What she looks like: on the recognition and iconization of the virgin mary at apparition sites in the twentieth century

ABSTRACT

Knowledge about Mary's appearance, which shapes apparition experiences, is transmitted primarily via well-known images, which themselves are increasingly representations of visions. Though there has been increased homogenization of images of Mary in the twentieth century resulting from template distribution and the way the psychology of recognition works, Mary is still consistently made specific to a place, to carry uniquely identifiable features which may also articulate local political and theological stances. As long as the apparitions are still taking place, these features may be in flux; the process by which they jell is termed “iconization,” the social process of agreeing on one image as the recognizable face of Mary at a certain apparition site. Medjugorje, the most important active Marian apparition site since the late twentieth century, is unique in that several images compete there for iconic status. Though power structures play an important role in determining which images become icons, this essay emphasizes the balancing act between universal and particular traits which constrains the options of the key players producing the images.     

Bed and throne: the “museumification” of the living quarters of a candomblé priestess

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the way in which the living quarters of a famous priestess from the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé were turned into a heritage site. The Memorial de Mãe Menininha do Gantois shows that the form of the museum might be understood as a particular “language” of status and prestige. The site therefore allows us to discuss what happens when new actors in the public sphere pick up, appropriate, and transform this language of “museumification.” Although the profane dimensions of “museumification” are hard to miss, we argue that in the case of the memorial this language does not at all diminish the sacred nature of this site, but actually articulates it in a new way.     

How Landscapes Remember

Abstract

This paper considers the possibility that as subject or agent, the landscape might have the potential to contain, store or transmit memories of their past, which are engaged experientially as uncanny. In a simple sense it asks why there are some landscapes – or landscape features – that are regarded as spiritually animated by different social groups, at different times. The paper focuses on the Neolithic temple site of Bor?-in-Nadur, in Southern Malta, which as well as having been a site of prehistoric ritual activity has more recently been the site of a significant devotion to the Virgin Mary, who graced the site with regular apparitions, and a focus for national and transnational Goddess pilgrimage. The paper suggests that sites such as Bor?-in-Nadur can be seen as palimpsest landscapes, in which memory is layered such that experiential engagements with them draw the past in to the present, and forwards into the future. The paper examines the intertwining of prehistoric, Catholic and Neo-pagan engagements with Bor?-in-Nadur, extending Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire (sites of memory) to encompass the milieux de memoire, or memorial environments, which are themselves also context of, and for, the uncanny.     

Ineffable - Edited by Brad Horn

Abstract

Le Corbusier was critical of the attitude of the Catholic Church to sexuality. He wanted to revive Christianity by bringing it back in contact with its roots in ancient religion. As a result of “meticulous research”, he discovered that the figure of Mary could be interpreted in a multitude of ways. He exploited the ambiguities present in her figure to give a reinterpretation of Christianity that addressed issues of sexuality and was both more tolerant and more inclusive. This article is an exploration of the ways in which such ideas were represented in the the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut Ronchamp.     

Vernacular miracles: blood and bones in neapolitan religion

ABSTRACT

Naples is a city run by miracles. Canonical miracles like the thrice-annual liquefaction of San Gennaro's blood, and vernacular miracles, like those effected by the capozzelle, anonymous skulls venerated at Fontanelle, the largest ossuary in Europe. Devotees visited these “little skulls” at the cemetery, cleaned them, adopted them into their families, even had them rebaptized. In return for these favors, the anime pezzentelle (vagabond souls) conjured by the skulls were expected to be conduits for divine favors or to provide more concrete benefits, like revealing winning lotto numbers in dreams. In the wake of Vatican II reforms, the Neapolitan archbishop denounced the anime pezzentelle cult as fetishism, and ordered the closure of Fontanelle, along with public access to the last two churches which still housed capozzelle. Based on field research in 1999, 2002, 2006, and 2013, I have documented the contest between the official church and partisans of the vernacular cult over the stewardship of the capozzelle, as well as the significance of this struggle for the practice of vernacular religion in Naples.     

Pilgrimage in graeco-roman and early christian antiquity seeing the gods Elsner,JaŚ and Rutherford,Ian (eds.)

