clothes, no makeup, and because of the intense heat I wore my long hair up rather than down over

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my shoulders as was the fashion for unmarried Brazilian women of my age group. After I became friends with several of the women and young girls in town, they learned that I was not a nun, and thereafter they repeatedly tried to persuade me to wear my long hair down and to apply makeup in an attempt to “improve” my appearance. During my time in Canindé, I spent most of each day in the House of Miracles looking at the milagres and observing people. At first, I was hesitant to talk with the pilgrims, not wanting to encroach upon what I assumed was a very private moment. Soon it became clear that the quiet, meditative behavior that I had expected to accompany the deposition of an ex-voto did not necessarily occur, and that people enjoyed my approaching them and asking questions. In the United States, the secular and the sacred are compartmentalized in different spaces, both physically and psychologically. In Northeast Brazil, this is not the case; religion is integrated into life, not just a part of it. For example, I assumed before going to Brazil that the ex-votos, since they were the material manifestations of sacred vows, would be considered sacred and therefore treated reverentially. After talking with many people and observing their behavior, it became apparent that this is not the case. When questioned, most people tell me that ex-votos are simply artes popular and that examples of sacred art are the plaster religious statues that can be purchased at the shrine bookstore and the souvenir shops that surround the basilica. Whenever people purchase these statues, they bring them to a priest to be blessed, which does not happen in the offering of an ex-voto. From this, I assume that it is only the priest’s blessing that “activates” the sacredness of the statues, while it is the promessa that is sacred in the votive tradition and not the ex-voto itself.1 I cannot generalize about the behavior of people around the ex-votos because it varies. Some people get down on their knees and pray when they offer their milagres; some people cry. Other people run in and simply throw their ex-votos in the bin and leave, most likely to frequent one of the many shops or even one of the cabarets (nightclubs/houses of prostitution) located in the bairros (neighborhoods) not owned by the Church. People can be laughing one minute and praying the next. In most cases, their behavior does not seem to change during the act of depositing the ex-votos. The variation of the objects themselves is endless. For someone

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Milagres waiting to be burned at the end of the pilgrimage season.

interested in folk art and especially interested in how people might envision their disease, it is like a new exhibit and psychological study each day. The problem for me, however, has been how to define the aesthetics of a genre that has no distinctive aesthetic criteria. Each object is crafted by a different individual, who in most cases has little to no familiarity with art other than religious statuary and images. The votive offerings are not made to last; in most cases the “life” of an ex-voto is a brief one. At the end of each pilgrimage season the majority of ex-votos are destroyed. They are taken to a property the monastery owns on the outskirts of Canindé and burned. The reason for their destruction, I was told by Frei Baptista, who was head of the monastery before Frei Wellington, is because of the sheer mass deposited each year. A few are saved, curated out of the bin; they are selected in most cases for their technical merit. These select pieces are added to the walls of the Casa dos Milagres or

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An example of a milagre considered “good” by other pilgrims. The woman had recovered from shingles, and others felt that she had illustrated her pain very well.

are destined to be included in the collections of museums and of a few individuals around the world. When I queried pilgrims about the destruction of the ex-votos, they were not disturbed. Most people responded that the milagres are forgotten once they are deposited. From these responses, it would appear that the works are created purely to fulfill the contract made between St. Francis and the pilgrim. The ex-voto can be viewed as a type of spiritual currency used to pay off a divine debt. While aesthetics may influence the object’s creation, it is not the foremost criterion. A successful image is one that can

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be recognized as representative of the problem. While it is true that some people examine the milagres deposited in the bin and judge them bom (good) or feio (ugly), this assessment usually refers to an arbitrary value or taste rather than to artistic technique.2 Many of the ex-votos that I think are wonderful are deemed ugly by other people. I have struggled with the question: Can I, an outsider in the culture, in the faith, and in the ex-voto tradition, work with these objects without looking at them with Western value judgments? Can I see them in the same light as insiders? The answer is that I cannot; the bias of a Western-trained art historian/folklorist/ anthropologist comes to the field with me. Field Methods

During the course of my study I realized that the ethnographic works that have most influenced me are those that challenge the prescribed research by earlier anthropologists in the area of cultural ownership and ethnographic authority. Works by Lila Abu-Lughod, Ruth Behar, Karen McCarthy Brown, Jill Dubisch, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes are models for me to follow because they encourage other anthropologists to write collaboratively and polyvocally and to contribute to the academic discipline without being limited to only that audience. My decision to use material culture as a vehicle for narration was influenced by the work of Barbara Babcock (1982, 1986), who for years worked with the Cochiti potter Helen Cordero. Cordero felt that each of her pieces truly had a story to tell, and those stories were told to her as she fashioned each one from clay. Other influences in my seeing the ex-votos as more than mute, inanimate objects came from reading Appadurai’s thoughts on the social life of things (1986) and Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about art production and aesthetic value as social commentary (1993). Milagres have a transient social life, moving from a form of divine currency to various other social statuses. Many pieces are deactivated upon deposition and wait to be destroyed. Others are chosen to be hung in the Casa dos Milagres, where they reinforce the healing power of St. Francis, while others are recycled: they are reborn as the ex-votos of other pilgrims who, not bringing one with them, choose an appropriate milagre from the bin and, after personalizing it, redeposit it. Still others are commodified as a valued art form, or in the case of objects such as crutches,

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eyeglasses, or clothing, given to someone in need. In this book, I take each of these different “lives” into consideration. Deciding to focus my study on the pilgrims’ votive artworks and the stories behind them has had its drawbacks. Dealing with primarily a transient population has meant that I do not ever have time to develop a sense of rapport. Usually, I approached the pilgrims and talked with them for about fifteen or twenty minutes, at the most, and then never saw them again. Also, in most cases I spoke only with pilgrims who had a successful outcome to their problem and thus had come to repay St. Francis. The percentage of people who have negative outcomes is unknown since they do not come to the shrine. Initially I worried that I would have no one to corroborate the stories I heard, and I would have no “snowballing” network that would lead to new informants. However, such leads have not been necessary, because each pilgrim’s story is in itself corroborative of the stories of others, and new informants (pilgrims) arrive each day. Each story is similar in that they all reiterate conditions that can be traced to the root problem of poverty. Each person’s story of a hurt foot, or a cut hand, or chronic pain validates what someone else previously told me. As a result, even though the people I spoke with only represent a fraction of the total population of the sertão, the stories they told were all so similar that I feel confident that I have a fair sampling of the local rural population. In talking with the pilgrims, I was interested in obtaining their viewpoints about the aesthetics of the ex-votos they brought to Canindé as well as those brought by others. I am sure that my own aesthetics played a role in which artifacts were chosen for further exploration. When I saw someone with an ex-voto that intrigued me, I attempted to talk with that person rather than with someone who had an ex-voto that did not interest me as much. Another variable is that I was able, like every anthropologist, to speak with only the people willing to speak with me, although there were only a handful of people who refused. Usually it was just the opposite; rather than having too few people to talk with, I was often surrounded by people wanting me to record their story. I am always mindful of a similar experience that Scheper-Hughes recorded about her experience with the Brazilian people in Alto do Cruzeiro. She said the people there had no representation and no opportunity to be heard, and they counted on her

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to give their stories a voice (1992, 28). I feel the weight of that responsibility as well. During that first field season in Canindé and periodically since, I have gone through periods of feeling like a parasite. I have felt that Brazilians are giving me food and shelter and information while I am giving them nothing back. With the opportunities that have been available to me as a middle-class, white North American, I sometimes feel it is criminal that I should be in their midst and not have a skill, like medical training, to alleviate the suffering around me. However, in addition to the physical suffering, I have gradually recognized an additional type of suffering shared by the people I talk with. It is the pain of not being heard or seen, and in many ways this pain is more insidious than physical suffering. Perhaps it is true that my relationship with the pilgrims has been somewhat parasitic in that it has enabled my academic career. However, I hope that with my telling of their stories our relationship will become one of symbiosis; these nameless voices will be heard; and the social and political situations that cause their physical and psychological pains will break down. The acoustics in the House of Miracles are not conducive to recording interviews on tape. If the room is full, it is very hard to even carry on a conversation. Also, because I did not get to speak with people for great lengths of time, I felt that the pilgrims would be more comfortable if I listened to their stories and only wrote down key points as we spoke. Afterward, I would complete my notes and fill in each story at my first chance. I talked with them about the milagres and asked them questions about their medical problems, their living situations, their occupations, and their health-care selections. Each pilgrim’s story is anonymous. I never asked any pilgrims their names. Since in most cases I was interviewing someone who did not live in Canindé, with whom I would only speak for a matter of minutes, and with whom I expected to have no further contact, a name was not important. It made people happy when I wrote down things while listening to them. It in some way verified that I was seriously interested in their story. If I did not write down their story, especially when they saw me write down bits from the person I was speaking with previously, it truly seemed to insult them. In addition to written records, I tried to photograph as many pilgrims with their milagres as possible. When I first started this research, each time I took

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a photograph of a pilgrim with my 35-millimeter camera, I also took a photograph with a Polaroid Instamatic camera. I would then give the pilgrim the photograph. A crowd of people always gathered, watching the picture slowly appear from the blank gray sheet: the milagre of modern technology. Unfortunately, the days of Polaroid cameras and even 35-millimeter cameras are over. I love the ease of the digital age, and the assurance of having a good shot, but it has lessened my feeling of reciprocity. I also recorded interviews with several freis. The clergy’s “official” perspective on the ex-voto tradition is very interesting. In some cases, the freis spoke rather patronizingly about the people to whom they minister and suggested that the votive ritual is childlike, but harmless. Others were more supportive of the practice. However, all the freis insisted that poverty is the greatest problem in the Northeast, and they placed great blame upon the government for ignoring the problem. Adalberto Barreto, the anthropologist from Fortaleza with whom I have worked, is a child of the sertão. Having grown up in Canindé, he has an interesting perspective on the situation. He says that many people in the rural sertão feel they are “residents of the nation of St. Francis,” not Brazil. Since they are so poor, they pay no taxes and have no driver’s license nor any other legal identification to show they are Brazilian. In addition, he says, they receive no institutional benefits from the government. Instead, they pay all their tribute to St. Francis and turn to him for the types of institutional aid they should be receiving from the government. It is to St. Francis that they give their surplus money, and it is to him they go for food, shelter, and medical care (Barreto, pers. comm.). To these pilgrims, St. Francis is a living entity. There is a Latin American folk saying, “A saint who is not seen is not worshipped” (Toor 1947, 541). This saying certainly applies to St. Francis. Pilgrims often say they “see” St. Francis walking in the basilica, and people sit outside the monastery hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I occasionally heard pilgrims talking together, asking if someone had seen St. Francis. One might reply, “Oh, no, I’m not good enough to see him, but I know someone who has.” Most people have a type of dualistic view of St. Francis walking among them and residing in heaven as well. They are very territorial about his being located in Canindé while on earth. Even though there is a picture of the shrine in Assisi, Italy, in the House of Miracles, and the freis instruct

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that St. Francis of Assisi is the “original” St. Francis, the people will have none of that. São Francisco das Chagas do Canindé is the only St. Francis that they are interested in. I quickly found out that the pilgrims could get quite huffy if I questioned them on this matter. In addition to informal interviews with pilgrims and residents of Canindé, and formal interviews with health-care professionals, the clergy, and carvers, I administered questionnaires to pilgrims during the Romaria a Canindé (Pilgrimage to Canindé), October 4–14, 1996. I and four young men (two sons of an American missionary and two Brazilians) canvassed 300 pilgrims in five days. My statistical analysis, although not based on probability sampling, offers a descriptive context for situating the pilgrim population in the greater population of the Brazilian Northeast and provides figures for comparisons with pilgrim populations elsewhere (see the appendix).

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The Soci al Functions of Ex-Votos

W

hile it is true that the ex-voto tradition serves an important religious function in the folk Catholic culture of Northeast Brazil, it also functions as more than just a religious ritual for its practitioners. I believe that the ex-voto tradition is the paradigmatic symbol of the pilgrim population of the “nation” of St. Francis. When pilgrims come to the House of Miracles they stand at the ex-voto bin and look at the offerings. By examining different milagres and seeing their sheer mass, pilgrims are reminded that they are like others. The volume of milagres demonstrates that even though poor people might be ignored by the secular establishment, they are indeed members of the powerful spiritual community of St. Francis. In this way the ex-votos are emblematic and reinforce a sense of community and even nationalism in much the same way flags do for nation-states. In addition, I believe that the ex-votos and the miracle stories associated with them serve as what Clifford Geertz calls “metasocial commentaries” (1973, 448). Their function is interpretive, allowing the pilgrims to view the offerings as tangible examples of their own experiences while the stories that become part of the oral tradition are in essence “stor[ies] they tell themselves about themselves” (ibid.). In the following pages I discuss other social functions that this ex-voto tradition provides for its practitioners, including exposing the underlying social dis-ease of the region by demonstrating a pattern of poverty-driven medical problems, 36

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acting as a link in the chain connecting the spiritual community of St. Francis throughout the Northeast, reinforcing horizontal social networks through reciprocity, and maintaining an active oral folk narrative tradition about the miracles of St. Francis. Social Dis-ease Reflected in the Epidemiology of Ex-Votos

Through studying the pilgrimage tradition in Canindé, I have come to recognize a direct connection between the health-related problems suffered by the population of the Brazilian Northeast and the ex-votos that are individually deposited at the shrine. Ex-votos are offered to represent literally any body part. Many milagres represent injuries to the hands and feet, for example. Almost all of the people I have seen living in this part of the Northeast wear only rubber thongs or flip-flops, instead of closed shoes. Without gloves and in this type of footwear, they work the fields with sharp machetes and hoes, work construction lifting heavy bricks and trying to avoid sharp nails, or work around animals with heavy hoofs and piles of excrement. This is the story that one man told me. I was working in a small usina [sugarcane factory]. The mill consisted of an electricity-powered drive belt which guided the stalks of sugarcane into the rotary blades that crushed the juice out of the cane. I do this same job day after day, loading cane onto the drive belt and running it through the grinder. The monotony of the job makes my mind wander, which is not a good thing, because there is no safety switch on the machine, and I have no safety gloves. One day, before I knew what was happening, I saw my fingers going into the blades. I could feel them cutting my fingers. I knew I would lose my hand. I would lose my job. I screamed, “São Francisco, ajuda me” [St. Francis, help me]. At that exact moment, the machine cut off. My hand was saved and my fingers were barely cut. I made this hand [the milagre] with blood [red paint] on the fingertips to thank St. Francis for saving my hand. In this region the natural environment, full of pricking cactus thorns and biting insects, is also hazardous. These conditions combined with tainted water and poor sanitation result in infections that are hard to

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The hand milagre offered to St. Francis by the usina worker.

A milagre of a leg injury; it measures exactly the length of the man’s own leg.

heal. I have seen children with running sores on their arms and legs, a result of mosquito bites. Walking is, for many sertãnejos, the primary mode of transportation. Traveling the hard-packed dirt roads dries the skin on their feet to such an extent that it simply splits open, creating another prime location for infection. Ex-votos with missing fingers and toes; misshapen hands, feet, and ankles; gaping wounds; infected insect bites; and other dermatological problems reflect the poverty and hazardous working conditions in which many people of the Northeast live and toil. Ex-votos depicting feet and legs are the most numerous offerings. Second in frequency of deposition are ex-votos illustrating the head. Many are carved complete with facial characteristics, while others have the features drawn or painted on. Still others have no facial characteristics at all. Some are painted to reflect skin tone, while others are painted colors not found in nature. Some people use cuttings of their own hair on these ex-votos, while others ignore this feature altogether.

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An example of what I call a “talking head.” In this case, the injury suffered from a bicycle wreck is obvious.

An example of a head that I consider “mute”; it does not illustrate the injury.

In a few cases, the heads are cut out with a jigsaw, and a photograph or a drawing is glued to the front. Many of these heads show signs of physical trauma and tell stories ranging from cuts suffered in a bicycle wreck, to hemorrhaging from the ears (symptomatic of the high fevers suffered with dengue), to more simple dermatological problems. There are, however, some heads that are mute, which give no hints as to why they have been offered. While some of these nondescriptive ex-votos may signify that healing has been accomplished, when I spoke with several pilgrims who offered such examples, they usually told me they had suffered from headaches, a malady not easily illustrated. Several pilgrims had received medical treatment for this problem, but in most instances they said that their doctors had been unable to find a medical basis for their recurrent headaches or that their treatment had given them no relief. It was only after asking St. Francis for help that their headaches stopped. These headaches may be attributed to the stress and anxiety of everyday life.

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Ex-votos depicting a problem with the female breast are also numerous. During my research, these were most often deposited by younger women. Because of their age, I assumed that they suffered from lactation problems. The sertão, like many other world regions, has problems with potable water, and the resulting health problems often lead to dehydration. If a woman is not receiving adequate nutrition and enough fluids, she may not provide enough milk for her nursing child. While my assumption of a depiction of lactation problems was partly accurate, it turned out that most of these ex-votos were offered because of a problem that results from being forced to rely too much on nursing rather than the inability to nurse. I became aware of this causation after talking with several women, and the same information was corroborated over and over as I spoke with more women. I remember one woman in particular because her ex-voto was unusual. It was a Sunday morning, but the busloads of people had not yet arrived. I noticed her handling her offering very gingerly and walked over to see it better. She had made a depiction of her breast by cutting off the top of a green plastic liter bottle of Guaraná, a Brazilian soft drink. She had then made a type of plaster out of flour and water, dipped pieces of gauze in the mixture, and applied them to the plastic bottle top. She had just made the ex-voto that morning and the plaster was still wet, so she was trying to keep it from getting all over her hands when she deposited it in the receptacle in the House of Miracles. We began talking, and I asked her about the ex-voto. This is the story she told me. Several months ago I found a lump in my breast. I was too frightened to go to the doctor for fear that he would remove my breast. I have two small children, and I was afraid that my husband would leave me if the doctor removed my breast. I appealed to St. Francis to help me, and I promised that if he would make the lump in my breast go away that I would make a milagre for him to repay my promise. I noticed that the lump had been gone for a few weeks, but I just wanted to be sure it was gone. Today, I am paying St. Francis for healing me. Because there is inadequate nutrition, children in the sertão are often weaned at a later age. These children, old enough to have a few teeth and needing more than breast milk to satisfy their hunger, often create sores

Examples of milagres illustrating problems with the female breast.

This milagre depicting a breast was made from the top of a Guaraná bottle.

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on the breast, which become inflamed. Continued nursing, poor hygiene, and other complications many times result in a lack of proper healing, which creates a lump of scar tissue that is feared as a symptom of breast cancer. The lack of governmental or municipal sanitation as well as the lack of nutritional aid is revealed in the stories told by these ex-votos. There is also a fairly large number of ex-votos that depict male genitalia. These ex-votos must have been surreptitiously deposited because they just seemed to appear. I never saw them being offered. I asked docents, among others, their opinions about what condition these ex-votos might represent. All responded that it was syphilis, and as a rule they negated my suggestion of impotency. I questioned a local doctor about the prevalence of venereal disease in the region. His response was that he had treated a few cases at the hospital but suspected there was a higher number of infections than was indicated by people seeking medical treatment. Brazil is officially a Roman Catholic country, and contraceptives are not always available, especially in the rural areas. As a result, there is a high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, “shotgun” weddings, and births to unmarried women. In comparison with the number of milagres depicting male genitalia, I only saw two ex-votos that graphically depicted female genitalia. There could be several explanations for this. First, it could reveal a degree of female modesty. Apparently, it was only in the recent past that many women began to offer ex-votos illustrating breast problems. It therefore stands to reason that depictions of female genitalia would be a controversial issue. Second, this low number could be misleading, since female genitalia are contained more within the body. Because of this, ex-votos concerned with female fertility or venereal disease problems need not be so anatomically graphic as those deposited by men. Third, symptomatic problems relating to sexually transmitted diseases take much longer to manifest in women than in men, may often be misdiagnosed, and thus may be represented differently in ex-voto form. During my time in Canindé, I saw little of the sort of preventive literature prevalent in the United States regarding venereal disease, pregnancy, and HIV/AIDS. This led me to think that the national and local governments, perhaps using the religious tenets of the Roman Catholic Church as an excuse, are doing little to educate people in rural areas about these health issues. The physician with whom I spoke proudly

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A milagre depicting a uterus and fallopian tubes.

informed me that there had never been a case of AIDS in Canindé. This may be true, but it also might be true that cases may have been misdiagnosed, or those infected might not have looked to the hospital for health care. While it is likely that intravenous drug use, a link to the spread of this virus, is low to nonexistent in the rural Northeast, the unavailability of birth control results in unprotected sex, another link to the spread of HIV/AIDS. Additionally, in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, instances of AIDS are reported to be higher than the norm due to the sharing of razors used in ritual bloodletting and due to homosexual activities among its priests (Marilyn Nations, pers. comm.). For whatever reason, unless preventive measures, such as community education, are taken it will not be long before HIV/AIDS is as problematic in this area as it is in more urban areas. Another category of ex-votos, while not represented by large numbers, is indicative of poverty and governmental neglect. Handicaps due to polio and birth defects eradicated in most parts of the world are still in evidence in Northeast Brazil. This is illustrated by the number of

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milagres depicting twisted limbs, the large number of crutches and leg braces left in the bins, and the handicapped pilgrims themselves. I did see government signs advertising free polio and tuberculosis inoculations while in Canindé, but because many adults cannot read, the signs may be overlooked. Also, I noticed in the people that I spoke with, even after the election of Lula, there lingered a distrust of the government. Having been abused so many times by corrupt government representatives and being rather unfamiliar with medical procedures, many people in these backland communities do not take advantage of the free inoculations. Last, one other medical condition that I saw illustrated frequently was improper umbilical healing. When the umbilical cord is cut at childbirth, it must be kept clean and bound to ensure proper healing. High levels of sanitation are hard to achieve in areas where there is little clean water, where animals and humans may share living quarters, and where the constant monitoring of children is impossible. As a result, it is not unusual to see toddlers with infected and herniated navels. I saw several children with this problem, a few wooden ex-votos depicting this condition, at least that many photographs on the walls of the House of Miracles showing children with navel problems, and one matchbox that contained a dried umbilical cord in the ex-voto bin. Historically, the living conditions of the poor in the sertão have been appalling, and the disease loads carried by the children are high. Inadequate nutrition can create a condition in which physical and mental growth are both stunted. Because of a lack of sufficient nutrients, many children in the sertão are small in stature. Due to chronic hunger their attention span and their ability to think clearly are affected. Rather than recognize poor scholarship as a symptom of gross institutional discrimination and neglect, in most cases their performance has been viewed by government officials as a form of inherited ignorance left over from the beginnings of the twentieth century, when the government used race as an excuse for poverty and the living conditions of the people of the sertão (Blake 2003). In this way, the problem is turned away from the system and toward the individual, which rationalizes the continuation of the problem. Fortunately, this situation is on the wane, due to the rising economy in Brazil and reform programs such as Fome Zero (Zero Hunger), which is designed to eradicate hunger in Brazil, and Bolsa Familia (Family Allowance), which is an economic assistance program

Examples of milagres offered for children with herniated navels.

