Material historicity: rethinking objects through the mis/recognition of a Catholic saint
Cant, A.
It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing. Abstract/SummaryBased on ethnographic research in Santa Cruz Mixtepec, Mexico, this article investigates a local disagreement about the identity of a historic statue of a saint. It shows that historical and object biography approaches cannot fully account for the different ways that people draw on material evidence, religious understandings, and their own perceptions of the past when engaging with such meaningful objects. To more fully account for such processes, I develop the concept of “material historicity,” which provides a framework that connects theories of materiality and historical consciousness. This framework will allow scholars to understand how objects and their material qualities provoke and enable creative and interpretive engagements with the past, and how these engagements interact with one another in the present. The case of the Mixtepec Saint shows that in addition to these analytical possibilities, attention to material historicity can also offer a politics that challenges the authority of secular, historicist interpretations of the past by allowing multiple perspectives to be considered on equal footing.
Anaya Muñoz, Alejandro 2005. The Emergence and Development of the Politics of Recognition of Cultural Diversity and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Mexico: Chiapas and Oaxaca in Comparative Perspective. Journal of Latin American Studies 37(3): 585–610.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value.” In The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3-63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. “The Thing Itself.” Public Culture 18(1): 15-22. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-18-1-15.
Bauer, Alexander A. 2019.“ Itinerant Objects.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48: 335-352. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-011111.
Brightman, Robert. 1990. “Primitivism in Missinippi Cree Historical Consciousness.” Man (NS) 25(1): 108-128. https://doi.org/2804112.
Bryant, Rebecca. 2014. “History's remainders: On time and objects after conflict in Cyprus.” American Ethnologist 41(4): 681-697. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12105.
Burgoa, Fr. Francisco de. 1934 [1674]. Geográfica Descripción Part 2, Vol. 2. México City: Archivo General de la Nación.
Cannell, Fenella. 1995. “The Imitation of Christ in Bicol, Philippines.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1(2): 377-394.
Cant, Alanna. 2018a. “Saints of the Shaking Earth.” The Religion Factor. Available at: https://www.rug.nl/research/centre-for-religious-studies/research-centres/centre-religion-conflict-globalization/blog/saints-of-the-shaking-earth-10-01-2018.
Cant, Alanna. 2018b. What Can Witchcraft Do in Mexico? Anthropology News, October 28, 2018.
Cant, Alanna. 2019a. The Value of Aesthetics: Oaxacan woodcarvers in global economies of culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Cant, Alanna 2019b. “Should beliefs or history decide if a building is a church or a museum?” Horizon 2020: Results in Brief https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/308452-should-beliefs-or-history-decide-if-a-building-is-a-church-or-a-museum.
Carroll, Timothy. 2018. “Im/material objects: Relics, gestured signs, and the substance of the immaterial.” In Materiality and the Study of Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred, edited by Tim Hutchings, Joanne McKenzie. London: Routledge.
Chávez Castillo, Sandra. 2000. “Los curas pusimos las costumbres y las podemos cambiar: un acercamiento a los conflictos entre pueblos indígenas y la Iglesia católica.” Alteridades (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Iztapalapa) 10(19): 69-78.
Chorpenning, Joseph F. 1992. Patron Saint of the New World: Spanish Colonial Images of St Joseph. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press.
Colwell, Chip. 2022. “A Palimpsest Theory of Objects.” Current Anthropology 63(2): 129 – 157. https://doi.org/10.1086/719851.
Cohen, Jeffrey. 2001. “The Shan-Dany Museum: Community, Economics, and Cultural Traditions in a Rural Mexican Village.” Human Organization 60(3): 272-280. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.60.3.fd4w9ldr2ajrxn4k.
Domínguez Rubio, Fernando. 2016. “On the discrepancy between objects and things: An ecological approach.” Journal of Material Culture, 21(1), pp. 59-86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183515624128.
Engelke, Matthew E. 2005. “Sticky Objects and Sticky Subjects: The Substance of African Healing.” In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 118-139. Durham: Duke University Press.