ABSTRACT

This study is an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of religious objects, their uses, and mediation of authority within the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Universal Church) in Brazil. Drawing on scholarship within media studies, religion and media, and material religion, I distinguish between artifacts used to cement implicit contracts between Universal Church followers and their church community, which I call contractual media, or swag, and those that followers bring to meetings to be blessed and then take home to mediate both good and evil forces in family, work, and social life—these I call portable media. While portable object media are seen by their owners as powerful tools, contractual media, on the other hand, create implicit power relations that keep followers tied to the institutional church in a reciprocal exchange predicated upon expected prosperity as evidence of faithful attendance, fidelity, and personal sacrifice. The physical exchange of material goods in religious spaces constitutes a perpetuation rather than a disruption of institutional religious authority. As infrastructure, contractual object media establish and maintain conditions for otherwise mundane materials to mediate power on a daily basis. Through attention toward portable and contract object media, as part of what I am calling material microstructure, we can further complicate religious authority as it is mediated through objects, not just in one-way flows but as dynamic exchanges and trade-offs between personal empowerment and institutional control.     

Dreams of an Iconic Mosque: Spatial and Temporal Entanglements of a Converted Church in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the making of iconicity through religious architecture in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Examining the Fatih Mosque housed in a former Catholic church in the city center, we show in what ways the efforts at making this mosque iconic are shaped by the building’s iconic field, by which we denote its entanglement with other (religious and non-religious) sites in the past and the present. This iconic field is characterized by the conversion chains that preceded the mosque, material and discursive legacies of “hiddenness” and contemporary symbolic interactions with nearby sites such as the Western Church. By developing an analysis of the mosque’s temporal and spatial entanglements in Amsterdam’s urban space, we seek to revitalize a relational and diachronic approach that has suffered from neglect, particularly in social-scientific studies of mosques in the West. Rather than looking at a singular place of worship at a particular moment in time, we draw attention to the relations between Islamic and other religious architecture and to the ways in which this mosque intersects with broader genealogies and geographies of religion, not only by association but also by actual links in relationships, politics or material culture.     

Disegno

Abstract

This essay explores the premise that thinking by drawing—thinking through the crafting of the disegno—is the primary way that architects extend their understandings of architecture. It suggests that drawing is an architect's unique mode of research, inquiry, and is the site for his/her most crucial speculations and constructions. Douglas Darden's drawings are speculative architectural fantasies that demonstrate this argument.     

Remembering the Mathematics of the Ideal Villa

Abstract

It is now fifty years since Colin Rowe's celebrated essay first revealed what Le Corbusier had concealed about the mathematics of the neo-Palladian structural grid of Villa de Monzie/Stein at Garches (1927)—namely, the ratios of the structural intervals that define the organization of the villa from front to back. The importance of this discovery, reported in Rowe's “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa: Palladio and Le Corbusier compared” (1947), has been underappreciated in subsequent scholarship, which has focused instead on Rowe's discovery of the accord between Garches and Palladio's Villa Malcontenta (c. 1550–1560) with respect to the so-called ABABA rhythm of the intervals from side to side. However, the north-south intervals are no less essential to a proper apprehension of Le Corbusier's structural/spatial grid as a complete idea. This article reexamines the mathematics of the grid employed at Villa de Monzie/Stein and proposes an alternative to the Le Corbusier-Rowe numbering system. The alternative system heightens perception of the grid's fundamental mathematical elegance and ideality as well as its comprehensive control of the “extended field” of the site and elevations/facades. This study seeks to cast new light on the significance of Le Corbusier's assertion that, at Garches, more than at any of his other projects, “proportion ruled absolutely there, as absolute mistress.”     

Ethical pleasure,visual dzikir,and artistic subjectivity in contemporary indonesia

ABSTRACT

Drawing from a long-term ethnographic collaboration with Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous, this article examines the mingling of art and religion for what it may tell us about subjectivity and the senses in a predominantly Muslim public culture. Recent statements describe subjectivity as the site of a social actor's sensibility, reflexivity, and judgment and as an annex to prevailing social, cultural, and ideological circumstances. Following some brief reflections about artistic and religious subjectivity, this essay discusses the Islamic revival in Indonesia since the 1970s, a revival that has given spirituality, and Sufism in particular, new popularity and appeal. It then turns to a set of artistic practices that Pirous associates with “ethical pleasure” and with dzikir, the “mindfulness of God” that Muslims, and Sufis in particular, are careful to cultivate. Subjectivity acquires artistic and religious dimension in these practices, particularly as the senses engage with paint and canvas in devotional-aesthetic acts of “visual dzikir.” We see that the intermingling of aesthetic and religious ideologies in the reflexive, sensorial sphere of subjectivity is not an interior or ethnographically unavailable phenomenon, but one that is cultural and public, worked out in the sensuous materiality of things and the world of social discourse.     