A photo on the Casa dos Milagres wall shows a child with a herniated navel.

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to aid low-income families. Signs of economic progress have made their way to even this rather remote region. However, the funneling of the majority of governmental aid funds to such urban areas as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in southern Brazil still continues, leaving a deficit in the Northeast except in the larger urban areas, such as Fortaleza and Recife (Oxfam International 2010; “Brazil’s Bolsa Familia” 2010). Ex-Votos Acting as Links in the Spiritual Chain

Periodically, a pilgrim will pay his promessa by walking to Canindé carrying a cross. When this happens, the pilgrim is attributed celebrity status. One such pilgrim arrived in Canindé after much anticipation by the townspeople. He had begun his pilgrimage about fifteen months earlier in the state of Sergipe and had received quite a lot of press coverage during the length of his journey. He was called the “Homem da Cruz” (Man of the Cross) by the pilgrim population and had achieved almost legendary folk hero status as stories about him spread through the region. When the cross arrived in Canindé it was covered with photographs and small ex-votos that people along his route had attached to it. His cross was placed in the House of Miracles after his arrival and was treated by the pilgrims as a holy relic; people would lay prostrate before it, touch it, and tie fitas and locks of hair to it, as if through contagious magic they would be imbued with the pilgrim’s grace. Though his cross had been made a bit more mobile by the addition of wheels, it was so heavy that I could not even lift it to my shoulder. He had carried the cross for so long that there was a worn, indented place in the wood where his shoulder had been. Frei Humberto interviewed the Homem da Cruz. This is a translation of his story. I was born nearly blind, deaf, mute, and paralyzed. After ten years I received a gift from the family of a child that died in a bus accident. The family gave me her eyes. My mother made a promessa with St. Lúcia, and from that day I could see better. At eleven years of age, on September 4, 1977, at the Festival for Padroeira de Aquidabám in Sergipe, a wagon loaded with dried meat had bad brakes and killed seventeen people. It crashed into our house causing

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Pilgrims in the Casa dos Milagres look at the cross carried by the Homem da Cruz.

the roof to fall down. Part of the roof fell on me and crushed my leg. I was in the hospital for nine months, and my mother was afraid I would die. My mother had hope in St. Francis of Wounds and over the course of two years and six days made one hundred and nineteen promessas with him to make me well. The payment of the promise would not be valid unless I walked to Canindé on foot. I hope I have another chance to walk here again. The cross of the Homem da Cruz eventually was taken to the local museum, where it joined five other crosses that had been collected from previous pilgrims who had walked from the northeastern states of Alagoas, Paraíba, Pernambuco (two of them), and Piauí. Just like the new one, each of these crosses was completely covered with names, cuttings of hair, small wooden anatomical ex-votos, and photographs, among other items, which were applied to the cross by people along the route that the pilgrim traveled to Canindé. As these pilgrims traveled through the countryside, people turned out to see them, much as people do in the United States with the passing of the Olympic Torch. As each pilgrim traveled, his cross became emblematic of the regional

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faith in St. Francis. As the cross passed through the countryside and was laden with more and more offerings, it was transformed from the symbol of one man’s devotion into a symbol representing the devotion of the whole Northeast. As each cross was carried across the country, people became directly linked with other pilgrims, creating a spiritual chain that reached all the way to the shrine at Canindé. Since these types of pilgrimages often occurred after a terrific drought, a time of devastation shared by everyone, they served as a revitalization agent for the entire region. These pilgrimages enabled even those who could not make the pilgrimage themselves to pay their promessas by proxy. These crosses can be read as lasting “metasocial commentaries,” as mentioned by Geertz (1973, 448), because they chronicle the miracles shared by the “forgotten” people of the Northeast through time and space. Ex-Votos Reinforcing Community and Social Reciprocity

The decision to go on pilgrimage takes place within the individual but brings him into fellowship with like-minded souls, both on the way and at the shrine. —victor turner and edith l. b. turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture

The majority of pilgrims traveling to Canindé come in groups. Each group may be marked by homogeneity—family members or neighbors that began the trip together—or it may be a diverse group that because of traveling together experienced a sense of cohesion along the way. The most common means of group transportation to Canindé is by pau de arara. Pau de arara translates as “parrot perch” and is the name given to the open-trailer trucks that have been converted into people carriers. They are so-called because the bench seats made of logs that fill the trucks resemble parrot perches. Blocks of these seats can be reserved in advance for a family or neighbor group, and the truck makes stops all along the route until it is filled. As the travelers often come great distances to reach Canindé, the trip may take several days. During this time the pilgrims, all like-minded and in many instances similarly dressed in the brown pilgrimage uniform, form bonds. By the time they reach Canindé, some have become quasi-kin, relations united in the family of St. Francis and belonging to the community of that particular pau de arara. Many of the

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Pilgrims arrive at Canindé in a pau de arara.

pilgrims who come to Canindé, especially during the Romaria, stay at the Church-owned abrigos, which are a series of shelters, complete with communal bath and cooking facilities, located a short distance from the center of the city. The abrigos become like small communities built around the occupants of a bus or pau de arara. Each shelter is filled with the hammocks of the group. The women may cook communally and take turns watching each other’s children while the men swap stories and perhaps share a bottle of cachaça (an alcoholic beverage). When they visit the basilica, they may visit as a group. It is almost like a national conference made up of small regional delegations, each having its own focus but sharing an allegiance in St. Francis, which binds everyone together. Another example of the sense of community encouraged by the ex-voto tradition could be seen in the reciprocal arrangements made between pilgrims who traveled to Canindé and their family members and neighbors who remained at home. It was not uncommon for a pilgrim to deposit several milagres at one time. Sometimes all of the milagres were made by one person in the community, but they also could represent the work of different individuals. As I questioned pilgrims with multiple ex-votos, I learned that they were often depositing ex-votos for friends and family that could not make the trip to Canindé. I learned that families and

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friends may sometimes pool their finances to have enough money to send one or two representatives of their group to Canindé. This representative then would deposit their own ex-votos and those of their friends and would perhaps buy the people at home a religious souvenir to be blessed by a priest. Many times people filled empty plastic liter bottles with water from the grotto, which is in a small park behind the basilica, brought it to a priest to be blessed, and then took it back to their community to enable those who remained behind to physically share in the sacred experience of the pilgrimage. In return for these activities, the people remaining behind performed services for those who traveled. Many in this region live on small sitios, farms that require continuous maintenance. Their daily chores, such as the feeding of animals, would be temporarily taken over by the people staying at home. In addition, those people often volunteered to watch the small children, or the elderly, or the infirm family members of those making the trip to Canindé. Through reciprocal activities such as these, groups worked together to accomplish the actual pilgrimage attendance of only a few. In this way, even if only vicariously, all the people were able to share the pilgrimage experience and pay their promises to St. Francis. Ex-Votos in Oral Folk Narratives

In cultures where there are high rates of illiteracy, such as in the Northeast of Brazil, storytelling and oral narratives are cohesive agents that connect people through space and time. The oral information dealing with “miracle stories” is shared by pilgrims coming to Canindé from all over this vast region (Slater 1986). This shared knowledge crosses generational boundaries and acts as information for membership in the community of St. Francis. While these stories are based upon factual events, over time they may be transformed into stories of mythic proportions, which glorify the healing power of St. Francis and reinforce the benefits of being counted as one of his followers. They are stories that the people tell themselves about themselves. I first learned of the legendary miracle stories surrounding St. Francis of Wounds through talking with the pilgrims. These stories were related to me quite sincerely, but their fantastic quality made me interested in hearing the same stories told by someone outside the pilgrim culture.

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For other narrations, I turned to Dr. Barreto and the freis, and from them I learned a similar but less fantastic version of these mythic tales. These different versions reinforce the idea that culture is interpreted and also that culture is interpreted differently depending upon one’s place in the cultural “web” (Geertz 1973). Throughout the rest of this chapter, I will share some of the stories that I heard from the pilgrims, as well as stories told to me by residents of Canindé, Barreto, and the freis. These stories take various forms, ranging from miracle stories and creation myths to what could be described as urban or occupational legends. Some of the stories instruct, some are metaphors for social situations, and some simply validate people’s faith in St. Francis. Many of these stories have been repeated for generations, which is a revealing testament to this active tradition. However, one story is new and revolves around an ex-voto that was brought to the House of Miracles in my presence. That ex-voto immediately received a lot of attention, and by the next day, word of it had spread throughout the community. For the next several days people came to the House of Miracles just to see this milagre and to recount the story behind it. It was interesting to watch this dynamic process in action since it became obvious that with this ex-voto, a new legend had been added to the oral narratives surrounding the miracles of St. Francis. That story, “A Criança com Cruzeiro,” is related later in this chapter. The Miracle Story of the Founding and Building of O Santuário de São Francisco das Chagas

It is interesting that even though people in Canindé refuse to accept that St. Francis of Wounds and St. Francis of Assisi are one and the same, Francisco de Assisi is one of the most common names given to boys in the area. This story was first told to me by DeAssis, a young man about twenty years old, who is now a Franciscan brother but worked for several years in the House of Miracles. I later heard pieces of this tale from others. The story is as follows: Many, many years ago, before the shrine to St. Francis was built, three brothers owned all of the land where Canindé is now. They were evil men who mistreated the people who worked their land

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for them. The Roman Catholic fathers wanted to build a mission here, but the brothers refused to sell their land. However, through a miracle, the land was given to the Church. It seems that one by one the brothers experienced misfortune and death, until the remaining brother, in fear for his life, gave the land to the Church. These miracles continued during the erection of the first cathedral, which has since been replaced by the present-day basilica. It seems that during the building of the first cathedral, several miracles also occurred. The most notable one was when one of the carpenters, working high up on one of the steeples, lost his footing. As he was falling, presumably to his death, he screamed, “Save me, St. Francis!” At this exact time, his belt was caught by another piece of scaffolding, breaking his fall and saving his life. When I read the history of the shrine in São Francisco das Chagas de Canindé: Resumo Histórico, written in 1962 by Frei Venâncio Willeke, this “mysterious” legend was alluded to, but not confirmed or denied. The book did verify that in 1758, two Franciscan brothers left the monastery in Recife to begin a following of St. Francis of Wounds in the area of Canindé (Willeke 1962, 27). Because St. Francis has always been associated in Roman Catholic literature with thaumaturgy, the performance of miracles, and to honor this, many of the Franciscan brothers in Canindé wear wooden letter Ts around their necks. Willeke’s history of Canindé states that it is through religious instruction connected with the doctrine of St. Francis of Assisi, who is often referred to in canonical writings as St. Francis of Wounds because of his having received the stigmata, that miracles became connected with the shrine. In other words, the official story, according to the Church, is that religious canons dictated the shrine’s association with miracles, while the unofficial story of the people maintains that St. Francis himself began the association by performing miraculous events. This is yet another illustration of the competition for cultural ownership and the anticlerical philosophy of the people of the Northeast; their belief is connected directly to their patron saint rather than linked through an intermediary of the Church.

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A Menina de Amazonas (The Little Girl from Amazonas)

The next miracle story is the most famous of the local legends associated with the shrine. It was told to me on my first trip to the shrine museum, but I was repeatedly told it by other people as well. Frequently, pilgrims asked me where the Menina could be found. This is a translation of the story. .

Many years ago in the state of Amazonas, Maria Aperacida, a little four-year-old girl, was picnicking in the jungle with her family. While her parents were not looking the little girl wandered off, disappearing into the jungle. Her parents shouted and shouted, and looked and looked, but the little girl was not found. The parents looked for several days. They feared that a wild animal had taken their little girl, and that they would never see her again, especially not alive. In desperation, they appealed to St. Francis to find their daughter for them. They promised to make the long journey to his shrine in Canindé if he would please do this. The very next day, the little girl walked into her parents’ village, apparently no worse for wear, after spending several days in the jungle. Her parents were overjoyed and asked how she survived in the jungle all by herself. She told them that she had not been by herself, but that a kindly old man had taken care of her. The mother and father went into the jungle to try to find this old man, to thank him for saving their daughter’s life, but he was never found. Soon, to repay St. Francis as they promised, the family made the pilgrimage to the shrine at Canindé. They brought with them a life-size doll dressed in the clothing of the little girl to deposit in the House of Miracles. When they entered the basilica, they knelt under the painting of St. Francis. The little girl looked up and said to her parents, “That is the old man that took care of me in the jungle.” And so it was that it was St. Francis who took care of the little girl, proving to all that he is always willing to help those who believe in him. This plastic doll, about three feet tall, was prominently displayed in the shrine museum in Canindé, but was moved to the Casa dos Milagres.

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The Menina de Amazonas in her new home in the renovated Casa dos Milagres.

When she resided in the museum, the blonde doll appeared to be dressed in the polyester clothes in which she originally came from the factory rather than those of a little girl. After at least thirty years in the museum, she was looking pretty tired and dusty. She was, however, the biggest draw that the museum had, beating out tribal artifacts brought back from the Amazon; taxidermy specimens; pistols from the famous bandit of the sertão, Lampião; and mineral specimens from Minas Gerais. She is so famous that when someone asks, “Where is the Menina?” everyone expects you to understand what they mean. It would seem that this doll is no longer merely a doll; she is an icon, the permanent manifestation of a miracle. Seeing her is, to contemporary pilgrims, similar to what viewing the relics of saints during the Middle Ages was to medieval pilgrims. In honor of her great status as an icon of the people, she now has a designation in the Casa dos Milagres, a historic plaque telling her story, and she has had somewhat of a makeover. She has been cleaned up and now wears a new dress and a ribbon in her hair.

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The Man Who Rose from the Dead

This third narrative is another famous miracle story that has been transformed into legend. It was repeated to me by several people. This story, the “creation myth” of the shrine, and the tale of the Menina are the nucleus of the shared legends surrounding the shrine. The facts of this story were told to me by Adalberto Barreto, who was in the House of Miracles when the event occurred and captured it on film. Here is the miracle story as it was first told to me by another person. Many, many years ago there was a very devout man. He was very, very sick and the doctors could not diagnose what was the matter with him. He appealed to St. Francis to help him and promised to make a pilgrimage when he was well. He did get a bit better, but he was too weak and died before St. Francis could heal him. Before he died, he asked that he be taken to Canindé in his casket, to pay his promise to St. Francis. He was a very religious and good man and wanted to pay his promise even after his death. When his family brought him to the shrine at Canindé and set his casket before the statue of St. Francis, they heard knocking coming from within the casket. They removed the casket lid, and the dead man sat up— alive. St. Francis had been so moved by the faith of the man that he decided to bring him back from the dead. The man and his family walked away from the shrine, leaving his casket as an ex-voto. I often heard pilgrims asking where they could view this casket. However, it was destroyed along with other ex-votos brought to the shrine that year in the annual burning at the end of each pilgrimage season. Barreto, who in addition to being an anthropologist is a practicing psychiatrist, supplied the background of the story. While it is true that the man came to Canindé in his casket, he was not dead. However, no one knew this but Barreto, a frei, and the man and his family. The events unfolded in this way: Barreto received a telephone call from a frei who was disturbed by a letter he had received from this man. In the letter, the man told the priest that he had been told by St. Francis himself that in order to be healed of the emotional problems that he was having, he must come to Canindé in a sealed coffin. And, once he arrived in Canindé,

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the coffin could only be opened by a priest. The priest, wanting to help the man but unsure how to deal with such a bizarre request, turned to Dr. Barreto for his professional opinion. Barreto spoke with the man and discovered that his problems stemmed from a childhood incident. As a child the man had gone to church with his mother. She had told him to go to confession, but he had not. When it came time to receive communion from the priest, the boy was afraid to tell his mother that he had not gone to confession. He knew from religious teaching that it was a sin to take communion if one had not been to confession, so when the host was laid upon his tongue, he spit it out. Horrified by this act, and learning of his lie about going to confession, the boy’s mother told him he was doubly damned. Apparently, the man was truly traumatized by this, because as he grew older, he began to have psychological problems relating to this incident and even had tried suicide. In desperation, he appealed for forgiveness to St. Francis, who then told him that he must go to Canindé in a casket and have it opened by a priest. Then, St. Francis said, he would have forgiveness. Dr. Barreto thought that this request was very profound, since it was the perfect metaphor for the man’s emotional problems. His spiritual death had occurred when he spit out the host. As a result, his resurrection could only be accomplished by forgiveness from the Church, the authority that damned him. Barreto encouraged the frei to cooperate with this request for healing and suggested that tiny air holes be bored into the lid of the casket to ensure that suffocation would not occur. The man was brought to the House of Miracles in his casket, which was then opened by the priest. To all effects, it appeared to onlookers that a dead man was brought to life, and it created quite a stir. To this day, only a few people know that this was a staged “miracle,” and the resurrection story is repeated to each new generation of pilgrims. It is truly a wonderful story of the redemptive qualities of faith. A Criança com Cruzeiro (The Child with the Coin)

The story of the Criança com Cruzeiro spread throughout the pilgrim community within a few hours during the Romaria in honor of St. Francis in 1996. This annual festival, which begins around October 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, and lasts about ten days, is the high point of the pilgrimage season. During this time, the population of Canindé, normally

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about 25,000, swells to about 350,000. The shrine is packed with people, and the town is transformed into a human camp. City streets are closed off, and hammocks are tied to anything vertical, including trees, lampposts, and gates. Small cooking fires heat water for coffee, while bathing, sleeping, eating, and other aspects of living become public spectacles. During the festival, the House of Miracles witnesses a constant, swarming mass of bodies, with people pushing and shoving to get to the bins in order to view the milagres. It was in this mass of people that a man appeared one afternoon with a crudely made ex-voto representing his daughter. The milagre immediately attracted attention because it was grotesque. It was about two feet tall and crudely hewn from wood. What made it so grotesque was that it was dressed in a baby’s diaper, it had a Brazilian coin in its mouth, and its head was covered with human hair. Fellow pilgrims surrounded the man after he had deposited the offering and demanded to hear of the miracle it represented. The man, a local resident, was more than willing to repeat the story over and over to all who wanted to hear it. This is what he said. Earlier that day I had been at home, taking a break from the festivities, when I saw out of the corner of my eye, Tonia, my little girl, a toddler, put something into her mouth. Before I could grab her and see what was in her mouth, she swallowed it and began to choke. I turned her upside down and smacked her on the back, but whatever it was, was lodged in her throat. I could see that she could not breathe and that she was beginning to turn blue. I did everything I could to dislodge the object, [but] finally my little girl stopped moving and I feared that she had died. I screamed, “Não, não, São Francisco, ajuda me” [No, no, St. Francis, help me]. At that exact moment, my little girl coughed and the object, a coin, was magically expelled from her throat. Within a few minutes she was back to crawling around and playing as if nothing had happened. The father, overcome with gratitude to St. Francis for saving the life of his daughter, decided to immediately make an ex-voto for payment. He found the wood and measured the height of his daughter. He then took the clothes that she was wearing and dressed the ex-voto in them. When he was carving the facial features, he opened the mouth enough to

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The Criança com Cruzeiro in the bin in the Casa dos Milagres.

wedge the same coin she had swallowed into the opening. Finally, he cut curls of hair from the head of his child and glued them onto the milagre, making it as representative as possible. The father was still visibly shaken by the recounting of the events. He was also bursting with gratitude toward St. Francis for coming to the rescue of his daughter, and so made a compelling storyteller. This, in combination with the uniqueness of the votive offering, resulted in a sort of instant celebrity status for the ex-voto. For the rest of the festival, crowds of people pushed to examine and discuss the Criança com Cruzeiro. Because of its notoriety, this ex-voto was removed from the bin and placed in the museum. Santa Lúcia and How She Lost Her Eyes

Ex-votos can also represent stories from religious history. These exvotos are often taken from the bin by parents and held while they recount to their children the story “told” by the offering. In this way, the milagres can function as aids to religious instruction and the generation of sacred mythology. One such story is of St. Lucy, who is acknowledged in books of hagiography as the patron saint of vision. This is the story as it was told to me.

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Examples of milagres offered to St. Lúcia.

Lúcia, the beautiful daughter of a very wealthy king who lived back in the times of Jesus, refused to marry a suitor because he was not a Christian. He was a very bad man, and became very angry that Lúcia would not marry him. In a jealous rage, he plucked out her eyes and served them to her on a plate, saying that if she would not marry him that she would never look on another man again. God, to reward Lúcia’s devotion to him, brought her to heaven. From there she looks down on all Christian people, and it is to her we pray when we have a problem with eyesight. Ex-votos that represent the story of St. Lúcia are quite interesting. Usually they are depicted as eyeballs on a plate. Not being familiar with the story of St. Lúcia before I went to Canindé, when I saw the first one, I was quite intrigued. The docent at the House of Miracles was amused at my reaction to the milagre and then told me the story of the saint. Thereafter, when someone deposited another example of this religious story, I was always made aware of its presence.

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Did You Hear the One About the Man Who Came by Bus Instead?