Engelke, Matthew E. 2008. “The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: S1-S21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20203794.
FAHHO [Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú de Oaxaca]. 2019. Anuario de Obras de Restauración 2016. Oaxaca: FAHHO. Available at https://tallerderestauracionfahho.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IMPACTO-2016.-WEB-2019-r.pdf.
FAHHO [Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú de Oaxaca]. 2022. Memorias de Restauración, Taller de Restauración, vol. 10, number 16. Oaxaca: FAHHO. Available at https://tallerderestauracionfahho.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CONVENTOS-WEB.pdf.
Fazioli, K. Patrick. 2017. The Mirror of the Medieval: An Anthropology of the Western Historical Imagination. Oxford: Berghahn.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
General Law of National Assets (Ley General de Bienes Nacionales), 2004. United Mexican States Federal Government. Available at https://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/LGBN.pdf.
Ginzburg, Carlo. 1980. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop Journal 9(1): 5-36. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/9.1.5.
Graziano, Frank. 2016. Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gross, Toomas. 2003. “Protestantism and Modernity: The Implications of Religious Change in Contemporary Rural Oaxaca.” Sociology of Religion 64(4): 479-498. https://doi.org/10.2307/3712337.
Gruzinski, Serge. 1995. “Images and Cultural Mestizaje in Colonial Mexico.” Poetics Today 16(1): 53–77. https://doi.org/10.2307/1773223.
Hammant, Henrietta. Forthcoming. “Museum objects and the ‘heroes’ of early British Antarctic exploration.” Doctoral thesis, Department of Archaeology, University of Reading.
Harries, John. 2017. “A stone that feels right in the hand: Tactile memory, the abduction of agency and presence of the past.” Journal of Material Culture, 22(1), pp. 110-130. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183516679187.
Henig, David. 2017. “Prayer as a History: Of Witnesses, Martyrs, and Plural Pasts in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Social Analysis 61(1): 41-54. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2017.610103.
Hernández Díaz, Jorge 2007. Dilemas de la Construcción de Ciudadanías. In Ciudades Mexicanas Del Siglo XX: Siete Estudios Históricos. Jorge Hernández Díaz, ed. Oaxaca, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, pp: 35-86.
Hirsch, Eric. 2007. “Valleys of Historicity and Ways of Power among the Fuyuge.” Oceania 77(2): 158–171. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40495521.
Hirsch, Eric and Charles Stewart. 2006. “Ethnographies of Historicity.” History and Anthropology 16(3): 261-274. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757200500219289.
Hodge, Brendan. 2022. “Is there a global vocations crisis? A look at the numbers.” The Pillar https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/is-there-a-global-vocations-crisis. Accessed 10/11/2023.
Hodges, Matt. 2019. “History’s Impasse: Radical Historiography, Leftist Elites, and the Anthropology of Historicism in France.” Current Anthropology 60(3): 283-448. https://doi.org/10.1086/703204.
Hutchings, Tim and Joanne McKenzie. 2016. “Introduction: The Body of St Cuthbert.” In Materiality and the Study of Religion: Stuff of the Sacred, edited by Tim Hutchings and Joanne McKenzie, 1-13. London: Routledge.
INAH [Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia]. 2016. Ética en la conservación del patrimonio cultural, mesa de discusión en la CNCPC. Available at https://conservacion.inah.gob.mx/index.php/etica-en-la-conservacion-del-patrimonio-cultural-mesa-de-discusion-en-la-cncpc/.
INEGI [Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía]. 2020. Censo de Población y Vivienda 2020. Available at: https://www.economia.gob.mx/datamexico/es/profile/geo/santa-cruz-mixtepec.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill. London: Routledge.
Irvine, Richard. 2018. “Our Lady of Ipswich: Devotion, Dissonance, and the Agitation of Memory at a Forgotten Pilgrimage Site.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24(2): 366-384. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12815.
Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language & Communication 23: 409-425. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00010-7.
Kleinberg, Aviad. 2008. Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination. Cambridge: University of Harvard Press.
Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lamrani, Myriam 2018. From the Saints to the State. Modes of Intimate Devotion to Saintly Images in Oaxaca, Mexico. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), University College London.
Larkin, Brian. 2010. The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Lucas, Gavin. 2022. “Comment on ‘A Palimpsest Theory of Objects’ by Chip Colwell”. Current Anthropology 63(2): 148-149. https://doi.org/10.1086/719851.
Martínez Sola, María del Carmen. 1998. El Obispo Fray Bernardo de Alburquerque: El Marquesado del Valle de Oaxaca en el Siglo XVI. Oaxaca: Instituto Oaxqueño de las Culturas; Fondo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes; Secretaría de Desarrollo Turístico.
Mayblin, Maya. 2014. “People Like Us: Intimacy, Distance, and the Gender of Saints.” Current Anthropology 55:S10, S271-S280.
Meyer, Birgit. 2015. “Picturing the Invisible. Visual Culture and the Study of Religion.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 27: 333-360.
Meyer, Jean. 2006. El Conflicto Religioso en Oaxaca, 1926-1938. Oaxaca: CIESAS, IAGO and UABJO.Mímisson, Kristján. 2012. “Twisted Lives: On the Temporality and Materiality of Biographical Presences.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16(3): 455-472. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23257128.
Miller, Daniel. 2005. “Materiality: An Introduction”. In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 1-150. London: Duke University Press.
Mímisson, Kristján. 2012. Twisted Lives: On the Temporality and Materiality of Biographical Presences. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16(3): 455-471. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23257128.
Mitchell, John P. and Hildi J. Mitchell. 2008. “For Belief: Embodiment and Immanence in Catholicism and Mormonism.” Social Analysis 52(1): 79-94. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2008.520105.
Morales, Francisco. 1998. “Mexican Society and the Franciscan Order in a Period of Transition, 1749-1859.” The Americas 54(3): 323-356. https://doi.org/1008413.
Morgan, David. 2012. The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Morgan, David. 2016. “Material Analysis and the Study of Religion.” In Materiality and the Study of Religion: Stuff of the Sacred, edited by Tim Hutchings and Joanne McKenzie, 14-32. London: Routledge.
Mullen, Robert J. 1975. Dominican Architecture in 16th Century Oaxaca. Tempe: Arizona State Center for Latin American Studies.
Myers, Fred. 2005. “Some Properties of Art and Culture: Ontologies of the Image and Economies of Exchange.” In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 88-117. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Norget, Kristin. 1997. “Progressive theology and popular religiosity in Oaxaca, Mexico.” Ethnology 36(1): 67-83.
Norget, Kristin. 2007. Decolonization And The Politics Of Syncretism: The Catholic Church, Indigenous Theology and Cultural Autonomy in Oaxaca, Mexico. International Education 37(1): 78-96. https://trace.tennessee.edu/internationaleducation/vol37/iss1/5/.
Norget, Kristin. 2008. “Hard Habits to Baroque: Catholic Church and Popular-Indigenous Religious Dialogue in Oaxaca, Mexico.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 33(1): 131-158. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27764247.
Orsi, Robert. 2010. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Pérez, Victor, et al. 1991. “Santa Cruz Mixtepec, Zimatlán Oaxaca.” Cuadernos de Arquitectura Virreinal 10: 82-88.
Peterson, Anna L. and Manuel A. Vasquez. 1998. “The New Evangelization in Latin American Perspective” CrossCurrents 48(3): 311-329. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24460817.
Pierce, Donna, Rogelio Ruiz Gomar and Clara Bargellini, 2004. Painting a New World: Spanish art and life, 1521-1821. Denver: Denver Art Museum.
Proctor, Fr. S.T.L (ed). 1901. Short Lives of the Dominican Saints by a Sister of the Congregation of Saint Catherine of Siena. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd.
Ramsey, Jason. 2024. Reckoning with Change in Yucatán: Histories of Care and Threat on a Former Hacienda. London: Routledge.
Reinhardt, Bruno. 2015. “A Christian plane of immanence? Contrapuntal reflections on Deleuze and Pentecostal spirituality.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1): 405-436.