Treacherous matters,or some notes towards a symptomatology of crisis

ABSTRACT

A stone surrendered by a Muslim to a Christian on an urban battlefield in Ambon (Indonesia), circulated with stunning effect in a Christian prayer group. Within no time it infected this core scene of Christian worship and community, triggering illness and possession, turning the group's prayers into a Qur'anic reading session and inserting the spectral presence of a North Moluccan sultan's daughter into its midst. This scene is only the most dramatic instance of the promiscuous traffic in poisonous and protective objects across religious boundaries during the war that racked the Moluccan city and its surroundings from 1999 until the 2002 peace. It also attests to the often carefully policed difference between magic and religion at the time. From rosaries flaunted by Protestants aiming to pass as Catholics, magical amulets worn alongside tiny Qur'ans or Bibles into battle, and Jesus billboards emerging as brandmarks for Christian neighborhoods, the war fostered and witnessed an explosion of religious and occult technologies along with the objects through which these technologies operate. Of particular interest is the tension and interplay between the deployment of amulets, which often functioned as boundary markers, and the war-torn terrain in which they appeared and occasionally went astray, betraying the intentions with which they were first set in motion. Attention to the capricious waywardness and mediating capacities of things as symptoms of profound crisis provides a point of departure for a larger symptomatology of crisis in which both the shape-shifting effects of objects and their taken-for-granted status as fixtures of everyday worlds are explored.     

MTO: A residential relocation demonstration program in the United States

This article provides an overview of an experimental residential relocation program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development known as Moving to Opportunity (MTO), currently in operation in five U.S. cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Because families are randomly assigned to three groups, each of which receives a different bundle of housing services, MTO provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the effects of concentrated urban poverty on the outcomes of families. Yet residential relocation can be an effective anti-poverty strategy only if families successfully relocate and if their new neighborhoods translate into improved labor-market, educational, or other outcomes. We illustrate the potential as well as the limits of residential relocation policies by focusing on the relationship between the housing market and educational opportunities in the Baltimore demonstration site. Helen F. Ladd is Professor of Public Policy Studies and Economics at Duke University. Much of her current research focuses on education policy, particularly performance-based approaches to reforming schools. She is the editor ofHolding Schools Accountable: Performance-Based Reform in Education (Brookings Institution, May, 1996). She currently co-chairs a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Education Finance: Equity, Adequacy, and Productivity. Jens Ludwig is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University.     

Conservation of historic water systems in Champaner-Pavagadh,Gujarat, India

Champaner-Pavagadh, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Gujarat, is an interesting and unusual case study in how religion, culture, terrain, and climate interact in creating water systems that sustained large communities for 800 years between the eighth and sixteenth centuries. Water is central to Hindu worship rituals and at Pavagadh Hill, embodiment of the goddess Kalika, is symbolic of her nurturing aspects. The ornate water architecture of Champaner city at the foothill, inhabited by Muslims, celebrated water not for its symbolic value but for its sensual and utilitarian aspects. In ‘water-intelligent’ settlement planning at Champaner-Pavagadh, historic water catchment and conveyance systems ensured availability of water throughout the year. The article concludes with outlining the landscape approach to sustainable heritage landscape conservation within which water systems are restored and made functional, to serve the needs of local residents and pilgrims, and to enhance the legibility of this complex and layered site.     

Two Sunflowers

Abstract

There can be little argument that the design jury features as a key symbolic event in the education of the architect.¹ However, while the centrality of the design jury as a site for learning disciplinary skills, beliefs, and values is now widely acknowledged, there continues to be considerable disagreement about what is learnt and how. While critical pedagogues argue that the design jury is a critic-centered ritual that coerces students into conforming to hegemonic notions of professional identity, the more commonly held conception is that the jury is a student-centered event that supports students in the construction of their own architectural identities.² This article, inspired by Michel Foucault's studies of relationship between power and the formation of the modern self, reports on the findings of a year-long ethnographic study carried out in one British school of architecture.³ The research sought to unravel the complexities of the design jury as a site of dichotomous power relations, and the findings bring into question the efficacy of the design jury as a ritual that supports useful learning. The article concludes by proposing that the design jury be replaced by a new set of pedagogic events that are carefully constructed to support student learning.     