Living with the freis afforded me the privilege of having a window into monastic life. In many ways it is the tranquil, ascetic life that I imagined. In many other ways, it is not. One characteristic that I had not expected to find was the sense of merriment and the ensuing abundance of levity that is shared by the brotherhood. Meal times, especially at midday, which is the only meal formally taken together, are the occasions when the freis discuss the events of the day, share memories, and even tell jokes. An example of monastic humor can be found in the telling of what I consider to be the equivalent of an urban legend. I deem it an urban legend because it may or may not have occurred, but it has been repeated so often that it has become an amusing anecdote. In addition, because of the content and the audience to which it is repeated, I suggest that it also falls into the category of occupational legend. This story was told to me at lunch by one of the priests. It concerns a confession that he claimed to have heard that morning. I was a bit suspicious of the validity of the story at the time because I knew that the freis normally do not discuss things told to them in confession. My suspicions were confirmed when I noticed the twinkle in his eyes and the muffled laughter going around the table. This is the story I was told. A man came into confession today from Maranhão. As you know, that is very far from Canindé. Anyway, he had made a promessa to St. Francis to come to Canindé on foot. Later, he realized that it was a long way, that it would take a very long time to reach Canindé on foot, and he would miss many days of work. So, instead of walking, he decided to come here on the bus. As a compromise, he stood in the aisle of the bus the whole way. He was very worried that St. Francis would think he had reneged on his promise and asked my opinion. I told him it was okay. I thought St. Francis would understand. Afterward, when I told him that I did not believe him, he and the rest of the priests roared with laughter, not just at me but at the story itself. It would seem that this type of humor can be found in any occupational group, even priests.

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Stories Using St. Francis as an Agent of Enculturation

While I was in the House of Miracles one day, a woman came up to me and asked where she could find the Homem Grávida (Pregnant Man). Once again I thought that this was a situation where I just could not understand her Portuguese and asked her to repeat herself. She asked again where she could find the Pregnant Man. I’m sure that I looked at her as if she were crazy, because she said something else that I could not understand (which was probably a good thing) and walked off to find someone who could answer her question. After she left, I also went to find someone who could answer her question. I was told who the Pregnant Man was and was interested to find out that there are a number of legends attributed to St. Francis in which he teaches a lesson to people who don’t believe in him. The Homem Grávida is the most widely known of this type of legend, and in a pattern similar to an urban legend, many people believe that it occurred recently and that the man can be found locally. The legend was told to me as follows: There was a man who came to Canindé who did not believe in the miraculous powers of São Francisco das Chagas. Even though people told him of the miracles that St. Francis had worked for them, he was still a doubter. He bragged that he did not believe and said, “If St. Francis can work miracles, then he can make me a pregnant man.” The man began to swell immediately, causing quite a commotion. This swelling continued for several days until the man said he believed and asked St. Francis to help him. The man soon returned to his normal size. I heard two endings to this story. One is that he returned from where he came, but comes to Canindé each year for the Romaria. The other says that he moved to Canindé and remains one of St. Francis’s most devout followers. Perhaps the story is based on a bit of truth. It is possible that a man suffering from a disease that caused his body to swell did come to the shrine. Someone saw him and said that he looked pregnant. Then someone else overheard and misunderstood, thinking that the person said the man was pregnant. Then, as the story was told and retold, the legend was created.

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When I asked if there were any more stories similar to this, I was told one about a little boy who stuck out his tongue so often that he could not get it back in his mouth. Apparently, he was an ill-tempered boy whose mother told him that if he did not stop sticking his tongue out at her, she would ask St. Francis to make it stay that way. The warnings did not deter him, and so St. Francis made the boy’s tongue remain sticking out. I do not think there is any basis of truth in this story; however, it is quite interesting to me that St. Francis can be added to the list of fictive agents of enculturation.

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Ex-Votos Aesthetics and Forms

T

he history of pilgrimage and the material culture that accompanies this ritual has changed little since it was first chronicled. Reading historical accounts of the tradition, I am struck by the similarity of the descriptions to the contemporary types of offerings I saw in Canindé. As mentioned previously, Finucane divides the myriad of votive offerings from the Middle Ages into four major categories: animate, inanimate, exuvial, and replicative (Finucane 1977, 96). It is quite apparent that, despite the 400 years that have passed since the height of Christian pilgrimage, these categories are still applicable. During the Middle Ages animate offerings were usually in the form of pilgrimage and animal sacrifice. While the sacrificing of animals has virtually disappeared in Canindé, pilgrimage is still vital, and contemporary animate offerings now include the donation of living animals. Inanimate offerings, historically and now, usually take the form of crutches that are no longer needed, or another item that had a utilitarian life before becoming connected to a miracle. Offerings of an exuvial nature in the past and the present can at times be rather macabre. This type of offering can consist of a bit of hair, a jar of gallstones, a matchbox with a desiccated umbilical cord, or some other cast-off piece of the body. Unchanged from medieval times, the replicative offering is still the most common type. Into this category fall the anatomical ex-votos, which are found in different forms and made from different materials; they are offered to several deities around the world in addition to St. Francis in Canindé. 63

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Otra Modas (Other Ways of Paying the Promise)

Before discussing the replicative handcrafted milagres, I will inventory the many other ways that I witnessed promessas being repaid. These payments took the form of candles, objects from nature, utilitarian objects, exuvial fluids and materials, wearing the batina (pilgrim’s costume), walking the Stations of the Cross, mortification of the flesh, walking to Canindé, photographs, fireworks, tithes, and recycled objects.

candles Since around the fourth century, the Church has accepted the custom of offering candles at shrines. The burning of candles at the tombs of Christian martyrs is one of the first recorded instances of this custom. As candles became more affordable, this tradition expanded and was used as a type of ritual in conjunction with prayer. It is possible that some pre-Christian ideology connected with magic became syncretized with this practice, which involves sympathetic magic and transference. In early Christian ritual, candles were purchased to fit the measurement of an individual or body part. It was believed that an illness could be transferred into the candle and destroyed as the candle burns (Finucane 1977, 96). But candles of odd lengths are more costly, and can only be purchased by special order from a candle factory in Fortaleza or another commercial center. Because Canindé is located a great distance from any commercial center, this tradition is not as active there as it is at urban shrines, such as the Igreja de Nosso Senhor do Bonfim (Church of Our Lord of Good End) in Salvador in the state of Bahia. I did witness a few examples of this, however, and the candles were intended to represent the length of the pilgrim’s arm or leg, or to duplicate the height of a child. In those instances the pilgrims carried the candles into the House of Miracles looking for a place to burn them, but they were directed to the grotto in the park behind the basilica, where candles are safely burned. The simplest way to repay a promessa with candles is by purchasing regular tapers. Twelve-inch candles can be purchased for around seventyfive cents apiece in one of the many souvenir shops. On some occasions candles were left wrapped in the paper from the store and placed in

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the bin at the House of Miracles rather than taken to the grotto to be burned. When this happened, one of the monks or church employees often waited until the pilgrim left the building, and then removed the candles from the bin before they were broken. The candles were then used by the Church for other purposes.

objects from nature Even though Canindé is only about three hours from the sea, many people living in the interior have never ventured to the coast. When a large conch shell was left in the bin, Maria, one of the docents who at the time was about fifty years old, admired it. I held it to my ear, as I have done all my life, to hear the waves of the ocean. She asked what I was doing, and I said that I was listening to the ocean and told her to hold it to her ear. As she did, her face became transfigured with amazement. She had never heard the ocean before and now magically she could listen to it whenever she wished. For the rest of the day, I saw her pick up the shell, hold it to her ear, and smile. Another type of natural object that was frequently deposited in the votive bin is a piece of wood that has an unusual formation, such as a forked branch that resembles a human form or two branches that have fused to resemble a cross. These natural formations are considered very powerful and if not used as an offering are given prominence on a wall in the home, usually above the home altar. Before the restructuring of the exhibits in the museum, an entire wall was covered with natural cross formations that had been offered to St. Francis over the years. Cattle horns are also offered to St. Francis. While the sertão is too dry to support large-scale agriculture, it does support cattle ranching. Because of this, there is a special Mass given for the vaqueiros (cowboys) during the Festival of St. Francis in October. At that time, milagres for injured horses, hats and chaps worn by the vaqueiros, and cattle horns are deposited, and for a few days in the House of Miracles one can get whiffs of smells like those found in a stable. Another interesting way of paying a promise related to cattle is by playing a bingo game. In the mid-1990s, about once a month, to fulfill a promessa, an owner of a big ranch donated one of his animals to the parish. The parish house would then have a bingo game with the grand prize

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A natural wood formation used as a milagre.

being the steer. The winner could either take the animal or sell it at the livestock market. One month, the grand prize was a donkey, a valuable work animal in that part of Brazil. The bingo card was three reis (about three dollars), and usually about 200 people would play. In this way the parish earned a bit of money, and some wealth was redistributed in the community.

utilitarian objects In his essay in The Social Life of Things (1986), Igor Kopytoff introduces the concept of a biographical approach to the study of objects. For example, he questions: What are the recognized periods in an object’s life?

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What is the expected life of an object? How does its life change with age? And what happens to it when it is no longer useful? These questions can be applied to the inanimate category of votive offerings in Canindé, which are utilitarian objects, such as crutches or a pair of glasses that are no longer needed due to the intervention of a miracle. No longer living their original lives, these items become transformed into emblematic objects imbued with magical or sacred powers. Many appeared in the caixa, the bin, where ex-votos are deposited. These items had previous functions before they became votive objects, and in many cases their “lives” continued even after they were deposited, through recycling. On a regular basis, someone in need from the community, and occasionally a pilgrim, would ask if a pair of crutches, a cane, eyeglasses, or even a prosthesis had recently been deposited. As a rule, when an object such as this was offered, it was culled from the bin and set aside for just such a situation. Since there are no social services to freely furnish these items to those in need, this ritual often filled that gap. Also, on occasion, the docents looked the other way when a child came in, saw a cloth ex-voto in the shape of the human body that had been left in the bin, grabbed it, and gleefully ran away. To the child, the object did not represent a miracle, but instead looked like a perfectly good doll. Additionally, if a pair of shoes, a pair of pants, or a straw hat might benefit someone in need, they were removed from the bin and quietly given to that individual. Inanimate articles that functioned in another capacity before becoming votive offerings included items of modern medical technology, such as X rays, sonogram pictures, biopsy results, contact lens cases, saline drip bottles, and disposable syringes. In Brazil, the patient pays for tests such as X rays and often keeps them rather than having them on file with a doctor. Because of this they can be used as models to fashion anatomically correct images of unseen organs, such as hearts and lungs. However, in most cases, the X rays themselves, along with the medical papers, were offered to St. Francis. Another item that was offered upon occasion is a bottle of cachaça, a locally produced and potent alcohol similar to rum, made from sugarcane. Drinking excessive amounts of cachaça seems to promote aggressive behavior. Its abuse plays a role in many instances of homicide and domestic violence, which are recognized as two of Brazil’s most prevalent

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social problems. When an individual has asked for help to stop drinking, repaying St. Francis with a bottle is deemed an appropriate action. Other manufactured items I have seen offered include medicine bottles, surgical garments, army uniforms, soccer balls and jerseys, body casts, false teeth, orthodontic retainers, composition books from local schools, photographs in pierced tin or wooden frames, pieces of machinery, spark plugs, roofing tiles, leg braces, orthopedic shoes, bridal veils and wedding dresses, and huge clay cooking pots. Items representing local agricultural production, such as bottles of oil made from castor beans and carnauba palms, dried corn stalks, jars of beans, dried gourds (sometimes decorated with designs and other times plain), manioc meal, and machetes and hoes, were also offered to St. Francis in thanksgiving for bountiful crops.

exuvial fluids and materials Also deposited in the caixa were jars filled with mysterious body fluids and materials such as gallstones and kidney stones. Other exuvial offerings that I have seen are fingernail clippings, dried umbilical cords, teeth, and hair. There is a special bin in the House of Miracles for the deposition of hair. Sometimes women brought in braids of their hair that had been previously cut. Other times, it was cut on the spot. It was always a very emotional scene. I remember one instance in particular. A young girl of about fifteen or sixteen came to the House of Miracles with her mother. The girl had recovered from a high fever, most likely dengue. She had beautiful, thick dark hair that reached all the way down her back. As her mother removed the scissors from her bag, the girl started to cry. She kept repeating, “Not much, Mother, please not much.” Unfortunately, her mother wanted to make sure that the promessa was repaid in full and cut her daughter’s hair off to her shoulders. As about two feet of her hair was removed, the girl cried so pitifully that everyone around was caught up in their actions. By the time the scissors were put away, there was hardly a dry eye in the building. Children were often brought to the House of Miracles and given their first haircut. This was usually in repayment by their mothers, thanking St. Francis for keeping their children alive until they reached seven years

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of age. It is thought that if a child lives until then, he or she has a good chance of reaching maturity. All of the offered hair is kept in the special bin until it is filled. Then it is collected in big bags and taken to Fortaleza to sell to wigmakers, with the revenue used for worthy causes in the parish.

wearing the

bati na

Some pilgrims wear clothes made from brown cloth until they arrive at the House of Miracles. These brown clothes are meant to pay homage to the brown robe worn by St. Francis. They also represent the uniform of the “nation” of St. Francis. Many people who lived in Canindé did not wear the traditional brown robe, but did take a vow to always dress in brown in honor of St. Francis. I also noticed that many owners of the shops and restaurants would dress in brown when they knew large numbers of pilgrims would be in town. I sometimes wondered if this was a true show of solidarity or just good business. There is a special bin to hold these garments. In one corner of the House of Miracles is a folding screen behind which the more modest can remove the ritual garment and change into regular clothes. When children changed out of the robes, it seemed to be more auspicious than when an adult did so. Children almost always had brand-new clothes, often still commercially wrapped, to put on. This symbolized a sort of rite of passage, marking a transition in their lives from one stage of childhood to the next. When the bins were full, the batinas were taken to the monastery to be washed. The garments were then delivered to different parishes throughout the interior to be worn by future pilgrims. St. Francis of Wounds, being the patron saint of the poor, is not widely followed by members of the upper classes. Most of the wealthier visitors arrived on a Sunday and rarely brought an ex-voto, preferring instead to put money into the alms box. In more recent times, as the economic situation became more prosperous, new cars would be driven up to the doors of the Casa dos Milagres to be blessed by a frei. The Franciscan brother would splash holy water all over the exterior and interior of the car, often even on the motor under the hood. The owner of the car would receive a blessing as well. The last Sunday I was in Canindé there were so

Pilgrims changing out of their batinas.

New cars being blessed by a frei.

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many cars lined up it looked like an assembly line at an automotive plant. While many of these people were earnest pilgrims, some fell into the category of religious tourist. They rarely touched the ex-votos in the bin, but simply looked around the House of Miracles, and perhaps purchased something from the religious bookstore at the shrine or had lunch at one of the restaurants close to the basilica. It was interesting to me, however, that they often dressed in expensive and fashionable clothing in shades of brown.

walking the stations of the cross In addition to bringing an ex-voto to repay their promise, some pilgrims walked the Stations of the Cross. These stations, depicting fourteen stages of Jesus’ ordeal during his trial by Pontius Pilate and his crucifixion, are located on the Via Sacra, which ascends a steep hill in Canindé. The first station is at the base of the hill and the fourteenth is at the top where the Igreja de Cristo Rei is located. The walk is quite taxing and made doubly tiring when performed under the hot tropical sun. This ritual action is compounded at the first station, where the pilgrims pick up a stone to place on their heads. At each succeeding station, the rock is exchanged for a larger one, until by the time the last station is reached, the rock can weigh several pounds. Observing this procession was very illuminating as to the integration of ritual behavior into Brazilian life. Some people behaved in the somber, reverent manner that someone from the United States might expect, while others laughed and chatted. I even saw people holding the rock on their head with one hand while smoking a cigarette or holding a soft drink with the other. These observations reinforce the idea that reverence, like most behaviors, is subjective and culturally constructed.

mortification of the flesh Religious mortification of the flesh connotes hair shirts, self-flagellation, and acts of crucifixion, practices common in religious groups such as the Penitentes, found in parts of Mexico and the United States. To my knowledge, such practices are not associated with the followers of St. Francis. However, while the carrying of a cross on a daily basis for several weeks

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Pilgrims walk the Stations of the Cross carrying rocks on their heads.

A pilgrim circumambulates the basilica on her knees.

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or months certainly would qualify as quite rigorous, circumambulating the basilica or climbing the expanse of concrete steps from the grotto to the basilica on hands and knees are the most common methods of repaying a promessa through physical pain and suffering. Payment in this fashion is no small undertaking. The circumference of the basilica is several hundred yards of rough textured concrete, and there are about thirty steep concrete steps from the grotto to the top. I witnessed an eightyyear-old woman ascending the steps on her knees, refusing any help in her climb. When she reached the top she could not stand, but appeared glowing with happiness. I have seen numerous pilgrims on their knees making the revolution around the building. Usually they were holding the hand of a friend and had pads on their knees; some had no pads but did have the support of a friend who held a hand, gave sips of water, and even held an umbrella over the pilgrim to shade them from the intense sunlight. Fewer had no pads and no support, choosing instead to focus on the promise and the accompanying pain on their own. At the culmination of this circumambulation, the fabric would be completely gone from the knees of their pants, and their legs would be bleeding freely. In all of these instances the pilgrims remarked that St. Francis had bled for them, and they wanted to repay him in kind.

walking to canindé Some pilgrims paid their promessa by walking to Canindé. Usually family groups or neighbors joined together to make the trip, walking at night to avoid the heat. There is a plaque on the wall of the House of Miracles commemorating one such group that was killed by being hit by a transport truck while on their way to Canindé. The road to Canindé is hazardous, filled with potholes that can literally overturn a car. To avoid these potholes, vehicles going both ways veer from their lanes. Fortunately, accidents with many fatalities are not common. During the summer of 2011, I talked with a bicycling group from Fortaleza that had ridden together to fulfill a promessa. I was told by residents of Canindé that many wealthy people from Fortaleza promise St. Francis to make the journey on foot. However, their chauffeur-driven cars creep along behind them, and periodically the pilgrims avail themselves of air conditioning and refreshments before

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T-shirt worn by a member of a bicycle group that made a promessa to ride to Canindé from Fortaleza.

continuing on. The leg of the journey through the streets of Canindé to the shrine, however, is completed alone. The car proceeds to the shrine and awaits their arrival, upon which they are retrieved and carried home in comfort. I never saw this happen and wonder if this might not be another fledgling urban legend. Once while I was in Canindé, the governor of Ceará came to pay his promise to St. Francis after a successful reelection. He arrived by helicopter preceded by vans of television camera crews, and he was whisked the four or five blocks to the shrine by an awaiting car driven by the head of the monastery. He dashed in, knelt in front of the banner of St. Francis, jumped back into the car after a brief photo opportunity, and was back in the sky within about fifteen minutes! While he did not walk to Canindé, his was definitely the most spectacular arrival that I witnessed. There were other people whose arrivals created quite a stir as well: the individuals who traveled various distances carrying a large cross. Not all pilgrims traveled for months to reach Canindé, like the Homem da Cruz.

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One young man I talked with had walked barefoot for two days. His cross was simply fashioned from two young pine trees and did not have the benefit of wheels like that of the Homem da Cruz. The young man had made his pilgrimage carrying a cross to repay St. Francis for healing his foot. He was an agricultural worker, as are many residents of this region. Again, like most workers, he did not have protective foot gear and worked, instead, either in bare feet or wearing rubber flip-flops. He told me that a heavy log had fallen across the instep of his right foot, breaking it. Farm workers in this area have nothing remotely resembling workers’ compensation. They apparently do not even have sick days. The prospect of missing work and perhaps losing his job prompted this young man to appeal to St. Francis. He said that after making the promessa to St. Francis, in two days his foot was as good as new, and he had come to Canindé to make good on his half of the bargain. I looked closely at his foot, and it had healed so cleanly that I could not even see a mark.

photogr aphs Photographs are another popular way of paying a promise. Before the age of inexpensive digital photography and cell phones with cameras, many sertãnejos did not own a camera and to have a photograph taken was a costly undertaking. As a result, the value placed upon a photograph is far greater than would be expected in the United States. Offering a photograph of yourself is felt to be a visual reminder to St. Francis of your devotion. There is a big wooden box in the House of Miracles where people place their photographs. Periodically, the docents would take down the old photographs covering the walls of the House of Miracles and replace them with new ones. The old photographs were burned with the other ex-votos. Many people promised St. Francis that they would put their photograph on the wall in the House of Miracles and were disturbed when they were not permitted to paste them up themselves. Many tried to put theirs on the wall surreptitiously and ended up being rebuked by the docents. The subjects of the photographs included people in uniforms of the army, soccer teams, and grade school classes. Occupational photos included a bus driver in his bus, a policeman with his rifle, drivers in their trucks, farmers on tractors or with animals, and a beautician in her shop. Brides;

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A photo in the Casa dos Milagres depicts a child wearing a batina while posing next to a statue of St. Barbara (Yansâ).

A professional photographer outside the basilica.