Rozental, Sandra. 2016. “In the Wake of Mexican Patrimonio: Material Ecologies in San Miguel Coatlinchan.” Anthropological Quarterly 89(1): 181-219. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2016.0007.
Romero Frizzi, María de los Ángeles. 2000. “The Indigenous Population of Oaxaca from the Sixteenth Century to the Present.” In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Vol.2, Part 2, edited by Richard Adams and Murdo MacLeod, 302-345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sanchez, Andrew. 2024. “Provenance: The Value of People and Things.” Anthropology Research Seminar, Brunel, University of London. February 6, 2024.
Sansi, Roger. 2005. “The Hidden Life of Stones: Historicity, Materiality and the Value of Candomblé Objects in Bahia.” Journal of Material Culture 10(2): 139-156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183505053072.
Scheper Hughes, Jennifer. 2010. Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scheper Hughes, Jennifer. 2012. “Mysterium Materiae: Vital Matter and the Object as Evidence in the Study of Religion.” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 41(4): 16–22. https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.v41i4.16.
Stewart, Charles. 2016. “Historicity and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45(1): 79–94. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-100249.
Torres Torres, Fr. Eugenio Martín. 1997. “La Desolación de un Convento: Santo Domingo de México, 1860-1861.” In Los Dominicos y el Nuevo Mundo, siglos XVIII-XIX: Actas del Vo Congreso Internacional 1995, edited by José Barrado Barquilla and Santiago Rodríguez López, 309-348. Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban.
Turner, Edith and Victor Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tutino, Stefania. 2021. A Fake Saint and the True Church: The story of a forgery in seventeenth-century Naples. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 2022. “Understanding the Liturgical Colours”. Available at: https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgical-year-and-calendar/understanding-the-liturgical-colors.
Walzcak, Marek. 2018 “Between the Eternal City and Cracow. On the Origins of the Iconography of Saint Hyacinth of Poland OP (d. 1257).” Artibus et Historiae 39(78): 325-357. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45120360.
Winston, Jessica. 2002. “Describing the Virgin.” Art History 25(3): 274-292. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.00322.
Winter, Marcus C. 1978. Cerro de la Cueva: Una zona arqueológica del clásico en Santa Cruz Mixtepec y San Bernardo Mixtepec, Distrito de Zimatlán, Oaxaca. Estúdios de Antropologia e Historia, Numero 12. Oaxaca: Centro Regional de Oaxaca, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia.
Wolf, Eric. 1958. “The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol.” The Journal of American Folklore 71(279): 34-39.
Wright-Rios, Edward. 2009. Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934. Durham: Duke University Press.
Zorzi, Kelsey and Julio Pohl García Prieto. 2023. “Mexico is officially the world’s most dangerous place to be a priest.” The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/4047813-mexico-is-officially-the-worlds-most-dangerous-place-to-be-a-priest/. Accessed on 10/11/2023. University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record |
University of Reading
CentAUR: Central Archive at the University of Reading
Accessibility navigation
Material historicity: rethinking objects through the mis/recognition of a Catholic saint
Cant, A.
It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing. Abstract/SummaryBased on ethnographic research in Santa Cruz Mixtepec, Mexico, this article investigates a local disagreement about the identity of a historic statue of a saint. It shows that historical and object biography approaches cannot fully account for the different ways that people draw on material evidence, religious understandings, and their own perceptions of the past when engaging with such meaningful objects. To more fully account for such processes, I develop the concept of “material historicity,” which provides a framework that connects theories of materiality and historical consciousness. This framework will allow scholars to understand how objects and their material qualities provoke and enable creative and interpretive engagements with the past, and how these engagements interact with one another in the present. The case of the Mixtepec Saint shows that in addition to these analytical possibilities, attention to material historicity can also offer a politics that challenges the authority of secular, historicist interpretations of the past by allowing multiple perspectives to be considered on equal footing.
Deposit Details References University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record |
Lists
Lists
![[img]](/style/images/fileicons/text.png)