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graduates in caps and gowns; children in their first communion clothes; people of all ages in various stages of health and ill health; people with amputations, stitches, tumors, infected sores, elephantiasis, leprosy, and other topical diseases; new cars and new homes; storefronts; airplanes and fishing boats; crops in fields; pets; people in surgery; even people in their coffins—all appeared in the pictures that covered the walls. When I questioned people about the photographs of the deceased, I found that in most cases these individuals had been unable to come to Canindé to repay their promise before they died, so a friend or relative made a photograph of the deceased and completed the pilgrimage for them. One particular photograph that I found especially interesting was of a little girl, two or three years old. She was dressed in the brown clothing of a pilgrim, yet she was standing next to a statue, almost as big as she was, of St. Barbara. Barbara is a relatively obscure saint in the Roman Catholic religion, but the image represents Yansâ, who is a powerful deity in AfroBrazilian religions. What better example can there be to illustrate the heterodox practices of Brazilian religion than this photograph of a child wearing the pilgrimage uniform that honors a Catholic saint while posed next to an Afro-Brazilian deity? Some people paid professional photographers to take their picture in Canindé. At least four sites around the basilica had commercial photographers, who would hang a backdrop painted with a large image of St. Francis and the basilica on it. People would come to these backdrops to have their picture “taken with St. Francis” and pay a few reis for one of these quick-developing photographs. In most cases the expenditure was only made for a child. These photographs were in some instances taken home as religious souvenirs and placed upon home altars. However, most often they were placed in the photo box in the House of Miracles to reinforce the power of the pilgrims’ ex-votos.

fireworks I was in the church during a particularly solemn moment in the service of worship. Suddenly there was a nerve-shattering burst of fireworks from the roof of the church. Then, slowly, the sharp smell of burning gunpowder began to drift in through the open door and mingle with the pungent odour of candles and incense. After that I

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ceased to be aware of their separateness, and realized that both incense and gunpowder were ingredients basic to the celebration of a festa. (Boissevain 1969, 59–60) To me, one of the most interesting ways to fulfill a promessa is by purchasing and setting off fireworks. On feast days and weekends, the serenity of Canindé was constantly interrupted by the deafening boom of fogos, fireworks, being shot in the park below the basilica. At times the air was so filled with the acrid smoke of these fogos that my eyes burned. I know that the practice of lighting fireworks at shrines has long been a custom in Japan, but it could never accurately be explained to me how this activity pleased St. Francis. The explosions only happened during the day, and they did not produce a colorful display, only a deafening noise. According to Boissevain’s (1969) research in Malta, it appears that a similar practice occurs there and probably in other parts of the world. Perhaps it is a form of reminding the saint that you are here.

tithes People also fulfilled their contract with St. Francis by giving away money. Money was given to the Church by putting it anonymously in the donation box in the basilica or by paying for a special Mass. Many people gave money to the ever-present beggars, who arrived early and stayed late around the shrine. Several local people who worked for the Church spoke disparagingly about the beggars and told me that some of them lived quite comfortably on the money they earned in this way; at times they could be seen wearing nice clean clothes, rather than the dirty, tattered “costume” worn during their “working hours.” However, I never saw evidence of this and suspect that it may be yet another derisive urban legend. In a similar vein, I was told about a woman who tithed half of her monthly income to St. Francis. She was one of the local prostitutes, who gave her wages in return for good health and a steady clientele. Dance halls and houses of prostitution located outside the lands owned by the Church were kept busy by the many people coming into Canindé. In fact, during the Festival of St. Francis, celebrated in early October, prostitutes from other cities would come to work in the local establishments to accommodate the huge influx of people into the town. While pilgrimage

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may have been the primary reason for coming to Canindé, for most people the festival was also the one time of year when they could get away from the drudgery of farm work and have a vacation. Once the sacred responsibility of fulfilling the promise to St. Francis was accomplished, more secular activities began. Illustrating this combination of the sacred and the secular were the souvenir stands that lined the streets during the festival and on most Sundays. They catered to both the sacred and the secular by selling pictures of saints alongside those of Brazilian rock stars. What is more, the half dozen restaurants located across the plaza from the basilica and throughout the town counted on the pilgrims drinking great amounts of beer each weekend in order to make their monthly revenue.

recycled objects Appadurai’s ideas on the changing social lives of things can be further explored in the category of ex-votos crafted from recognizable recycled materials. Plastic parts of a doll’s anatomy were frequently used as replicative milagres. People also employed plaster parts from store mannequins in this way. Other examples of material reuse I have seen are shoe boxes altered to represent houses; the top of a plastic liter bottle fashioned into a breast; cardboard from boxes cut to resemble paper dolls, hands, and feet; and similar objects made from Styrofoam. One interesting ex-voto used a rolled-up X ray as the leg from the knee to the ankle, and a cardboard foot had been attached. I asked the man about his injury, and he said that he had broken his leg in a motorcycle accident and had asked St. Francis to help heal it. He saved the X ray of his leg from the hospital and fashioned his milagre from it. The life of an ex-voto was extended when it was reused by another pilgrim. Several times I saw pilgrims come to the bin empty-handed, look over the ex-votos, and choose one that corresponded to their needs and aesthetics. Many times they would hold it for a while, perhaps, as Suzanne Preston Blier (1995) suggests, to “activate” it as their own. Then they might wrap a bit of their hair around it, tie a fita around it, or even write their name upon it to reinforce the new role it was playing, and redeposit it. Related to recycling, although not deposited in the bins as offerings, were broken religious statuary. Since these items, once blessed by priests, are considered sacred, they were disposed of by being placed in the

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ex-voto receptacle. If a statue was minimally damaged or if the broken pieces were included, they were removed from the bin and given to one of the Franciscan brothers to be recycled. The frei would glue the pieces together and usually would give the statue to someone who could not afford to purchase one. I saw statuary representing St. Francis and Jesus deposited most often, but others included St. George, whose statue is used to depict Ogun, a powerful orixá in Afro-Brazilian religions, but rarely prayed to in the Roman Catholic religion; the Virgin Mary; the Black Madonna (Nossa Senhora Aparecida), the patron saint of Brazil; and Padre Cícero, the popular folk saint, who has a shrine devoted to him in Juazeiro do Norte, also in the state of Ceará. I found it interesting that people disposed of statuary in this manner rather than tossing it in the trash, and asked why this was done. No one could give me a good reason, usually replying that it was just done that way. While reading The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic by Ralph Merrifield, I came across his discussion of the favissa, the ritual pits used by the Romans to dispose of sacrificial animals. He notes that the Roman word sacer is derived from the same Latin root as “sacred,” “sacrifice,” and “sacrilegious,” and means much the same thing as the Polynesian word tabu, or taboo: something that is prohibited due to fear from harm because it possesses a humanlike force. Merrifield goes on to say that “sacred things were dangerous and had to be disposed of with proper care when they were no longer required” (1987, 44). The attitude of sacred items being potent and dangerous has, subconsciously perhaps, survived to the present. Blier (1995) also discusses the danger present in the “activation” and “deactivation” of religious articles utilized in African Vodun. The fact that the statues are discarded in the ex-voto bin to be included in the mass burning of the ex-votos could illustrate that this is a belief in Canindé and could, again, exemplify the syncretization of Roman Catholic and African practices that defines religion in Brazil. Commercially Crafted, Mass-Produced Ex-Votos

Ex-votos have been commercially mass-produced since Roman times. From their findings, archaeologists have interpreted that shops selling terra cotta and wooden ex-votos lined the street outside temples dedicated to Aesculapius and Minerva (Jackson 1988). Contemporary forms

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of commercially made ex-votos can be purchased at most shrine sites in Latin America and the southwestern portions of North America. These replicative votive offerings are usually cast from base metals or cut from tin. The images are usually in miniature and can be purchased for little money. In most Latin American countries, with the exception of Brazil, it is unusual to find a handmade, three-dimensional ex-voto. Instead, one finds commercially made wax representations, small metal figures, handpainted scenes on metal, or vernacular offerings particular to a saint or folk hero. Replicative milagres commercially crafted in Brazil are made from cera (wax) or gesso (plaster). These preformed milagres made up a small percentage of the offerings in Canindé during my research, but their numbers are increasing each year. Molded wax ex-votos must be purchased in a large commercial center so their numbers will probably never be high in Canindé. Plaster ones can readily be purchased in commercial centers but can also be purchased in Canindé from a local sculptor. I witnessed this type of ex-voto almost always being brought to Canindé by a more sophisticated, urban person than by the typical pilgrim. The appearance of more and more of these prefabricated milagres may signal that more people from urban areas are traveling to Canindé to pay their promises. It might also suggest that some people do not want to take the time to fashion a milagre in the traditional manner, by hand. When I spoke with one of the freis about this, he declared that the prefabricated ex-votos were sem alma, without soul, and feared that this might also reflect the religious attitude of certain portions of the population as well.

molded wax Wax ex-votos have been offered for centuries, but since they were usually melted down for reuse, there are few historic examples remaining. One group dating from the fifteenth century escaped destruction after a bomb landed on Exeter Cathedral in London because they had been hidden on a ledge behind the tomb of Bishop Edmund Lacey. They were found amid the rubble. The group of wax ex-votos consisted of miniature heads, arms, and legs; animal and human feet; and the figure of a woman (Radford 1949). The Brazilian tradition of offering molded wax milagres is more commonly found in urban areas, such as the shrine to Nosso

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Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, where the walls and ceiling of a small chapel are covered in wax anatomical representations. These areas are centers for the processing of wax byproducts from the carnauba palm. In Canindé the people offering these wax ex-votos came from urban areas, usually Fortaleza, and appeared more affluent than the typical pilgrim. Transportation to Canindé was usually in the family vehicle rather than by a public form. They most often arrived on Sunday and lunched in one of the restaurants on the highway on the outskirts of town before visiting the shrine. Molded wax offerings that I saw included heads of various sizes and shapes representing males, females, and children; arms and legs of several sizes; a house; a female torso made from a mold of the Venus de Milo; breasts, single and paired; female reproductive organs: ovaries, fallopian tubes, and womb, all molded separately; hands and feet; lungs; and a specially made plaque with a valentine-shaped heart on it. This last milagre was offered by a man from Rio de Janeiro who had been ill for months. He had gone to several doctors and none could ascertain what was wrong with him. He made a plea to St. Francis to help the doctors diagnose his malady, and the next doctor found three blockages in his heart. After a successful surgery, he commissioned a wax heart with three red stripes to illustrate the blockages, and traveled all the way from Rio de Janeiro to repay St. Francis.

plaster Plaster images that were deposited included heads of all sizes and shapes depicting males, females, and children; a female torso depicting a fetus in the womb; male genitalia; an eyeball; an ear; hands and feet of all sizes; legs and arms of all sizes; a nose; breasts, single and paired; internal organs; and ovoid shapes the size of an egg. I did not have a chance to speak with the pilgrim who deposited the ovoid shapes. I do not know if they represented actual eggs to illustrate the health of a chicken, or if they were a symbol for human fertility. The images were usually cast in white plaster. In a few cases a red mark denoting a surgical incision or some type of wound was applied. Also, in a few instances, a head was painted to indicate skin tone, hair and eye color, and the application of makeup.

Examples of typical wax ex-votos.

An unusual wax milagre brought by a man who had three blockages in his heart.

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A plaster milagre depicting a liver ( figado).

Handcrafted Ex-Votos

The category of handcrafted ex-votos includes two- and three-dimensional images, both of which have European precedents during the Middle Ages. They include drawn and written offerings and forms made from wood, clay, cloth, and other materials.

two-dimensional images Two-dimensional ex-votos have a strong history in Europe and can be found in the collections of most major cathedrals in Europe and Latin America. Painted on canvas, wood, or sheets of metal, these votive offerings depict scenes illustrating miracles that resulted from the intercession of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, or a particular saint. This tradition traveled to Brazil during early Portuguese colonization (Barreto n.d.; Bastide 1951, 1978; Bercht 1989; Cardoso 1983; de Kadt 1967; della Cava 1970; Frota 1989; Mota 1968) and is depicted in the novel Tenda dos Milagres (Tent of Miracles) by the Brazilian author Jorge Amado (1971). However, this tradition was never very active in the interior of Brazil and is completely absent from the ritual found in Canindé today. I saw a few two-dimensional ex-votos on sheets of paper, illustrating miracles. These drawings, however, rather than illustrating a scene

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A paper milagre depicting a pilgrim’s lungs before and after making a promessa.

similar to the older painted ex-votos (saints performing miracles), instead simply depicted a healed anatomical affliction, such as lung cancer. In one example of a two-dimensional ex-voto, a man had drawn two fairly accurate pairs of lungs, one showing the damage suffered from lung cancer and the other showing pink, healthy lungs. Underneath the drawings he had written that his first X ray had shown extensive tumors covering his lungs. After he made a promessa to St. Francis, he had another X ray taken. This time, miraculously, there were no signs of the cancer and his lungs were perfectly healthy. I also saw people place slips of paper in the bin. This type of votive is common in other parts of the world, especially in Roman Catholic shrines throughout the American Southwest (Romano 1965). On these slips of paper, people write messages to St. Francis thanking him for his intercession on their behalf. The illiteracy that until recently was widespread in the backlands of Northeast Brazil, especially within the age group of the typical pilgrim (i.e., over forty) meant that this type of offering was not represented by a large portion of the ex-votos at Canindé. However, many wooden ex-votos were written upon. I will discuss these narrated ex-votos in the section on wooden offerings (below).

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three-dimensional images Three-dimensional votive offerings can be found throughout the world and across religious boundaries. Whether one is studying Vodun offerings in Haiti and Africa, Hindi offerings in India, or Roman Catholic offerings in Latin America, three-dimensional votive offerings can be found (Blier 1995; Devisch 1990; Graziano 2007; Huyler 1994). Three-dimensional ex-votos are the most common type of offering in Canindé and come in a range of materials. For the most part, they can be cataloged into those made from beeswax, cloth, clay, wood, and, less commonly, concrete, Styrofoam, papier-mâché, and stone. Stone ex-votos, which are carved or etched, are extremely rare in Canindé. Unfortunately, I never witnessed one being offered. I was made aware of their existence because they were collected by one of the local freis, who kindly shared his collection with me. Ex-votos made from the other materials will be discussed below.

Beeswax The ex-votos made from the almost black, aromatic wax taken from domesticated bee hives are also rare in Canindé. They are deposited so infrequently that each time one appears in the caixa, it is quickly removed by one of the docents and given to another local frei for his collection. I have seen several offerings molded from the pliant, dark wax. On each occasion they represented either a hand, a foot, or a head, and measured about three inches in height.

Cloth Cloth ex-votos are almost always made by women. These offerings are hand sewn from fabric scraps and are usually made in much the same way as the rag dolls the women make for their children. These pieces are stuffed with cotton, human or animal hair, grass, or more material scraps, and they depict whole bodies or just afflicted parts. I saw limbs, internal organs, human bodies, animals, eyes, and ears made from fabric. Details such as facial characteristics and wounds were drawn on or illustrated through embroidery. Hair was made from animal or human hair, yarn, or string. External problems, such as tumors or swellings, were depicted by extra stuffing or by sewing a lump onto the afflicted area. In most cases

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Examples of milagres made from beeswax.

the fabric choice for the skin was a solid color, although it might be blue, green, or a floral print since these offerings were made from scraps. One of the most poignant ex-votos that was offered while I was in Canindé was for a little girl who had died. It was a small casket covered in white cloth, which opened to reveal a small cloth doll. The doll had black yarn for hair and was dressed completely in white. I was told that it represented a little girl who had died and was buried in her first communion dress. Even though she had died, her parents wanted to repay their promessa to St. Francis and had no ill feeling against him. They said that they knew he had tried to intercede on their behalf, but that it was God’s will that she die.

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Examples of cloth milagres. They are often stuffed with hair of the pilgrim.

The casket milagre of a child who died; she wears her first communion dress.

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Styrofoam Styrofoam offerings were relatively new in Canindé and were crafted from leftover packaging material from television and audio equipment boxes. I saw images cut like paper dolls, and cutouts of traced hands and feet. I also saw a fairly accurate tracing of a femur and a three-dimensional leg with foot attached. On this Styrofoam leg, a gouge that had been painted red represented a wound. I also saw a house that had been glued together from thin sheets of Styrofoam. One interesting offering fashioned from this material was in the shape of an airplane. I was lucky to photograph the airplane as soon as I saw it in the bin because shortly thereafter a small boy climbed into the bin, grabbed it, and ran away. The last view I had of this ex-voto was it sailing through the air in the hands of a delighted seven- or eight-year-old.

Clay Ex-votos fashioned from clay are second only to those made from wood in their frequency of deposit. The arid climate of the sertão will not support many varieties of trees. Instead, there are a few scrub pines, several forms of cacti, and some low-growing brush. Clay, however, is readily available. Many people utilize the natural clay in the construction of their houses. Most are made of clay brick similar to that used in adobe construction, except in the poorest bairros, where people use clay in their taipa houses, which are of a simple wattle-and-daub construction. Most of the ex-votos were made of this same clay and varied in color, ranging from gray to bright orange, depending on where the clay was from. The clay milagres were hand modeled and were not glazed or fired, though some were polished with a stone in a similar technique to that used in many types of Native American pottery in the United States. The figures were simply left in the hot sun to bake and harden. Most of these types of ex-votos were small, ranging in size from three to five inches, since anything bigger would become brittle before hardening. I saw one milagre of a leg that was about twelve inches long. It was extremely dense and heavy and broke apart soon after being placed in the votive offering bin. Most of the clay images that I saw were small: simple hands, feet, heads, breasts, fingers, toes, and human forms reminiscent of prehistoric figures found archaeologically throughout Europe. In most cases these clay milagres had no addition of color, but a few of them had what

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Example of a milagre formed from clay and sunbaked.

appeared to be a thick paint applied to them to denote a wound or other pertinent feature. There was a wide range of technical skill demonstrated in these offerings. In most cases the works were crude and rather childlike. However, I did see several heads, one figure of a pregnant woman, and one longhorned steer that could have been modeled in an advanced art class.

Wood Wooden ex-votos far outnumbered the other types of offerings. Most wooden ex-votos were simply fashioned from a light wood, probably scrub pine. When I asked pilgrims what kind of wood they used, they

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usually did not know the names of the trees; instead, their response was usually duro (hard) or macio (soft), relating to the difficulty of working with it. A Brazilian publication listed the following types of wood as those commonly used in making ex-votos: camurú, imburana-de-espinho, imburana-de-cheiro, pau-d’alho, pau-branco, aroeira, cedro, timbaúba, paud’arco, mulugu, and tambor (Medeiros 1987, 27). In some cases, I was told that the wood was taken from scrap piles at building sites or procured from a mill. While most offerings were carved with only a small knife, others showed evidence of being turned on a lathe, honed with a rasp, or even shaped by a jigsaw. Usually the offerings were carved from one piece of wood, but I saw some with joinery that ranged from a simple nail attachment to more sophisticated pegging. These ex-votos were often detailed to fully illustrate the disease or trauma from which the pilgrim had been healed. Paint, pencil marks, the removal of chips of wood, and the application of additional wood were all used for this purpose. In many cases, the entire story of the problem and its alleviation due to the intercession of St. Francis was recorded on the piece, including the date of the promessa, the name of the pilgrim, and the date of the pilgrimage to Canindé. For example, on an ex-voto representing a leg was written: Agadeço a Deus, e a intercecão de São Francisco das Chagas, por eu ter ficado boa da dor que eu sintio na minha coxa e quadril direito. Peco a São Francisco das Chagas que rogue a Deus nosso porque agora en figura da dor que esto u sentendo no meu ombro direito. [signed] Francisco Freitas Araugo, Rua Ile Somiro de Castro 3962, Fortaleza, Ceará, 26 Julho 1996 This roughly translates as “I thank God and St. Francis of Wounds for his intercession, for I have been free of the pain that I had in my thighs and right hip. I beg of St. Francis that he intercedes with God for now I have started to feel pain in my right shoulder.” The ex-voto was signed by the name and address of the pilgrim and the date the ex-voto was brought to Canindé. This is an interesting example because the pilgrim is both thanking St. Francis for the healing of his hip and asking him for another favor: to help in the healing of his shoulder. Many ex-votos showed no physical sign of trauma whatsoever. I was

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This milagre gives thanks for one healing and then asks for another.

Examples of why it is important to speak with pilgrims in order to understand the meaning of the milagres. I never learned the stories behind these.

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given two explanations for this, which I have already mentioned briefly. One explanation suggested that when heads show no sign of trauma they are representative of an internal problem, such as anxiety. Another explanation was from one of the ex-voto carvers. She said that she is often requested to carve an ex-voto that is perfect to illustrate that the miracle has occurred and that the person has been healed. Both of these interpretations make perfect sense; however, the true story behind any particular ex-voto can only be ascertained by speaking with the pilgrim who offers it. Wooden ex-votos represented almost anything imaginable, including anatomical body parts, occupational equipment, and animals, just to name a few. I have seen practically every body part carved three-dimensionally or in bas-relief, including intestines, kidneys, lungs, eyeballs, genitalia, and tongues. I have seen many depictions of the heart. Some were shaped like valentines, others were more realistic, while others looked like the sacred hearts found in religious paintings, complete with flames. One of the first pilgrims whom I interviewed many years ago was a young girl with a heart condition. She was dressed in the brown pilgrimage robes and was with her mother. Both of them were somber, and I hesitated to approach them. As it turned out, they were glad to tell me their story and happy to receive the photograph that I gave them. The young girl had very pink cheeks and upon first glance looked quite healthy. After she revealed that she had a heart condition, she raised the hem of her robe, revealing matchstick-thin legs that were badly splotched due to poor circulation. The doctor had told the girl’s mother that the heat in this region was very bad for the girl’s condition. Her mother appealed to St. Francis to help them. Soon afterward, the girl’s aunt, who lives in São Paulo where it is much cooler, invited them to live with her. Before leaving for São Paulo, they had come to Canindé to repay St. Francis for his intercession. The girl showed me her milagre, which had been carved for her by her mother’s cousin. The heart was carved from what looked to be mahogany and had been copied from a religious picture showing the flaming heart of Jesus. Wooden ex-votos also represented occupational equipment. I saw automobiles, tractor trailers, buses, and boats being offered during my fieldwork, and I have seen tractors and earth movers in museum collections. Of course, in the rural Northeast, most animal milagres that are

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offered could also be considered to be occupational equipment. In this category I saw horses and donkeys depicted fully and also represented by just a leg or hoof. One day I saw a young woman holding a carved image of a donkey in her hand. She seemed reluctant to place it in the bin, so I took the opportunity of going over and asking her the story behind the donkey. She told me that she and her parents lived on a small farm farther in the backlands. They had a wonderful donkey that helped them plow and carry things to market. Usually, the donkey slept in the house with them, but one night he got out and wandered away. When they woke up the next morning, they called for him and looked everywhere, but he was nowhere to be found. Without him to help on the farm, the work was very hard. She also said that she had missed him very much. The donkey was missing for about six weeks. Her family appealed to St. Francis to please help them find their donkey. One morning about a week after making the promessa, they awoke to find their donkey standing in front of their house. Her father carved the milagre, and she had come to Canindé to repay their promise. Other carved votive objects that I have seen include houses, bottles, caskets, crosses, and even a replica of the trophy of the Copa do Mundo, the World Cup of soccer, won by Brazil in 1994 and again in 2002.

the carvers Most pilgrims coming to Canindé carved their own ex-voto or commissioned it from a relative or neighbor who had experience working with wood. In most cases, the offerings were carved free of charge, for just a small price, or in exchange for something like a pack of cigarettes or a soda. I frequently noticed that artistic details made it obvious that certain ex-votos were carved by the same hand. In most cases, the pilgrims who offered these had traveled to Canindé from another part of the region, and I was unable to speak with the carvers. I did, however, develop friendships with two local carvers. Maria Édite has now passed on, but she worked at the small museum adjacent to the shrine for twenty-six years. Every day you could see her sitting in the open doorway, carving with her red Swiss Army knife and trying to benefit from what little breeze might be circulating. She carved small crucifixes; figas, the small good luck charms associated originally

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A T made by a local carver; similar items are worn by many freis.

with Afro-Brazilian religions, but now widespread; and the wooden Ts worn by the freis; she sold all of these to pilgrims and tourists as souvenirs. She also accepted commissions for ex-votos, for which she never charged a fee. For this reason, she told me, she did not like to make them. I saw a leg, a breast, and two hands deposited that were carved by Maria Édite. When I first arrived in Canindé, I asked several freis if they knew any local ex-voto carvers with whom I could speak. Interestingly, no one mentioned Maria Édite, even though she had worked for them for twentysix years and had been carving all those years. I later found out that a frei whom I had not asked, one who taught occupational training to some of the local youth, furnished Maria Édite with wood for her carvings. I do not think that the freis I questioned were deliberately withholding this information. It is possible that they had no idea that she carved ex-votos. But I think it illustrates instead a general lack of interest in the ex-voto tradition on the part of certain clergy, perhaps resulting from their tacit exclusion from it.

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The child from Bairro dos Montes whose mother offered a milagre for his healed leg.

Manuel de Suza (not his real name) lives in the Bairro dos Montes, a very poor neighborhood in Canindé. There, dirt streets are lined with cramped houses that have no running water and that are often shared by many family members as well as animals. Manuel has worked as a carpenter for a long time and told me that he “understood wood.” He also told me that he is really a farmer, but like so many other sertãnejos he has no land to work. He has been making ex-votos for people in his neighborhood for many years and only accepts money if people offer. He never asks. Usually people furnish him with the wood for their ex-votos. He uses a large knife to rough out the image and a small penknife for the detail.

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The milagre offered by the mother of the child in figure 43.

One day while I was visiting in Bairro dos Montes, I noticed a little boy sitting outside his house. He was dressed in a brown pilgrimage robe and said he was waiting on his mother. His mother was inside getting ready to take her son to the House of Miracles to repay St. Francis for healing his leg. She lifted his robe, and I could see areas of newly healed pink skin on his right leg. It seems that while she was not looking he had turned over a pot of boiling water and burned himself. She had asked St. Francis to help heal his leg. When it promptly healed without getting infected, she asked Manuel, who lives just up the street, to carve a small leg for her. He did not charge her anything to carve it.

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n 2007, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean reported that the Northeast is Brazil’s poorest and least developed region with 58 percent of the total population and 67 percent of the rural population living in poverty, which it defines as surviving on less than US$1 per day. With a social system of vast inequality—the elites control 85 percent of the wealth and the masses must divide the other 15 percent—little has changed over the years (New Agriculturalist 2007). Many sertãnejos serve as members of a labor force of sharecroppers and migrant and seasonal workers, who work under socially manipulated conditions that ensure a system of dependency. In this chapter, I will discuss the lives of the pilgrims, who for the most part come from this population, and the social and political pressures that they must negotiate. The Pilgrims

Soon after Portuguese colonials arrived in the 1500s, the sertão was occupied by people moving westward looking for land upon which to graze cattle and goats. They established vast plantations, and for about 300 years this region was thinly populated. When the inevitable droughts occurred, the cattle died but the people survived. In the nineteenth century it was discovered that with irrigation cotton could grow well in certain parts 98

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of this region. Soon there was an influx of migrants looking for work. Today, the sertão accounts for about 46 percent of the total population of the Northeast and has a gross national product that is the lowest in Brazil (Araújo 2004, 17, 34). The fazenda, the large-scale, privately owned plantation, is still the dominant form of landholding in Brazil. Owners of fazendas contract land to small-time farmers in a variety of tenure arrangements that in most cases favor the owner. In The Brazilian Peasantry (Forman 1975), peasant farmers are categorized three ways. The smallest percentage of peasant farmers are tenant farmers. They pay money to rent the land upon which they live and work. Sharecropping accounts for about 15 percent of the small farming operations. The sharecroppers are, in a sense, salaried employees who receive land and a percentage of the crop in exchange for their labor. They pay their rent in crops (renda) or by in-kind labor (sujeição). In the 1950s and ’60s, many sharecroppers and tenant farmers were dislocated, prompting the founding of organized peasant leagues. The growth of these leagues allowed the angry farmers an opportunity to vent their feelings. As a result, that was a time of many violent actions between the league members and the hired gunmen of the landowners. Eventually most of the peasant leagues died out in the sertão. Today, most agricultural workers are working for a daily wage. Many farmers work a small piece of land in their spare time and some are given lodging. This system of wage work instead of tenancy has broken down the social system of patronage, often leaving the workers in a worse situation than before. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (2010) states that the inequity of land tenure is one of the main causes of poverty in the Northeast. Since the landowners, most of whom are absentee, still control the land but have no real investment in their workers, they are less likely to provide the security that the patronage system supplied. This has created a situation of despair for vast numbers of people. In an area where there is often a critical shortage of water, subsistence existence is a struggle. The worst drought in recorded history was in 1877–1878. It is estimated that 50,000 people died (Mitchell 1981, 3). Even though there have not been catastrophic droughts within the time span of my research, the rainfall has still been unpredictable, and small subsistence farmers do not have the surplus to make it through even one year with little rain.

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There have been several programs financed by the Brazilian government to counteract the effects of the droughts, but historically they have done little to help the sharecropper or small independent farmer. What they did was reinforce the power of the wealthy landowners, who spent the money building dams and reservoirs that would benefit themselves. The funds were so abused that this type of aid was popularly referred to as the “drought industry.” More recently, government funds have been allotted to the Northeast to improve water systems such as the Integrated Rural Water Supply and Sanitation System (Corrêa 2010). But there is still a large population that has no resources to fall back on to help them endure the chronic famine caused by the poverty that plagues the people of the sertão. It is this endemic hunger that is the greater villain (Albuquerque 2004; Araújo 2004). The diet of the typical backlander consists primarily of manioc, beans, and rapadura, a coarse brown sugar that comes in a hard block. These staples can be purchased very inexpensively, and the menu has not varied significantly in over a hundred years. Backlanders make up 50 percent of the nation’s population with a low caloric intake (Araújo 2004, 34). While this diet is adequate in vitamins A and C and carbohydrates when eaten in sufficient quantities, the average caloric intake and the levels of nutrients such as protein, iron, riboflavin, and niacin are questionable. Insufficient caloric intake will cause the body to burn its existing protein for energy. Under these conditions many people will become emaciated and apathetic, and they will tend to be small in stature. Chronic deficiencies can cause hormonal problems, which can lead to debilitating diarrhea, delayed puberty, and menstrual irregularity. Niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin deficiencies can cause dermal problems, depression, and irritability. Deficiencies of vitamins A and C can cause more severe conditions. Inadequate vitamin A will cause night blindness and can lead to permanent blindness. Insufficient vitamin C will cause scurvy. While an adult can more or less be maintained on this diet, the consequences that a child might suffer are quite serious. Insufficient caloric intake and inadequate nutrients often lead to mental and physical retardation and even death (Reis 1981). While the social welfare programs promoted by Lula, such as the Rural Poverty Reduction Project sponsored by the World Bank in the Northeast state of Rio Grande do Norte, have assisted many families by financing

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water, electricity, and food production, they only benefited those who lived in the project area (World Bank 2012b). The conditions of malnourishment describe the physical appearance of many people I saw in Canindé, especially in the late 1990s. At five foot eight inches, I am taller than almost everyone. The fact that many people suffer from wounds that do not heal properly, skin problems, and brittle bones also illustrates the consequences of chronic malnutrition. The dietary insufficiencies could also account for the high number of stillbirths, the large amount of weak and sickly infants, and the higher rate of infant mortality than in other regions of Brazil. The average woman in the Northeast has about 10 pregnancies during her reproductive years, including (statistically) 1.4 miscarriages, abortions, or stillbirths. Then, 3.5 of the children die, while only 4.5 live. Seventy percent of infant mortalities occur between birth and six months and 82 percent by the end of their first year (Scheper-Hughes 1985). This is 68 percent higher than the national average (Araújo 2004, 34). To some extent, the nutritional deficiency also may account for the Northeast’s high rate of illiteracy, which for individuals age fifteen and over is 88 percent (Baer 2007). The 2010 Brazilian census from the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica recorded that almost 10 percent of the nation’s population was illiterate, and while this was a drop of four points since the 2000 census, it still shows that 14.6 million Brazilians can neither read nor write, and 70 percent of illiterate people live in rural regions. Another explanation for the high level of illiteracy is made by Tãnia Araújo, who states that in some regions of the Northeast, child labor, up to 80 percent in some areas, is still a viable source of family subsistence (2004, 36). While it has been shown that the Bolsa Familia program improved this situation by requiring school attendance, the program has not alleviated child hunger (“Brazil’s Bolsa Familia” 2010). Under the best of conditions, children who are hungry cannot concentrate. If they do not have the right foods to eat they can suffer from apathy, anxiety, and depression, none of which are conducive to learning. These conditions also apply to parents. If the parents are full of apathy, anxiety, and depression and do not have the strength to work, they will not encourage their children. It is a vicious circle, and even the administration of Lula misdiagnosed the situation and blamed ignorance and resistance to change as reasons for the sertãnejos’ continued existence in poverty.

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As a result of this cycle of poverty the Brazilian Northeast has long had a reputation as a region of lawlessness and messianic cults, led by individuals who arose out of the fog of apathy and for a time acted as agents of revitalization (Albuquerque 2004). Bandits like Lampião have been immortalized in backland folktales and literatura de cordel, cheaply printed pamphlets that tell stories of popular culture. Messianic movements have sprung up all over the Northeast, and promises of utopia have been made by charismatic leaders such as Antônio Conselheiro in Canudos and Padre Cícero in Juazeiro. While these movements for a short time give people hope, they usually are squelched by owners of the latifundios (large landholdings) or are shown to be self-serving and as much a threat as the entrenched social system against which they are supposedly fighting. Fortunately, there are organizations currently working to help the people of the Northeast. I met a young man who is risking his life trying to better the lives of the poor. In my field notes I wrote, “I met a real hero today, a real person.” I will call him João Cabral, and if he has not been killed by the hired guns of the coronels (politically powerful landowners), I am sure he is still working with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST; Movement of Rural Workers Without Land). The MST acts to organize disenfranchised farm workers into a sort of union that will function to break up the monopolies the coronels have on the land in Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile. Because of these monopolies, it is difficult for the poor to acquire land, even if it is lying fallow. In many cases the farm workers have lost their positions on a fazenda and have nowhere to go. Organizers like João travel to an area and gather the workers and their families into a group. These groups build acampamentos, which are makeshift, self-sufficient, temporary communities on land that is not being used for planting. In many cases, the land is owned by a wealthy coronel who is not happy with the squatters. The Brazilian newspapers are full of articles reporting massacres in these encampments by hired guns. Fortunately, because of the influence of the Church in Canindé, the local group had been safe for about eighteen weeks without being threatened. I visited that acampamento with one of the freis. It was about twenty kilometers from Canindé, but it took us about an hour to get there because of the condition of the dirt roads, even though the frei drove his Volkswagen Beetle very fast. We hit potholes so hard that the doors of the car kept flying open. It was an exhilarating drive in the

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country, to say the least. There were 86 families living in the encampment, and they had around 200 children among them. They lived in makeshift housing of two rows of connecting structures made of interwoven twigs. Each family had a section consisting of two rooms, one in front of the other. The two rows faced a central meeting area that had rows of split log benches and a flagpole from which flew the banner of MST. I was pleasantly surprised that the community was pristine compared to some of the neighborhoods in Canindé. The children were cleaner and looked healthier than many of the children playing on the streets in town. Each morning the children were gathered in the central meeting area and taught rudimentary lessons in reading and math by some of the more educated members of the community. The adults had planted a garden of corn, beans, potatoes, and medicinal herbs. The atmosphere in the camp was one of strength and hope. The frei stopped at each household, asked after everyone’s health, and shook hands with everyone. João Cabral gathered the people in the meeting area, where they sang protest songs and gave impromptu speeches. The frei told them that they were “God’s special children” and that this movement and their role in it was “God’s plan.” I was introduced as the campanheira from the Estados Unidos who had come to learn about the good work they were doing so I could talk about their plight when I returned home. I was very impressed and moved by this visit. With the support of the monastery, these eighty-six families will hopefully be allowed to support themselves on this land. It is a start. Of course, the people who join MST are just a small percentage of the displaced farm workers. Many have relocated to one of the ever-growing favelas or have come to shrine centers like Canindé. Della Cava (1970) states that the latter type of migration is reflected in the population of Juazeiro do Norte, the shrine site for the folk saint Padre Cícero, which increased from 2,500 at the turn of the twentieth century to about 80,000 in 1970. The City Population website estimates that in 2013 the population was 261,289, making it the largest city in Ceará after Fortaleza. With many residents of the sertão living with insecurity, it is only natural that many would turn to religion for help. However, Forman suggests that religion “continue[s] to reaffirm the peasant’s dependent social status and to reinforce a politics of despair.” He exemplifies this by stating that when the majority of Brazilian peasants are finally

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confronted with the all-important question of “what is to be done,” many times their reply is a fatalistic “as God wills” (Forman 1975, 209–210). I am often plagued by the question: Is the Church acting as an “opiate” of the people, or is it serving as their only means of survival? The Catholic Church in Brazil is not monolithic, for there are both conservative and progressive factions within it. On one hand, the Church in Brazil has served as an agent of change. Many priests have given their lives fighting against federal and local injustice. The perspective of liberation theology, the reconstructive doctrine that works toward enacting change for the betterment of the masses, is shared by the freis in Canindé. Yet, on the other hand, the doctrine of the Catholic Church, which is espoused by many clergy, encourages people to accept their lot in life and to simply put their faith in God, assuming that all suffering is a part of the plan God has for them. Is this in the best interests of the people or of the Church? In Canindé, where the Church is all that many people have between them and societal and nutritional struggle, this question is difficult to answer. In addition to the social services provided to the people by the paróquia (parish) that I have previously mentioned, one of the freis, who unfortunately is now deceased, was involved with a mutirão, a cooperative of displaced people who came to Canindé. The members of the mutirão worked to build housing for themselves on lands donated by the Church. Men, women, and children all worked making bricks and doing what labor they could. Men from the community volunteered their labor and materials for this project, and women volunteered to prepare food for the workers. I have discussed the earthly, tangible benefits that people receive from the Church, but what about the more spiritual benefits? What draws people to the Church? Forman turns to the Brazilian anthropologist Thales de Azevedo for an explanation. Azevedo suggests that religion for the oppressed is of “therapeutic value rather than a path to salvation” (qtd. in Forman 1975, 275). By this he means that people turn to religion as a means of satisfying worldly concerns rather than because of worries about an afterlife. Over and over I heard pilgrims say “vida e luta,” life is struggle. Rarely was anyone with whom I spoke overtly concerned with dying and their immortal soul. They were concerned with the here and now. Their focus was on living rather than on the afterlife. This is different

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from the beliefs of those who follow orthodox Roman Catholic dogma. Several social science researchers have written on the differences between orthodox Catholicism and its derivations, which usually fall under the umbrella of folk Catholicism.1 There is a basic agreement that there are five ways in which folk Catholicism differs from institutional Catholic dogma. The first is that there is little or no focus on salvation or an afterlife. Second, there is a broad definition of what is considered a sin and what is not. Third, there is ambivalence toward the sacraments and the authority of the priests. Fourth, there is adherence to the cults of saints. Last, there is a preference for domestic liturgies rather than formal rites. These five points can be directly applied to the religion of the pilgrims in Canindé. One hundred percent of the people I spoke with came to St. Francis with concerns over illness, pain, homelessness, or other aspects of their situation here on earth. They vowed to pay their promise when St. Francis helped them with the suffering they were experiencing. For example, I spoke with a woman who had brought in an ex-voto that was a shoe box that she had fashioned into a house. On the shoe box/ house she had written her own house number and “Vila da Paz” (Village of Peace). I asked her what this signified. She told me that her husband was out of work and drank too much cachaça. When he got drunk, he would beat her. She had appealed to St. Francis to help her. Soon afterward her husband had quit drinking, quit beating her, and found a job. She said that “graças a Deus e São Francisco,” now she lived in peace. The second point emphasizes that there is a more fluid definition of what actions might be considered sinful in folk Catholicism than in orthodoxy. In times of societal discord, particular social structures tend to break down, and survival becomes foremost. There are people in the sertão who are in a perpetual struggle with an environment of scarce water, poor soil, and unequal land and income distribution. In this struggle they may have to lie and even steal, but few condemn them for it. In some cases they are even rewarded by their peers for their actions. The petty pilfering of food, white lies to cover up missing items, and even children born out of wedlock can be accepted behavior, seen as the casualties and spoils of the day-to-day struggle. I have made several references to the anticlerical attitude of sertãnejos. Their indifference to the priestly role and authority, their adherence to saints, and their preference for domestic liturgies over formal

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A milagre made from a shoe box.

liturgical rites—the last three points—can all be discussed together. I have heard the freis speak about how some pilgrims will go to the House of Miracles to repay their promises but will not attend Mass. In some cases, the pilgrims see priests as being in a service role to the Church but doing nothing for them. They do not need priests to intercede in their contract with St. Francis. St. Francis acts as their emissary to God, so what do they need a priest for? The ex-voto ritual is not recognized by the Roman Catholic hierarchy as an official sacred rite of the Church, yet it is one of the most important rituals in Brazilian folk Catholicism. Because of the remoteness of some areas in this region, there are often no priests to officiate at baptisms or marriage ceremonies or to give last rites. Instead, the families carry on without these rituals or perform the rites for themselves. In addition, because many have never been indoctrinated into these traditions, many feel that the rites have no place in their lives. The freis in Canindé are trying to remedy this situation by traveling into the backlands to say Mass, hear confession, and give communion, as well as to perform weddings, baptisms, and funerals. On weekends at the shrine, there are usually two priests in the confession booths in the House of Miracles, but they are often not busy. It seems that most people come to Canindé only to repay or to renew a contract

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with St. Francis. The formal dogma of the Church is just not necessary. Pilgrims rely on St. Francis to ameliorate the difficulties in their lives, and he gives them what they need. He heals their physical and mental aches and pains. Health-Care Alternatives in Canindé

Brazil is nothing if not a heterogeneous culture. The blending of the three major ethnicities—Portuguese, African, and indigenous—can be seen, heard, and tasted in all facets of Brazilian culture. This includes health care. Located in Canindé is a regional medical center run by the Catholic Church and administered by the Irmãs de São Francisco. In Brazil, the government subsidizes the cost of indigent people’s medical care. This means that everyone in Brazil can receive medical attention. Unfortunately, this also can mean that if you are poor, you might literally die in the waiting room before your number is called, while someone with more money is attended immediately. Except for those who can afford it, prophylactic care is not routinely practiced in the remote areas of Brazil, and it seems that many people wait until health problems are grave before going to the hospital. Since Canindé is a rural location, the facilities are not as crowded as they are in urban areas. I interviewed a physician who had been with the regional medical hospital for twenty-two years. He told me that health facilities have improved greatly during his tenure in Canindé, but that the general health of the population has not improved comparatively. He attributes this to a lack of health education and a lack of significant improvement in sanitation facilities. He said that most health problems are the result of poverty. Because of poverty there is chronic malnutrition, which weakens the immune system. This, combined with unsanitary living conditions, creates a cycle of disease that eventually wears down the body until it can fight no longer. He said that the most common diseases are parasitic infections, diarrhea leading to dehydration, and respiratory ailments like tuberculosis. He went on to say that even if there were a hundred doctors in Canindé, nothing would change until the government improves the sanitation facilities and people are educated about the necessity of clean water and living conditions. He said, as do most health-care providers in less developed parts of the world,

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that he treats the same people over and over to rid them of parasites, but since there is no change in their living conditions, they are reinfected, which starts the cycle again. This results in the counterproductive situation of strengthening the strains of bacteria that attack the body and weakening people’s faith that a doctor can provide productive treatment. In 1970 only 2.5 percent of the rural households had running water and less than 0.5 percent had service by a sewer system. Seventy-five percent of all rural households had no sanitary facilities at all (Dias 1978, 176). In 2009 the situation had improved somewhat with 17 percent of the rural households in the state of Ceará having access to safe water and almost 20 percent having basic sanitation services. In April 2012 the World Bank approved a US$100 million loan to facilitate the Ceará Rural Sustainable and Competitiveness Project, which will increase water supplies and sanitation coverage to 60,000 rural residents (World Bank 2012c). With this dramatic increase in water quality and sanitation, I am hopeful that the health of the rural poor will improve. Additionally, while medical treatment is free, medicines are not, and many times the cost makes their use prohibitive. Even if they are purchased, many times the full dosage is not taken, in the hope that this will make the medicine last longer. But a lower dosage is often not strong enough to combat the disease, resulting in the continuation of the health problem and in some cases fostering the development of antibioticresistant strains of bacteria. Again, instances such as these can lead to a lack of trust in hospitals and reinforce a mistrust of doctors. Brazilians do, however, have a strong belief in herbal remedies and utilize them far more than we do in the United States. To try to ameliorate the mistrust of medical doctors and their medicines, the regional hospital, in conjunction with the Federal University of Ceará, created the Farmácia Viva (Living Pharmacy) adjacent to the hospital. There, healing herbs that can be made into cough syrups, anti-inflammatory syrups, antiseptics, and light sedatives that give relief to simple health problems are grown and dispensed to those refusing or unable to purchase the medicines prescribed by the doctor (Barreto n.d.). For people who prefer treatments other than those given at the hospital, there are alternatives available, such as those given by a rezadeira, who heals through prayer, and by a curandeiro, who heals through the use of herbs and magical practices. Both of these types of practitioners

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usually work in the impoverished neighborhoods and offer their services for free or accept a barter exchange. I was fortunate to meet Maria dos Anjos, a rezadeira living in Bairro dos Montes, who though partially blind has, like her grandmother before her, the ability to see what normal vision cannot. Through touch Maria can discern if you have bom (good) or mau (bad) energias. She can tell if there is a bad spirit weighing you down and, with a beatific smile, she will place her hands on either side of your face or upon the infirmed spot and pray for healing. When she placed her hands on my face, I felt her energy vibrating against my skin. It was a remarkable sensation, and though I had not been feeling ill, I felt euphoric when I left her house In addition to the prayers and practices of rezadeiras and curandeiros, other forms of religious healing are widespread throughout Brazil. Evidence of pluralistic religious healing attitudes can be found even in major Roman Catholic shrine towns. In Canindé, in addition to those who are faithful to St. Francis, there is at least one active Espiritismo (Spiritism) group and at least three Umbanda centros (centers). This open atmosphere toward religion may be unusual, however. In a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from 2010 it is suggested that the number of individuals participating in AfroBrazilian religions that are still discriminated against, such as Candomblé and Umbanda, is low because many do not want to be identified with such a practice and thus list themselves as Catholic on census forms. In both Spiritism and Afro-Brazilian belief systems, trancelike states are achieved by practitioners, during which healing information particular to the patient is channeled to them by a spiritual entity. Treatments are often in the form of limpas (ritual clearings) and “sweepings,” where the practitioner sweeps the patient’s body with the leaves of herbs or other plants. In addition, in the case of Umbanda, offerings are made to one of the pantheon of deities determined most helpful in ameliorating the divined problem. I had the opportunity to visit an Umbanda ceremony while visiting friends in Fortaleza. The word for the building used in Candomblé is terreiro, which loosely translates to “backyard,” while the word used in Umbanda is centro, which means “center.” 2 The centro I went to was in a quiet neighborhood of lower-middle-class houses. There was no indication that this house was any different from the similar houses that lined

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the street, and certainly nothing distinguished it as one of the most popular centros in Fortaleza. I was visiting that night’s meeting with a Brazilian friend, by invitation of one of the members. As we walked up the sidewalk, I heard many people talking in the courtyard as they waited to enter the altar room. Because Umbanda combines African possession religion with Catholicism, the trances and dancing take place before an altar upon which sit several statues, which were familiar to me as Christian personages. When we walked into the altar room, I noticed that people were bowing in front of the statues when they passed, similar to believers’ genuflection in front of the crucifixes in Roman Catholic churches. On the altar of the centro was a statue of the Virgin Mary, who is sometimes used in Umbanda to depict Iemanjá, the Yoruba female spirit of the sea; one of Jesus, who often represents Oxalá, the Yoruba male spirit of the sky; and one of St. Barbara, who often represents Yansâ, the Yoruba female spirit of wind and storms. These statues and their meanings are indicative of syncretism and also the forced adoption of Catholicism during colonial times, which resulted in a duality of representation for these Christian personages. By overtly accepting the symbols of Christianity, the enslaved population could sustain their indigenous belief systems. There were many candles and bowls of food placed on the altar for these orixás (spirits). There were two large chairs in front of the altar for the mãe de santo and the pai de santo, the spiritual leaders of the centro, and there were bleachers three rows high along one wall where people could watch the proceedings. The ceremony began with the leaders entering, followed closely by the novices, women dressed all in white. They circled the room in single file, and after some initial remarks by the pai welcoming the people and encouraging the visitation of the espíritos, the two drummers slowly started playing their atabaques to summon the spirits. The novices lined the floor in two rows and swayed with the beat of the drums, increasing their movements as the beats became more rapid until they were spinning around, arms extended, skirts swirling, beads flying. Sooner than one would think possible, the trances began. As one woman would swoon, those around her would catch her as if on cue. I recognized the traditional spirits of pretos velhos (“old blacks”) and Caboclos (indigenous Brazilians) possessing the novices. When possession occurs, the individual is given garments of the spirit to wear. For example, when someone is

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possessed by one of the pretos velhos, the person becomes hunched over, looks aged, and often is given a cane to walk with. During this ceremony, there was one woman who was dressed differently from all the others from the beginning. She had on a long, deep-red velvet dress similar to the red gown on the statue of Yansâ, and she alone wore a man’s fedora and smoked a big cigar. When she went into trance she had two women assisting just her. I was thoroughly engrossed with the performance being enacted. I did not feel like an outsider, but felt completely at peace. Before I knew what had happened, the woman in red was standing in front of me and speaking to me. She was in trance and speaking a dialect that I could not understand. I told her that I could not understand what she was saying, to which she threw back her head and laughed heartily. She grabbed me and hugged me, lifting me off the ground. While she had me in her arms, I felt something flowing into my solar plexus from her, like lightning. When she put me down, I felt changed—and that feeling has never left me. At the same time that the novices were going into trance, the pai de santo was also receiving the espíritos into his body. People in the audience formed a line in front of him. As their turn came to speak with the pai, he would listen to their problem and then lay his hands on them, spray them with some sort of fluid that he took into his mouth from a bottle he was holding, or talk to them in the voice of the espírito who wanted to involve her- or himself in that individual’s problem. One of the things that draws people to a centro is the sense of community. In much the same way that the freis in Canindé will find food, lodging, and clothing for a person in need, the mãe and pai of a centro do the same. In the sertão, where most things are unsure, some people must feel that following both St. Francis and the espíritos is not disloyal, but simply doubling their options for assistance. The idea that body knowledge and the manifestation of illness can be socially constructed has been cross-culturally explored by many researchers.3 In Death Without Weeping, Nancy Scheper-Hughes discusses how pressures from the social and political system faced by the typical Nordestino (Northeasterner) influence and are revealed in physical afflictions. Basing her discussion on Marcel Mauss’s idea of habitus, a term later made popular by Pierre Bourdieu, as the way people “inhabit” their bodies, Scheper-Hughes looks at the somatization of the typical

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Northeasterner. Her investigation brings into consideration the activities of “working, eating, grooming, resting and sleeping, having sex, getting sick and getting well.” She maintains that these are all “forms of body praxis and expressive of dynamic social, cultural, and political relations” (1992, 185). In other words, everything we do, even mundane activities, has been consciously or unconsciously influenced by culture, and the ways these activities are manifested in the body reveal socially encoded statements about that culture. Taking this line of thinking a step further, Scheper-Hughes turns to the French phenomenologist Luc Boltanski, who proposed that because the poor and working classes spend their days doing physical labor, they will communicate primarily with and through the body. On the other hand, the upper classes are more disassociated from their bodies because their work is more of the mind. As a result, they express personal and social dis-ease psychologically rather than in the physically manifested way of the poor (Scheper-Hughes 1992, 185). During the week of the 1996 romaria, with the help of four assistants I polled 300 people about their pilgrimage to Canindé. Looking back over these questionnaires and my interviews with pilgrims, I noticed time and time again that people described afflictions that manifested in the body by naming symptoms that could be interpreted as socially constructed. Tremors, loss of voice, spontaneous blindness, pain in the arms, paralysis, a hand curled into a fist, and chronic nervous conditions can all be seen as reflecting the internal rage and frustration that must be endured by a subordinated people. This rage and frustration springs from what the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire defined as the “culture of silence,” which exists between the “subordinate and superordinate sectors of the social system.” He said that in the culture of silence, “to exist is only to live. The body carries out orders from above. Thinking is difficult, speaking the word is forbidden” (qtd. in Forman 1975, 207). In this sort of situation where thinking will only bring on more frustration, where speaking out is forbidden, where does rage, or for that matter any emotion, have to go but to turn inward? You want to talk back, but you cannot, so the voice disappears. You cannot look at instances of injustice any more, so your vision spontaneously disappears. When you long to raise your arms against your employer but cannot, paralysis sets in. The list could go on and on. Out of 300 questionnaires, there were only

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55 people who had cuts or broken bones. While the situations in which these people were injured might be indirectly related to a social problem, these were physical problems with inarguably physical causation. In addition to these 55, there were 2 men who had been shot due to alcoholrelated fights, and one woman said that she was crazy and when pressed further said that she drank too much. These alcohol-related problems could also be indirectly tied to social dis-ease. The 242 other people we interviewed with the questionnaires all had problems that might be directly construed as socially related. Thirty-two people said they had the vague affliction of tumors, 50 people said they had rashes, 39 people complained of headaches, 24 people had recovered from temporary paralysis, 25 people had problems with their heart or another internal organ, 10 people complained of nervoso (nerves), and the 62 remaining suffered from female reproductive problems and other disabilities. Among other demographics, we gleaned from the questionnaires that the largest percentage of pilgrims was female. We interviewed 212 women and 88 men. While this finding might reflect a greater willingness of women to answer our questions, the margin of difference indicates that more women than men enter into contracts with St. Francis.4 Every day that I spent at the shrine, I saw more women there than men. In a subordinate population, no one has a voice against the dominant population. But even within the subordinate population, everyone is still not equal. Brazil is a patriarchy. Men often hold title to property, and tenancy and sharecropping are usually negotiated through the males of the family. I spoke with several women whose husbands had died and who had been told that they must move off the owner’s land. Sometimes, women had nowhere else to go and faced homelessness. In all cases they appealed to St. Francis, and they were able to find other accommodations. Brazilian men are dominant in their households. Women who voice opinions are likely to be beaten or even abandoned. Men living in or near a community get to release their frustration in bars and by playing and watching futebol (soccer). Women have no such outlet. Women who work outside the home are almost always in domestic service in someone else’s home. This occupational category on the questionnaire had the largest number of women. The typical domestic worker has to get up very early to take care of the needs of those in her household and then spends the day taking care of the needs of another woman’s household. When she goes

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home, there is still her own work to complete. Most domestics have only one afternoon off a week. Because of this, the childhood of females ends early. Older sisters often are charged with the care of younger siblings. It is not unusual to see a girl of seven or eight carrying a younger child on her hip as she walks through Canindé. When families live in rural areas, labor is hard for everyone and the stresses are even more intense. However, urban or rural, women are still subordinate to their husbands. With little to no autonomy, it stands to reason that they are likely to have more physically manifested symptoms than men have. It also makes sense that they would turn to St. Francis to hear their plea. In the spiritual realm they can get the relief of voicing their problems without fearing any sort of repercussion. More than one-third of the pilgrims that we interviewed were over fifty. This number is not surprising. In most cultures older generations adhere most closely to religious practices. When this age category is compared to the occupational category, some interesting facts can be learned. Even though unemployment rates are very high in this region of Brazil, of the people we spoke with who were over fifty years old, only twenty-six stated that they were retired. While sixty-two people did say they were unemployed, many of them were women who did not work outside their own home. Many of the women who were over fifty were employed as domestics. Fifty of the eighty-eight men who spoke with us were working in agriculture. Ten of the twenty-seven people under the age of twenty stated that they were students. The remaining seventy-five people worked in other occupations. The largest number of these were carpenters, although one was a vaqueiro (who brought a milagre in the shape of a horse’s hoof). There were a few people with white-collar occupations, including teachers, a nurse, several waiters, two municipal officials, and a policeman. Almost half of the people whom we interviewed had come to Canindé to repay St. Francis more than four times. When we asked them why they asked St. Francis for help, some of the responses were, “He is my protector,” “He can work miracles,” “I believe in his miracles,” “Because I love him,” “To obtain a cure,” and “God gave him power to make miracles.” Even though the followers of St. Francis pray directly to him, they do not forget the higher power of God. But they feel that God is all-powerful and, according to their world view, does not have time to listen to someone as small and insignificant as they are. St. Francis, however, does listen and

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does love them, and he acts as their emissary (Scott 2010). They believe that with God’s will, St. Francis can perform the miracles they ask. Many times, people said “graças a Deus e São Francisco” when depositing their ex-voto. Reference to the Holy Trinity, as used in the formal Church liturgy, was missing from all the conversations I had with pilgrims. There is a saying in the sertão that the Holy Trinity is not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but instead São Francisco, Deus, e Padre Cícero. The Politics of Religion and Culture

There is a long-standing animosity between the Franciscan fathers as representatives of the Catholic Church and the elected officials of Canindé as representatives of the state and the federal government. The Church has a monopoly on the income generated in Canindé. It controls a majority of the land, can limit the number and types of tourism-related businesses, and for many years also influenced the city government. This rift has not been fully healed, but with the new administration at the monastery there are more negotiations in the works. The Church has made a great investment of money into the shrine in order to facilitate religious tourism. However, transportation to the shrine is still difficult because the roads to Canindé remain in disrepair. I was told during the summer of 2011 that the state is jealous of the power of the Church and prevents any transportation improvements. I also noticed that there had been no improvement in the tourism infrastructure regarding lodging for visitors. Nonetheless, the long-range plans seem to be to fashion Canindé as a spiritual tourism site.5 Masses are now televised throughout Brazil and other parts of Latin America each Friday, which has reportedly raised the profile of Canindé a great deal. However, the fact remains that the pilgrims’ tradition of offering ex-votos is outside orthodox praxis both in Canindé and at other Roman Catholic shrines around the world. To reinforce this, all shrine sites have a designated area for offerings outside the “sacred” areas of the sanctuary and the main altars. In many places it is a niche off to the side of the sanctuary, as at San Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona. Sometimes it is a small room off the sanctuary, as at the Santuario de Chimayo in Chimayo, New Mexico. In Canindé, votives are placed in the House of Miracles, a building entirely separate from the basilica. The paying of the promise is a

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very important activity for the pilgrims who come to Canindé, which is reflected in the huge numbers that visit the House of Miracles. Yet the Church obviously places more sacred importance on the basilica. In an article on “empowering place,” Margaret Rodman discusses the importance of “multilocality.” She states that much has been written about the importance of multivocality and suggests that the concept of place should also be examined. She goes on to say that “place, like voice and time, is a politicized social and cultural construct” and by giving it attention place can “encourage the understanding of the complex social construction of spatial meaning” (Rodman 1992, 640). The hegemonic views of the Catholic Church in Canindé are not the same as the world views of the population it serves. Though there are many Church officials who are trying to bridge the gap, their work is often thwarted by hierarchical authorities who have no direct contact with the people. The Church did try to address its problems in relating to its membership with changes that came about as a result of Vatican II (1962–1965). Problems arising with the liturgical language were somewhat alleviated when Mass was no longer spoken in Latin, Bible study was encouraged, and a sharing of responsibility between priest and laity for the Church community was encouraged (Mainwaring 1986, 43–44). Even so, the heterodox practitioners of the Northeast still have spiritual allegiances outside the Catholic mainstream. The generic ideologies in Afro-Brazilian religions and the form of folk Catholicism practiced in Canindé are not as divergent as one might assume. The Report on International Religious Freedom—Brazil published by the UNHCR recognizes this: “Many citizens worship in more than one church or participate in the rituals of more than one religion” (2010, 1). There are fluid boundaries across which people move, often making it unclear where folk Catholicism begins and ends in relation to Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda. All are focused on life on earth rather than on an afterlife. All employ a pantheon of intermediaries in the form of saints or spirits to act on humanity’s behalf, and in Brazil the same statuary is used to represent Catholic saints and Afro-Brazilian deities. All of these religions center on the belief in miraculous powers that can cure illnesses and answer petitions. All of these religious movements are located or had their beginnings in rural areas, and all cater to a subordinate population (Brown and Bick 1987). Perhaps these similarities are one reason

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that many Brazilians often blend the practices of what an outsider might view as more than one religion into their ideal form of spiritual practice. One of my research questions was concerned with the commodification of the ex-votos, similar to the commodification of the religious objects of African and other indigenous peoples. I knew from an earlier visit to Canindé that the bulk of the ex-votos were destroyed. But from that same visit I knew that academics and religious personnel were allowed to take ex-votos for their own use. In addition, I knew of international collections of Brazilian ex-votos owned by both individuals and museums, and I wondered how the people who offered the ex-votos felt about this. Their offerings had been made to repay a private contract between St. Francis and themselves. The ex-votos had been fashioned with the idea that they were going to have a temporal life, not sit on a shelf as an art object. I wondered if, once the contract was fulfilled, the practitioners felt that the objects were sacred and if so, when or how they were activated or consecrated, and also when and how they were deactivated or deconsecrated. No one told me that they felt the ex-votos were sacred. They all felt that the promessa, the contract, was the sacred thing. Everyone said that the contract was fulfilled when the ex-voto was placed in the bin. My questions regarding the consecration or deconsecration, or the activation or deactivation, were either ideas that I did not have the vocabulary to properly explain, or were ideas alien to them. I can only infer from their other statements and actions that they felt that the ex-voto was activated and fulfilled their contract with St. Francis when it was created or personalized by them. It was then deactivated, or symbolically depleted of personal meaning, upon placement in the bin in the House of Miracles. When I asked one of the freis about his feelings regarding the ex-voto tradition, he said, “When he [a pilgrim] gives an ex-voto like a head, hand, breast, or leg, he is giving something from his life. He can’t cut his own hand off and give it to God, so he makes a hand and presents it to God.” While I cannot say that this is exactly the feeling of the pilgrims, it is apparent that this priest recognized the important religious value encoded in the ex-votos and wanted to keep them for the people. He was also interested in breathing new life into the small museum run by the church that is adjacent to the monastery. Until 1996, there had been

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no new artifacts put in the museum since 1969. Although thousands of incredible milagres are offered each year, no one had been sufficiently interested to put any of them in the museum for the benefit of the pilgrims. The frei wanted that to change and requested that special pieces be selected so they could be placed in the museum. In 1996 the museum was a series of large dark rooms in a building behind the monastery. I doubt that the church spent much on its upkeep, because the artifacts looked pretty dusty and tired. The museum had no climate control, which is not surprising. As a result, most of the artifacts were in various stages of decay. But the lack of light and the fact that most of the items had not been touched in almost thirty years were probably the only things that had allowed them to remain intact, such as they were. The first item that greeted a visitor to the museum was the Menina de Amazonas, the life-size doll from the legend. The first room contained the bell from the first santuário and various high-style wooden religious icons in various states of decay from wood rot and insect damage. All of the artifacts in all of the rooms were simply displayed on shelves. Visitors stood behind stanchions when looking at the exhibits. In the next room were indigenous artifacts collected by a German missionary who had traveled the Amazon region many years ago on a motorcycle. This exhibit included baskets, arrows, feather capes, and necklaces, all suffering from dry rot, and his motorcycle, whose tires were completely flat and had graffiti carved into them. In one corner of this same room were a gun and a few other alleged possessions of the infamous bandit of the sertão, Lampião. Finally, there was a larger room where the walls were covered with ex-votos. There was no label copy, but the ex-votos spoke for themselves. There were examples of all genres, materials, and artistic styles. Around the room were crosses that had been carried to Canindé from all over the Northeast. There were also huge rocks that had been carried by pilgrims walking to Canindé. In the center of the room were small models of wooden boats. The stories these boats told were another testament to the faith and the family of St. Francis. These boats came from the Amazon, where rubber production takes place. The rubber workers cannot make the journey to Canindé because it is too far. When they make a contract with St. Francis, they have devised an ingenious method of paying their promessa. They write or get someone to write a note to St. Francis thanking him for interceding for them.

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A display of milagre boats that have made their way to Canindé from the Amazon region.

Then they take the paper and wrap it in layers of latex from the rubber tree until they have a ball about five inches wide. Then they make a little boat, enclose the ball inside the boat so that it will not get wet, and set the boat floating from the nearest igarapé (bank of narrow tributaries). On the outside of the boat are painted words to the effect of “This is a milagre for the promessa to St. Francis.” Apparently, when people see these boats, they know what it means. If they see the boat stuck along the shoreline, they set it back into the flowing water until the boat reaches the end of the waterway. Then the boat is given to a trucker who is driving on the huge highways out of the center of the country. The milagre is then passed from one trucker to the next until it ends up being deposited in the House of Miracles by someone. The rest of the museum was made up of exhibits of objects donated by followers of St. Francis, such as huge fruits and vegetables, mineral specimens, hornet nests, and paintings and sculptures made by pilgrims honoring St. Francis. I do not think there were many visitors to the museum during this time. There was a small admission charge, and I fear that with competition from the zoo and the local bars, going to the museum lost out.

The religious bookstore in the renovated Casa dos Milagres.

Pilgrims milling about in the renovated Casa dos Milagres.

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However, in the twenty-first century the museum was given a complete overhaul. It is now air-conditioned and has brightly illuminated display cases. Many of the old artifacts, such as the indigenous collection, are still on display. However, the museum now focuses on the Church and includes beautifully embroidered robes and miters worn by the clergy, silver communion cups, and ornate thuribles, or censers. The ex-votos, the crosses, and even the Menina are now kept in the recently enlarged Casa dos Milagres. In the spring of 2011, the head of the monastery decided on this change. The Casa dos Milagres has been expanded to include a new sales area for religious materials, private confession rooms, and a permanent display of milagres. Replacing the two docents who usually sat by the bin and talked with the pilgrims is an information kiosk staffed by young people dressed in brown shirts with an embroidered logo of the shrine on them. In fact, all the people working around the shrine now wear these shirts. This is a big change from times past and has brought a sense of pride to the workers and a more professional guise to the shrine. The photographs on the walls still remain, but rather than the jumble of images from the past, the photos are now arranged according to types of images. For example, all the animals are in one area, all the surgeries are in another, and all the babies are in another. The room is far better lighted than the old room was, and the pilgrims in the Casa dos Milagres tend to stay for a much longer time looking at all the objects on display.

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n this chapter I will readdress points made throughout this work in order to summarize and append information relating to the ex-voto tradition as practiced in Canindé, the cultural construction of physical disease and social dis-ease, and the politics of a widely shared yet nonetheless contested religious concept and cultural history. As I have stated, the catalog of physical diseases illustrated by the ex-votos can in many cases be traced to the root problem of poverty. By investigating the historical patterns of social structure and the resulting economic issues over space and time, it becomes evident that culture is constructed and must be negotiated differently depending upon one’s place in it. The marginalized people who are followers of St. Francis have constructed a culture in which they maximize the realization of their needs. This culture has its own visual language, commentary, and even costume. To be able to understand this culture, I listened to the pilgrims’ stories and observed their ritual and everyday behaviors. To situate this information within the bigger picture of the Brazilian Northeast, I also listened to the stories of religious personnel and other members of the community and surrounding area. From these data I was able to make the more general statements in this book regarding the tradition of ex-votos and the people who practice it. It stands to reason that if culture is a social construct, then disease can be culturally constructed as well (Scheper-Hughes 1992; Jackson 1989;

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Lock 1993; Rubel et al. 1984). It also stands to reason that the treatment for culturally constructed disease would be constructed in a like fashion. Many of the diseases and afflictions from which the pilgrims in Canindé suffer result from frustration, the blighted environment, and the cycle of poverty in which they live. Conditions of malnutrition and chronic gastrointestinal problems can be directly traced to the lack of sufficient nutrients, potable water, and sanitation facilities. These situations have recently started to be corrected by governmental institutions that provide services to which all Brazilian citizens have a right. However, there is no denying that historically the rights and well-being of these people have been neglected. In addition to the physical symptoms resulting from decades of social neglect, many people also suffer from culturally mediated conditions, such as susto, empacho, encosto, and nervoso, which are limited for the most part to members of the subordinate class. These culture-​ bound conditions are often called “folk illnesses” and can be divided into two types: material illnesses, which are physical illnesses resulting from objective causation, and spiritual illnesses, which are physical illnesses that have subjective causation (Ngokwey 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1992). While empacho, a blockage or type of digestive problem, can be categorized as a material illness due to its material or natural causation, such as a poor diet or a lack of sanitation, susto, encosto, and nervoso are designated as spiritual illnesses because their causation is subjective and often culturally mediated. Susto is a condition that its sufferers feel is brought on by a sudden shock or frightening experience. Interestingly, there is no time limit as to when this frightening experience may have occurred (Rubel et al. 1984). Encosto, from the verb encostar, “to lean,” is a physical state resulting from being “leaned upon” by a malevolent spiritual entity (Lynch 2005). Nervoso is a generic term used to describe nervous conditions from a variety of origins. These conditions result from the prolonged periods of fear, frustration, and anxiety in which a large portion of the people of the Northeast live (Rebhun 1993; Scheper-Hughes 1992). These culturally specific maladies are somatized, manifested in the body as depression, lack of energy, chronic headaches, bodily pains, and fragile nervous states for which medical personnel can find no objective basis. This often results in a minimizing of the patient’s complaint by the health-care worker. This in turn reinforces the anxiety of the sufferer, who feels further

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negated by the dominant culture through the doctor’s inability to see and recognize his or her pain. For this reason, it is my opinion that people who are members of the culture of the poor in the Northeast “constructed” St. Francis of Wounds to heal their diseases. It is their belief that St. Francis can bring forth an easing of their condition because he listens to their problems and can see their pain.1 By finally being seen, the pilgrim’s suffering is validated, and through a miracle their affliction disappears. The ex-votos that pilgrims create to fulfill their contract with St. Francis are encoded with symbols depicting conditions of disease caused by the socially created environment of neglect in which they exist. These symbols can be read by like-minded individuals, and the messages they send provide visual proof of St. Francis’s devotion and thus reinforce group solidarity and reciprocity. In this manner, the ex-votos serve the therapeutic function of allowing these unfortunate people a way to vent their anger and “voice” their frustration without fear of recrimination by the dominant class. Building upon Geertz’s (1973) statement that people within a culture exist in a web of shared cultural significance, Sider (1994) suggests that some people are the spiders that weave the web and the other people are the living things caught in the web. The pilgrims who turn to St. Francis for help are, in 99 percent of the cases, certainly not the spiders, but they are in most cases left to the mercy of those spiders, who will decide if their fate is to be eaten or just left dangling in the web. Discussions of Brazil, including the culture of the “spinners of the web” and the “victims caught in the web,” have generated many volumes of research. The mosaic components of the Brazilian population, the indigenous, African, and European, are openly discussed and even celebrated. Yet, while the history of Brazil has been written, representation of the individual stories of this diverse population has only recently been reflected in the text (Albuquerque 2004; Araújo 2004; Kenny 2007; Skidmore 1985). It would seem that to most of the early writers of Brazilian history there was but one history that was shared by all peoples. I join the contemporary writers and beg to differ. Co-opting the terms utilized by Sider: it is the spider’s history that has been told, while the histories of the victims have been consumed and forgotten. A comment made by one of the freis about the information I was gathering from the pilgrims illustrates this point. He said:

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All of the information that you are collecting here from the people is of great value to us. The more material that exists about our people, the better the story is created. All this material is the story of our people. It is sad that our Latin American people never had a continuous story. The whites did, but because of the conquests of the lands, our story was brutally interrupted. It is very sad to see that. Our people still have to suffer because of that. A people without a history are a lost people. Due to situations that have been out of most people’s control, the histories of those marginalized by poverty in Brazil’s Northeast have been lost or forgotten. In order to find work, families have been forced to migrate to different areas of the country. Because of illiteracy, the family ties that might have been maintained through written correspondence are unavailable, and contact has been lost. With this loss go family history and generational information that we in the United States often take for granted. When I questioned pilgrims about their ancestry, many could not give me any information. Some did not know the names of their grandparents or where previous generations had lived. Because in many cases these people have no link to history through family or through a shared culture with the dominant class, they forge new alliances in the present. This sense of community has been found in the nation of St. Francis. Membership in this group gives them a shared ideology, a recognizable uniform, guaranteed acceptance that is transferable to many different locations, and a shared history or mythology. The ideology of the nation of St. Francis is replete with its own heroes and legends, which are separate from the institutionalized Catholic liturgy, beginning with parallel versions of the creation of the shrine complex and the miracles surrounding the construction of the first church building. Their insistence on calling the saint St. Francis of Wounds, rather than his ecclesiastical name of St. Francis of Assisi, further reinforces their autonomy from clerical authority. In the same vein, while the followers of St. Francis do revere the holy icons of the Church, they also create icons of their own, such as the cross that was carried by the Homem da Cruz. In many ways, the crosses and certain notable ex-votos, such as the Criança and the Menina, are more important icons to the people because they are of their own making. These are objects that are

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approachable and available to them, unlike the ornate emblems of the Church, which are kept behind protective barriers and brought out to the people only once or twice a year. The symbolic ex-votos, because they are created by the practitioners, can be added to spontaneously. In this way they serve as objects of revitalization, which can stimulate their faith. The ex-voto tradition and these other factors serve to create a religion of the people that effectively bypasses clerical intervention to satisfy the people’s needs and thus reinforce their view of the debated topic of religious meaning and their ownership of their own tradition.2 Because of the acceptance of individualistic interpretations among the practitioners of this belief system and its similarity and compatibility with other belief systems in Brazil, it is no wonder that Brazil is considered a country of religious plurality. According to the UNHCR 2010 report based on the 2000 census, while 74 percent of the Brazilian population identified as Roman Catholic, 15.4 percent identified as Protestant with an estimated 74 percent of them being Pentecostal or evangelical. This movement away from Catholicism increased to 22.2 percent in the 2010 census (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica 2010). Additional identifications included Buddhists; Hindus; practitioners of Shinto; followers of Candomblé, Umbanda, and other Afro-Brazilian religions; spiritualists; Muslims; and Jews. The Afro-Brazilian belief systems of Candomblé and Umbanda, as well as Spiritism, which is based on the French philosophy of Allan Kardec, are similar to folk Catholicism in that they are based on a pantheon of deities rather than a single omnipotent presence. The tenets of each of these systems focus on the amelioration of earthly problems rather than on an afterlife. Also, each of these belief systems relies on magical or miraculous outcomes to achieve its goals. Although there has been a sharing or even blending of ritual behavior among these practices and, more important, many devotees feel free to pass fluidly from one practice to another in order to achieve their goals, why do we, as outside researchers, feel that we must differentiate the belief systems of these people into separate categories? If I learned anything during my time in Canindé, it is that the spiritual beliefs of people are not dictated by dogma and kept in a little box that is separate from the rest of their lives. I realized that my culturally constructed idea of devout behavior, where one is quiet and meditative, does exist, but it is not the defining characteristic of religious practice as it is found in Northeast Brazil. I saw that people can

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be devout while laughing or smoking a cigarette and performing the religious act of walking the Stations of the Cross. Puritanical parameters that impact behavioral models in North America are not so readily observed in the backlands of Brazil. People there tend to be more spontaneous and thus more open to anything that would be pleasurable or beneficial in some way. This openness carries over into their faith. The people I spoke with are trying to make their existence more bearable and will explore anything within their means to achieve this goal. Because of this, they may appeal to several deities but feel no contradiction of faith by so doing. In other words, to say that someone is a Catholic, an Umbandist, or a Spiritist is far too restrictive for the faith practiced by the people I met in Northeast Brazil. The words “Catholicism,” “Umbanda,” and “Spiritism” are just labels, while faith and belief are practices and as such cannot be restrained or limited by words. As it is, these religions are usually deemed superstitious and harmless by the powers that be, and as such they allow a type of freedom that is much needed as a release valve for the poor of Northeast Brazil. Ecstatic behavior is another characteristic that is shared by these faiths. In all of the belief systems I have mentioned, with the exception of folk Catholicism, ritual practice includes trance behavior on the part of the participants. However, the Masses that I attended in Canindé are far more exuberant than more traditional Masses that I have attended elsewhere. In Canindé the services are more akin to a Pentecostal revival in the southern Appalachian region of the United States than to a Catholic Mass. Many times the service sounded almost like a political rally, as the priest stirred the congregation’s emotions by encouraging them to scream over and over “Viva São Francisco!” until there was an electric current running through the basilica. Both of these types of ceremonies, those that result in trance behavior and the Catholic Masses in Canindé, allow their practitioners to release tension and stress through physical catharsis. This is of much therapeutic value to a people whose normal behavior is often inhibited to meet a standard set by the dominant class. There are also therapeutic benefits to be found in the creation of an ex-voto for St. Francis. The autonomous contract negotiated between a pilgrim and St. Francis is in itself beneficial for the reassurance it gives that he or she has a benefactor upon whom to call in times of need. The payment of the promise with the ex-voto reinforces a sense of self-worth

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in being able to fulfill a contract, if only a spiritual one. The mere crafting of the milagre has therapeutic potential. In the crafting of an image of one’s affliction, in the pouring of emotion into that object, time is allowed for pondering the problem and celebrating its resolution, and there is then the cathartic release of the problem into a tangible symbol, which can then literally be cast away. The people with whom I spoke who made their own ex-voto reinforced this sentiment. Interestingly, however, contrary to this strong cathartic potential, many of the pilgrims who came to Canindé did not make their milagres. They instead asked a friend, relative, or professional wood worker to make their ex-voto for them, and many pilgrims paid for this service. From the beginning of my research in Canindé, pilgrims contradicted my assumption that the milagres would be considered sacred artifacts and instead told me that it was not the ex-voto that was sacred, but that the promessa, the contract with St. Francis, was. These statements are reinforced by my statistics. About half of the pilgrims I questioned had been to Canindé more than four times to fulfill such a contract. However, they apparently did not think it mattered if they made the payment with their own hands. Simply put, it is the paying of the contract that is sacred to them; the method of payment is not. Much has been written about artifacts that are crafted during healing rituals. Wooden figures such as the boçio carved by the Fon in Benin; the minkisi carved by the Bakongo in Zaire; the mbwoolu made by the Yaka, also in Zaire; the nuchus carved by the Cuna in the San Blas Islands; the painted seals, scrolls, and talismans of the Ethiopian tebab; and the sand paintings of the Navajos in the southwestern United States are only a few of the many examples of how art is used in healing throughout the world.3 In these traditions, a religious or artistic specialist is charged with the creation of the object. In some cases, another specialist is enlisted to “activate” the power of the object. In the case of the Brazilian ex-votos, it is the pilgrims who activate their own ex-voto even if they are not the actual creator. The pilgrims feel that their ex-votos are “deactivated” when they are placed in the ex-voto bin in the House of Miracles. When another pilgrim recycles an ex-voto from the bin, he or she must personally “reactivate” the ex-voto by tying a fita, or attaching a lock of hair, or writing his or her name on it. The ultimate deactivation of the ex-votos occurs when they are burned at the end of the pilgrimage season. Most

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of the art created for healing purposes is meant to be ephemeral. It is meant to be destroyed as part of the ritual. Unfortunately, in the case of many of the aforementioned examples of healing art, due to their commodification for a very lucrative art market, these artifacts are not being destroyed (Steiner 1994). This not only interrupts the healing strategy, but also creates a chain reaction that impacts many facets of that culture and could ultimately erode the foundations of the entire society. I was concerned that this might be an issue I would confront in Canindé. But so far, that has not happened to any great extent. Because of the influence of African cosmology and handicrafts in Brazil and the precedent of Native American carving, it has been assumed that the three-dimensional quality of the ex-votos in Northeast Brazil grew out of these traditions.4 In a translation of Luiz Saia’s introduction to his book on popular Brazilian sculpture, an ex-voto is described as “sculpture, magical in its workings, hybrid as a phenomenon of art and in technical tradition Afro-Negro by origin” (1944, 24). Saia bases this theory on what he considers the African stylistic techniques of “cubism” depicted by the carvings. It seems that Saia only included wooden ex-votos in this study and only chose, with the exception of two or three full figures, heads. Looking through the pictures, I see ex-votos that are much simplified, but could be deemed vaguely reminiscent of the sort of wooden African sculptures that influenced the cubist movement in Paris during the early part of the twentieth century. However, when using wood as a medium in sculpture, there are tendencies, especially for a person who is using rudimentary tools, to depict facial characteristics broadly. Triangles, such as those used by cubist painters and sculptors to depict facial characteristics, are much easier to carve than circles. I saw in Canindé and in Saia’s book ex-votos where the carver employed such a technique, but the sweeping generalization that this is representative of the entire genre is wrong. In the first place, Saia ignored other media and other subjects by limiting his study to only wooden heads. Second, this work was written in 1944, during the time when Brazilian intellectuals were still supporting the platform of racial prejudice called branqueamento (whitening), which included the racial stereotyping of those with African heritage and darker complexions as backward and primitive (Blake 2003; Landes 1947). To connect this “primitive” form of popular art with the Afro-Brazilian population followed the practice of the time to simultaneously praise the

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“exotic” yet reinforce its triviality and lack of relevance. The philosophy of the Brazilian government in the past was to highlight its “Africanity” and even exploit it, but to keep its influence relegated only to what might be considered folkloric (Dzidzienyo 1985). Unfortunately, there is still a residual prejudice in Brazil against this type of popular art. This prejudice, combined with the more important fact of the clergy keeping the ex-votos off the art market, making them commercially nonviable, has resulted in there being little else published about them. Forty-five years later, Bercht (1989) and Frota (1989) still quoted Saia’s work, possibly because there was no other. Bercht adds that the “interaction of visual vocabularies that have their origin in techniques and traditions developed by the non-Iberian components of northeastern Brazilian culture: indigenous Brazilians, especially the Cairiri tribe, and West Africans, originally brought to Brazil as slaves,” might serve as a model for the ex-votos. In this fashion, she continues, “it should be noted that the techniques of carving wood and the modeling of objects from clay were known to all these ethnic groups well before their intermingling in Brazil” (1990, 16). In Canindé and many other areas of Northeast Brazil, the indigenous people were exterminated before they could fully make an imprint on the cultural maps that exist today, and this region’s inhospitable climate prohibited large-scale agriculture, making the African presence minimal. However, I do agree with Bercht regarding the importance of indigenous and African cultural influences, which can be perceived in Northeast Brazil’s votive tradition. But I fault Saia for ignoring the possibility of any European influence in the Brazilian ex-voto tradition. Again, this omission supports the intellectual environment of racial prejudice prevalent when he was writing. Saia’s theory does not explain the variations of the ex-voto tradition found in different parts of Brazil. For example, in Salvador, in the state of Bahia, a city in which Afro-Brazilians are the major portion of the city’s population, the majority of ex-votos are three-dimensional, but they are not fashioned from wood or clay, but instead are of molded wax and are commercially made and mass-produced. In Canindé, where the population is predominately European with a mixture of Afro-Brazilian and Native American, the ex-votos are handcrafted three-dimensionally from wood and clay, among other materials. While there is more wood available in rural areas such as Canindé than in an urban setting such as

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Bahia, wood is not plentiful in the sertão. Why the ex-voto tradition has resulted in three-dimensional unique pieces crafted from wood and clay in Northeast Brazil, when reportedly the rest of Latin America uses wax or miniature metal representations, I cannot say, but I believe that the answer is far more complex than to simply say it is because of the African and Native American heritage found in Brazil. Another point that supports the addition of European influence to the mixture of African and indigenous is in regard to transference. Bercht cites Saia as suggesting that “popular Brazilian concepts of disease and misfortune, seen as symptoms of spirit-like entities penetrating the human body have their roots in Indian and West African beliefs.” She continues, “[Saia] noted the existence among these groups of healing procedures that involve the transference of the ‘bad spirit’ into an inanimate object,” suggesting that ex-votos serve that purpose in Northeast Brazil (Bercht 1990, 13). I agree that the belief in transference, found in tenets of both West African and Cairiri religions, originally could have been a precedent for the ex-votos. However, the belief in transference was also strong in Europe and could easily have been transported to the New World. In any case, I believe that, in Canindé, the practice of transferring illness or any other problem to an ex-voto, with the possible exception of a candle, has ceased. No one I interviewed made any reference to the intentional practice of magically transferring their infirmity to their milagre as a mode of healing. When I asked one of the local freis why the ex-votos in Canindé were carved from wood and molded from clay, this was his response: I don’t know how to explain that. The people from the interior, at least before this modern time with television and all started destroying all of it, they would always make their own toys out of wood. It used to be very common among the people to make their own things. As mentioned previously, there is evidence from the archaeological record that ex-votos were fashioned three-dimensionally in clay and wood for hundreds of years in Europe (Deyts 1988; Jackson 1988; Merrifield 1987). It is unclear if all of these votive offerings were made in gratitude for the amelioration of a problem or if these same types of votives were also offered in supplication. One author suggests the interesting possibility

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that mimetic offerings were left at a shrine as a type of insurance for a continued curative effect. In this line of thinking, the pilgrim brought a likeness of the problem and left it with the deity in order that they not be forgotten (Davidson 1998). It is still possible to witness this tradition of three-dimensional wooden or wax votive offerings in certain parts of Europe; however, now it is more common to see two-dimensional metal ex-votos, or támata, as they are called in Greece. As to why three-dimensional forms survived in certain parts of the world and not others, again, I cannot say. It is a fascinating question. However, I believe that the ex-voto tradition is ingrained in the lives of the followers of St. Francis. Through this research, I have demonstrated how this tradition has become emblematic as an encoded way of reacting against the domination of the upper class. These pieces of art reflect the cycle of poverty in which the oppressed must live, and they can be read as a metasocial commentary on their poverty-related diseases and afflictions. However, these same ex-votos and the stories and legends that spring from them can also act as revitalization agents that reinforce the pilgrims’ belief system and encourage an atmosphere of solidarity. Both of these functions are vital to the continuation of the nation of St. Francis, which in turn, I believe, is vital to the survival of the impoverished people of Northeast Brazil. The people of Northeast Brazil have constructed St. Francis as the physician, psychiatrist, friend, and patrão who will never desert them. He is their helpmate in the present and the guardian of their future. I believe that their being able to lean on him is often all that is carrying them through the day. I also believe that the freis in Canindé realize this, and for this reason they resist changes from outside the Church or from within that might jeopardize the vitality and continuation of the nation of St. Francis. It will be interesting to see the results of the institutional aid programs, such as those that provide improved water quality, sanitation, literacy, and health benefits for the people of the Northeast. Will there be a waning of those who consider themselves members in the nation of St. Francis as they embrace their Brazilian citizenship? And will that change the tradition of appealing to St. Francis to heal their physical and social dis-ease?

Appendix

Pilgrimage to Canindé 1.  Gender: _____ male

_____ female

2.  Age group: _____ under 20

_____ 21–30

 _____ 41–50

_____ 31–40

_____ 51 or over

3.  Occupation: ____________________________________________ 4.  Residence: ______________________________________________ 5.  Number of pilgrimages to Canindé: _____ 1

_____ 2

_____ 4

_____ 3

_____ more than four

6.  Mode of transportation: _____ walking _____ by animal _____ by car

_____ by bus

_____ by pau de arara

7.  Material used for the ex-voto: _____ wood

_____ cloth

_____ other

_____ clay

_____ plaster

_____ other

8.  Part of body illustrated by ex-voto: _____ head

_____ legs/feet



_____ arms/hands

_____ whole body _____ breast



_____ internal organ

_____ other

9.  Maker of ex-voto: _____ pilgrim

_____ carpenter

_____ friend

_____ relative

10.  Did you pay to have it made? __________ How much? ________________

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appen di x

11.  Infirmity: _____ cut _____ tumor

_____ rash

_____ headache



_____ broken bone

_____ temporary paralysis



_____ internal organ _____ nervous disorder _____ other

12.  Does your ex-voto correctly illustrate your problem? _____ How? ______________________________________________________ 13.  What other assistance did you have? _____ rezadeira _____ pai de santo

_____ curandeiro



_____ farmacéutico _____ séance

_____ espirita

_____ medical _____ other

14.  Payment made (in addition to ex-voto): _____ wore batina

_____ walked on knees



_____ went to confession/Mass

_____ lit candles _____ cut hair _____ other

15.  Why did you make a promessa with St. Francis? _____________________ 16.  What (or who) resolved your problem? ______________________________ Compilations from Questionnaires 1. Gender:



male = 88

female = 212

2.  Age group:

under 20 = 27

21–30 = 48

31–40 = 60

41–50 = 54

51 or over = 111 3. Occupation:

unemployed = 62

student = 10

domestic = 77



agriculture = 50

retired = 26

other = 75

Ceará = 107

Piauí = 81

Maranhão = 105

Pernambuco = 3

Other = 4

4. Residence:

5.  Number of pilgrimages to Canindé:

first = 59

second = 36

third = 35

fourth = 28

bus = 154

car = 22

walking = 8

more than four = 142 6.  Mode of transportation:

pau de arara = 116

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135

7.  Material used for the ex-voto:

wood = 259

plaster = 17

cloth = 11

clay = 7

head = 78

breast = 21 ​

wax = 6 8.  Part of body illustrated by ex-voto:

arms/hands = 53

legs/feet = 115



whole body = 17

internal organ = 11

other = 5

9.  Maker of ex-voto:

pilgrim = 46

carpenter = 84

friend = 108

relative = 62

10.  Paid for the ex-voto:

yes = 132 no = 168

11. Infirmity:

cut = 33



tumor = 32

rash = 50



headache = 39

broken bone = 22 temporary paralysis = 24

internal organ = 25

nervous disorder = 10

other = 65

12.  Ex-voto illustrates affliction:

yes = 122 no = 172*

did not answer = 6

* This includes ex-votos showing no trauma, because the pilgrim intended to illustrate that healing had occurred 13. Received assistance in addition to promessa:



none = 62

medical = 208

curandeiro = 2



farmacéutico = 4

pai de santo = 2

espirita = 2

rezadeira/medical = 17

rezadeira = 2

rezadeira/pai de santo = 1

14.  Payment in addition to ex-voto:

wore batina = 12

went to confession/Mass = 112

walked on knees = 2

cut hair = 4

robe and confession = 42

candles and confession = 12

monetary offering = 6

combination of 2 or more = 31**

nothing additional = 79

** Represents combinations other than those mentioned above

Notes

Introduction 1. Some works that I have found valuable are Bastide 1951; Bruneau 1982; Burns 1970; Chesnut 2003; de Kadt 1967; Eakin 1997; Forman 1975; Gross 1971; Pang 1989; Rohter 2012; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Wagley 1963. Chapter One 1. For a more extensive discussion, see Greenfield 2001; Kenny 2007; Menezes 2004; Robock 1963, 1975. 2. George Foster’s model of patron-client relationships has been utilized as a basis for discussion in many aspects of social and religious organizations. His works “The Dyadic Contract: A Model for the Social Structure of a Mexican Peasant Village” (1961); “The Dyadic Contract in Tzintzuntzan, II: Patron-Client Relationships” (1963); and “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good” (1965) are classics in the field. For more contemporary adaptations of Foster’s model, see Graziano 2007; Greenfield and Cavalcante 2006; Kenny 2007. 3. Jill Dubisch’s 1995 groundbreaking book, In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine, fully fleshes out this reciprocal exchange between a client and a spiritual patron. 4. For more discussion of this in Brazil, see de Kadt 1967; Forman 1975; Freyre 1945, 1986; Hutchinson 1957; Wagley 1963. For an excellent edited volume that discusses this globally, see Badone 1990. 5. For discussion of liberation theology and religious terminology, see Bruneau 1982; Carvalho 2000; Chesnut 2003; Drogus 1997; Fragoso 1987; Löwy 1996; Mainwaring 1986; Nagle 1997; Puleo 1994. For more on Catholic Charismatic Renewal, see Chesnut 2003.

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6. For the early foundations of this tradition, see Cassar 1964; Davidson 1998; Deyts 1988; Dubisch 1995; Jackson 1988; Laing 1931; Lanciani 1967; Rouse 1902; Sambon 1895. 7. For more on the spread of the ex-voto tradition throughout Europe, see Ellen Badone’s edited volume Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society (1990), which includes “Breton Folklore of Anticlericalism” by Badone; “The Struggle for the Church: Popular Anticlericalism and Religiosity in PostFranco Spain” by Ruth Behar; “The Priest and His People: The Contractual Basis for Religious Practice in Rural Portugal” by Caroline B. Brettell; and “Pilgrimage and Popular Religion at a Greek Holy Shrine” by Jill Dubisch. Other volumes on this subject include Cátedra 1988; Coleman and Elsner 1995; Finucane 1977; Frey 1998; Garbini 1966; Gemzöe 2005; Hansen 1968; Marinatos and Hirmer 1960; Merrifield 1987; Nolan 1991; Nolan and Nolan 1989; Oettinger 1997; Pina-Cabral 1986; Radford 1949; Scott 2010; Wilson 1983. 8. For more complete discussion of the diffusion of the ex-voto tradition to the Americas, see Bercht 1989; Cardoso 1983; della Cava 1970; Dörner 1962; Egan 1991; Forman 1975; Frota 1989; Greenfield and Cavalcante 2005; Gross 1971; Medeiros 1987; Meirelles 1968; Mota 1968; Oettinger 1990, 1992; Oktavec 1995; Pineda 2004; Romano 1965; Saia 1944; Sanchis 1983; Slater 1986; Toor 1947; Turner and Turner 1978. 9. Adalberto Barreto has been studying the ex-voto tradition in Canindé for many years. He graciously made his notes and manuscripts available to me. 10. Dubisch 1995 and Landes 1947 also discuss the positionality of being a female researcher in the field. Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences (1986), edited by Peggy Golde, has chapters by several female anthropologists, including Jean Briggs, Laura Nader, Ruth Landes, and Margaret Mead. Chapter Two 1. In her 1995 book, African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power, Suzanne Preston Blier discusses the activation of power and magic in Fon boçio. I have used her idea as a model for the activation of the milagres. 2. If you look at figure 9, you will see that by most aesthetic standards this carved figure would be considered crude. However, it was considered to be very well crafted by the pilgrims. The woman who brought this milagre to the Casa dos Milagres had recovered from shingles. It was felt that her pain resonated through this offering and that the crudeness was not distracting. In fact, some felt that its roughness made it more effective. Chapter Five This chapter has been adapted from a previous version that appeared in Pilgrimage

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and Healing, edited by Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman. © 2005 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. 1. In addition to the works mentioned in the notes in chapter 1, see Brandão 1985; de Kadt 1967; Forman 1975; Graziano 2007; Ingham 1986; Yoder 1965, 1974. 2. By many accounts the prejudice against African diasporic religions in Brazil still exists. Stephen Selka goes so far as to call it a “holy war” and reports that between 2000 and 2002 there were several attacks on Candomblé terreiros by evangelical Christians (2007, 1). 3. For more information on the connection between physical and social illness, see Jackson 1989; Lock 1993; Lynch 2005; Martin 1987; Ngokwey 1995; Rebhun 1993; Rubel et al. 1984; Scheper-Hughes 1985, 1992. 4. Chesnut reinforces my conclusion that more women than men take part in the pilgrimage to St. Francis of Wounds and enter into a promessa. He states that “at least two-thirds of all consumers of organized religion in Latin America are women” (2003, 158). 5. When I spoke during the summer of 2011 with Frei Wellington, the head of the monastery in Canindé, he acknowledged that the Church would like to have more religious tourists come to Canindé, but he would also like it to become more of a religious research center for scholars, rather than just a tourist destination. Chapter Six 1. For a similar example of a healer who has been “created” by followers to act on their behalf, see Kelly E. Hayes’s Holy Harlots: Femininity, Sexuality, and Black Magic in Brazil (2011). Hayes has done a wonderful job of introducing the reader to the female spirit entity Pomba Gira and the ways she helps her followers. Included is a companion DVD called Slaves of the Saints, which documents trance performances by several followers of Pomba Gira. 2. The edited volume by Badone (1990) focuses on contested meanings, the ownership of traditions and rituals, and anticlericalism. See especially the entries by Badone, Behar, Brettell, and Dubisch. Along the same lines is a collected volume edited by Eade and Sallnow (2000). This is a very important work because it was the first to challenge Victor Turner’s concept of communitas, which began a discussion that continues to this day. For a compelling counterargument to Eade and Sallnow, see Coleman 2002. 3. I recommend the following works: for Fon boçio carving, Blier 1995; for Bakongo minkisi carving, MacGaffey 1991, 1993; for Yaka mbwoolu, Devisch 1990; for Cuna nuchukana, Taussig 1992; for Ethiopian tebab, Mercier 1997; for Diné sand painting, Newcomb 1964; for a cross-cultural survey of amulets, Francis 2007. 4. For more information on the religious material culture of Amazonian peoples, I recommend Santos-Granero 2009.

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Index

Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. about this book: background of, 2; conclusions of, 122–32; context of, 12–13; contributions of, 14; methodology and, 3, 31–35; overview of, 14–15; state of the art and, 14; subject of, 2; theses of, 12–13; title and, 30–31 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 2–3, 31 acampamentos, 102–3 Amado, Jorge, 84; Tenda dos Milagres, 84 Anjos, Maria dos, 109 Aperacida, Maria, 53 Appadurai, Arjun, 31, 79 Archaeology of Ritual and Magic, The (Merrifield), 80 art: cycle of poverty and, 132; folklore and, 132; healing and, 3, 15, 128–30; religious statuary and, 15, 28; social commentary and, 31 automobiles, blessing of, 69–71 Azevedo, Thales de, 8, 104 Babcock, Barbara, 31 Baptista, Frei, 29

Barreto, Adalberto, 14, 24, 34, 51, 55–56 Basílica de São Francisco, Canindé, 20, 21 Batista, Cícero Romão, 13–14 Behar, Ruth, 31 Bercht, Fatima, 14, 130, 131 Bick, Mario, 14 Blier, Suzanne Preston, 79 Boltanski, Luc, 112 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 12, 31, 111 Brazil: African cosmology and, 129; allocation of resources and, 6; Bolsa Familia and, 44–45; clean water, sanitation and, 108; devout behavior in, 126–27; dyadic contracts and, 7; ecstatic behavior and, 127; Fome Zero and, 44; health care in, 107; heterogeneity and, 107; land tenure and, 6–7, 18, 99; medicines and, 108, 109; Northeast lawlessness, messianic cults and, 102; Northeast poverty and development and, 98; popular art and, 130; religious healing

153

154 Brazil (continued) and, 109; religious plurality and, 126–27; religious terminology and, 8–9; slavery in, 6; “the web,” spinners, victims and, 124–25 Brazilian Peasantry, The (Forman), 99 Brown, Diana DeGroat, 14 Brown, Karen McCarthy, 31 Cabral, João, 102; malnourishment and, 100–101 cachaça, 67–68 Canindé, 2, 5, 21; Catholic Church and, 18; climate in, 17; employment in, 18–19; ex-voto tradition and, 9–10; fé e milagres and, 2; folk Catholicism and, 10; health care in, 107–8; health-care alternatives in, 107–15; politics of religion and culture and, 115–21; poverty in, 17–18; religion in, 9–10; sugar and, 17 Cardoso, Carlos Lopes, 14 Carvalho, José, 1, 14 Casa dos Milagres. See House of Miracles Catholic Church, 3, 18, 104–5; anticlericalism and, 8, 105–7; Canindé pilgrims and, 105; Catholic Charismatic Renewal groups and, 9; CEBs (ecclesial base communities) and, 8–9; formal vs. informal and, 7–8; government and, 115; Holy Trinity and, 115; House of Miracles vs. basilica and, 116; mutirão and, 104; pilgrimage and, 11; suffering and, 104. See also folk Catholicism Ceará Rural Sustainable and Competitiveness Project, 108 Chesnut, Andrew, 9; Competitive Spirits, 9

i n de x

child with injured leg, 96 Cícero, Padre, 14 Competitive Spirits (Chesnut), 9 Cordero, Helen, 31 Criançá com Cruzeiro, 56–58, 125 cubism, ex-votos (milagres) and, 129–30 DeAssis, 26 Death Without Weeping (Scheper), 111 della Cava, Ralph, 10, 103 devotion, behavior and, 126–27 disease, cultural construction and, 122 Dubisch, Jill, 31 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 98 Economist, 17 ecstatic behavior, 127 Édite, Maria, 94–95 Egan, Martha, 14 Elias, Frei, 25 encosto, 123 ex-votos (milagres): activation/ deactivation and, 117, 128–29; animate offerings and, 12, 63; artes popular and, 28; beeswax and, 86, 87; casket milagre, 88; clay and, 89, 90; cloth and, 86, 88; commercial crafting and, 80–81; commodification of, 117; community, social reciprocity and, 48–50; creation of, therapeutic benefits and, 127–28; cubism and, 129–30; definitions and, 11; disease and, 124; European influences and, 130–32; exuvial offerings and, 12, 63; female breasts and, 40–42, 41; female genitalia and, 41, 43; a “good” milagre, 30; group solidarity, reciprocity and,

155

i n de x

124; healing and, 129; holistic studies of, 14; Homem da Cruz and, 46, 47; inanimate offerings and, 12, 63; inscription and, 91, 92; lifespan of, 29, 29–30; male genitalia and, 41; metasocial commentaries and, 36, 48; “miracle stories” and, 50; molded wax and, 81–82, 83; “mute” ex voto, 39; “nation” of St. Francis and, 36; occupational equipment and, 93–94; plaster and, 82, 84; poverty, governmental neglect and, 43–44; regional variations and, 130–31; religion of the people and, 126; replicative milagres and, 63, 81; replicative offerings and, 12; revitalization and, 126; sacredness and, 28; shoe box/house and, 105, 106; social dis-ease and, 36, 132; spiritual chain and, 46–48; spiritual currency and, 30; stories and, 92–93; Styrofoam and, 89; survival and, 13; “talking head” and, 39; therapeutic benefits of, 127–28; three-dimensional images and, 86–97, 129, 132; tradition of, 3, 10–12, 122; two-dimensional images and, 84–85, 85; umbilical healing and, 44, 45; wood and, 90 Federal University of Ceará, 108 field methods, 31–35 Finucane, Ronald, 11, 63; Miracles and Pilgrims, 12 fitas, 21 folk Catholicism, 10; Afro-Brazilian religions and, 116; Catholic Church and, 8–9, 105; poverty and, 15 Forman, Shepard, 10, 104

Foster, George, 7 Francis, Doris, 14 Franciscans, 9 Freire, Paulo, 112 Frota, Lelia Coelho, 14, 130 Geertz, Clifford, 36, 124 healing rituals, artifacts and, 128–29 Hess, David, 14 HIV/AIDS, 42–43 Homem da Cruz, 46, 47, 74 House of Miracles (Casa dos Milagres), 2, 20, 23, 24, 117; acoustics of, 33; milagres and, 24; renovation of, 118–21, 120; wooden boat models and, 118–19 Integrated Rural Water Supply and Sanitation System, 100 International Fund for Agricultural Development, 99 Juazeiro do Norte, 14, 103 Kardec, Allan, 126 Kopytoff, Igor, 66–67; Social Life of Things, The, 66–67 Lampião, 102, 118 Landes, Ruth, 14 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 5–6; on poverty, 101 marginalized people, history of, 125 Mauss, Marcel, 111 medical problems: material and spiritual illnesses, 123; poverty and, 36 Menina de Amazonas, 118, 125 Merrifield, Ralph, 80; Archaeology of Ritual and Magic, The, 80

156 methodology: notes and, 33; photography and, 33–34; questionnaires and, 35; recorded interviews and, 34; variables and, 32–33 milagre of child with injured leg, 97 Miracles and Pilgrims (Finucane), 12 miracle stories: Child With the Coin, The, 56–58; Founding and Building of O Santuário de São Francisco das Chagas, 51–52; Little Girl from Amazonas, The, 53, 54; Man Who Came by Bus Instead, The, 60; Man Who Rose from the Dead, The, 55–56; Santa Lúcia and How She Lost Her Eyes, 58–59; St. Francis as an Agent of Enculturation, 61–62 Mota, Mauro, 14 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST), 102–3 “nation” of St. Francis, 125, 132–33; culture of, 125–26; ex votos (milagres) and, 132–33; family histories and, 125–26 nervoso, 123 Northeast Brazil, 98; droughts and, 100; economy of, 7, 18; ecstatic behavior and, 127; fear, frustration, anxiety in, 123–24; folk Catholicism and, 36; history of, 98–99; indigenous people in, 130; infant mortality and, 101; insecurity, religion and, 104; literacy and, 50, 85; messianic cults and, 102; poverty and, 5–6, 10, 17, 32, 34; religion and, 1, 28, 116–17, 127; Rural Poverty Reduction Project, 100–101; St. Francis of Wounds and, 37

i n de x

Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, 81–82 Oettinger, Marion, 14 Oktavec, Eileen, 14 patron-client relationships, 6–7 pau de arara, 48–49, 49 peasant leagues, 99 Pierre Bourdieu, 32 pilgrims, 32; age of, 114; gender and, 112; multiple visits and, 114–15; questionnaires and, 112; sociallyconstructed symptoms and, 112 poverty: ex-votos (milagres) and, 36, 122–23, 132; famine and, 100; health problems and, 107; land tenure and, 99; lawlessness, messianic cults and, 101; Lula da Silva on, 101; marginalization and, 125; Northeast and, 44; physical diseases and, 122–24; race and, 44 promessas, repayment of: animate offerings and, 63; batinas and, 68–69, 70; bingo games and, 65–66; candles and, 64–65; carrying a cross and, 74–75; circumambulating the basilica and, 72, 73; cycling to Canindé and, 74; exuvial offerings and, 63, 66–68; fireworks and, 77–78; hair and, 68–69; inanimate offerings and, 63; money and, 78–79; mortification of flesh and, 71; natural objects and, 64–65, 66; photographs and, 75–76, 76; recycled objects and, 79; replicative offerings and, 63; Stations of the Cross and, 71, 72; utilitarian objects, 66–68; walking to Canindé and, 73–74

157

i n de x

Report on International Religious Freedom—Brazil (UNHCR), 116 Rodman, Margaret, 116 Saia, Luiz, 128–29, 130 Salvador, Bahia, 130–31 São Francisco das Chagas (St. Francis of Wounds), 2, 124; presence of, 34–35; problem solving and, 19; stigmata and, 11; thaumaturgy and, 10–11 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 31, 32–33, 112; Death Without Weeping, 111 Selka, Stephen, 14 sertão (subregion), 5–6, 7, 8; cattle ranching and, 65; economy of, 99; government and, 17–18, 100; history of, 98–99; literacy and, 101; living conditions, children and, 44–45; “nation” of St. Francis and, 34; nutrition and, 101; potable water and, 40; religion and, 103–4, 111; religious beliefs and, 10–11; studies of, 13–14; weaning of children and, 40. See also Northeast Brazil

Sider, Gerald, 124 Slater, Candace, 10, 13 Social Life of Things, The (Kopytoff), 66–67 souvenirs, 22, 77, 95 statuary, religious, 79–80 susto, 123 Suza, Manuel de, 96 Tenda dos Milagres (Amado), 84 Tupi-Guarani, 11 Turner, Victor, 16; Celebration, 16 Umbanda, 111 Vatican II, 116 Wagley, Charles, 6 Wellington, Frei, 29 Willeke, Venâncio, Frei, 51–52 women: employment and, 113–14; property and, 113 wood carvers, 94–95 World Bank, 100–101, 108 Yansâ, 76, 77, 110, 111

King

anthropology | latin america | religion

—Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo, coauthor of San Jacinto I: A Historical Ecological Approach to an Archaic Site in Colombia

“L

indsey king takes readers on a fascinating journey to a pilgrimage site in northeast Brazil, the city of Canindé, where visitors come from afar to visit the House of Miracles, a shrine to the miraculous Saint Francis of the Wounds. They petition or thank the saint with a homemade milagre, a small effigy, usually in wood, that represents their illness or concern: a broken leg, a concussion, an affair of the heart. Sometimes reminiscent of the Canterbury Tales or the Easter pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Holy Child of Atocha in Chimayó in northern New Mexico, this book shares King’s quest for understanding a world entirely new to her, but ancient to those who live it.” —Martha Egan, author of Mílagros: Votive Offerings from the Americas and Relicarios: Devotional Miniatures from the Americas

Lindsey King is an assistant professor of anthropology at East Tennessee State University.

isbn 978-0-8263-5531-7 90000

University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com | 800-249-7737

9 780826 355317

Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil

“T

his is a remarkable work, concise and very precise, that helps us understand the place of pilgrimage sites in the theater of human desperation.”

Lindsey King

Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil

T

he religious tradition of offering anatomical votive images made of wood, clay, or metal, dating back to the pre-Christian cultures of Greece and Rome, came to the New World with European explorers. Combined with the Catholicism of the colonizers, the religious traditions of African slaves, and the spiritual practices of the native populations, such offerings are still a vital part of life in northeast Brazil. Lindsey King’s anthropological account of the use of ex-voto images focuses on the Sanctuary of St. Francis of Wounds in Canindé, in the state of Ceará in northeast Brazil, where pilgrims offer ex-votos known as milagres in payment for healing and reversal of bad fortune. King argues that the region’s marginalized citizens turn to St. Francis to replace the medical and social services that the government has failed to provide. The author’s photographs provide valuable documentation of this unique version of an ancient custom. Not only do the offerings of milagres, tangible symbols of faith, embody prayers and encode the pilgrim’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, but, as the author shows, they can reveal information about cultural domination and resistance. King’s study probes issues of art and material culture that are often overlooked in ethnography. She reveals the ex-voto tradition’s functions of reciprocity and solidarity, showing it as emblematic of the culture of its practitioners.