Pilgrimage and Visual Genre: The Architecture of Twentieth-Century Roman Catholic Pilgrimage in Scotland

Abstract

As Roman Catholics gained confidence in twentieth-century Scotland, they revived pre-Reformation shrines and pilgrimages and created new shrines with transnational connections to the modern Catholic world. Three sites in this campaign were Carfin, a new pilgrimage center based on Lourdes; Whithorn, site of medieval pilgrimages to Saint Ninian; and Dunfermline, associated with the canonized Queen Margaret of Scotland. Each had different meanings for Scottish Catholicism. The landscapes of these shrines included proposed new buildings, completed buildings, including shrines and churches, and existing features, notably caves or grottoes and medieval ruins. Whether found, professionally designed, or made by the clergy and their congregations, these sites framed and ordered pilgrimage rituals and lent them meaning. Seeing common architectural, visual features across these pilgrimages, and drawing on new archival research, we suggest that the employment of recognizable visual genres was a key way of creating a consensus among the faithful. International symbols of saintly presence were remade for the local context, with intertwined religious and political intentions, giving tangible expression to a revived Catholicism in Scotland, and promoting a new vision of Scotland as a Catholic nation.     

The proposed northland extension: The consumer viewpoint

Abstract

Northland is a large off-street shopping complex in Melbourne's north-eastern suburbs. In 1981, Myer, the site owners, proposed to double the retail floorspace. To be commercially successful an expanded Northland will have to penetrate the market area of neighbouring shopping complexes. This article reports on the present shopping behaviour and preference of households living in an area marginal to Northland's current market area. It was discovered that they were generally satisfied with their present shopping opportunities and would be unlikely to shop at an expanded Northland.     

fallen angel: the consumption of religion through american cocktail culture

Abstract

This essay examines the figure of the cocktail in American cultural history to establish it as a point of convergence between consumer culture and religious expression. The authors set out to understand which structures of religious experience persist within the cocktail, and what about them so captivates American consumers. The structures explored include: the fetishistic and totemic nature of cocktails and their accoutrements; the importance of pilgrimage within cocktail culture; a retention of ritualistic forms; an extant modern desire for transcendence through community; and the surprising relationship between religion and cosmopolitanism. The essay begins by examining the religious mood set by clandestine drinking during Prohibition, and traces that mood through its historical antecedents in alchemy, colonialism, and the medicine industry. The essay continues with an exploration of the process by which totemic images came to be associated with cosmopolitan cocktail culture in Harlem nightclubs, and Cuban and Caribbean tourist destinations. Finally, it compares the commercialized artistic aesthetics of surrealist art installations and the mid-century cult of tiki, in whose temple-styled lounges primitivism, alchemy, symbolism, ritualism, and colonial fetishism all facilitated the fusion of religious feeling with exotic drinks.     

Housing Reform And Fishermens Bend 1900–1913

Abstract

This paper examines the development of the Port Melbourne Council's (PMC) housing campaign between 1910 and 1913. In addition, it explores the contest between the PMC, the harbour trust and the lands department over the use of Fishermens Bend, an area of vacant crown land adjacent to Port Melbourne and the proposed site of the PMC's workers' housing scheme.     

Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America

Problem: Children make little use of many neighborhood parks even though they have facilities for active recreation.

Purpose: We examined the factors that bring children to parks, and aimed to understand how park visitation patterns differ between boys and girls, among children of different races and ethnicities, and between inner-city and suburban children.

Methods: We surveyed children and their parents in 12 middle schools and analyzed the results. Our team also observed children at 50 inner-city and 50 suburban parks, and we used multiple regression models containing park- and neighborhood-level variables to relate them to the numbers of children using parks.

Results and conclusions: The study confirms that many middle-school children make little use of parks. This is primarily explained by their own lack of interest in the existing park activities and their households' lack of time and concerns about safety. Active recreation facilities and organized sport programs, natural features, and good levels of maintenance and cleanliness are the most significant factors attracting middle-school children to parks. Our survey found some significant gender, racial, and ethnic differences in preferences for park equipment, perceptions of park safety, and park visitation patterns. Additionally, our regression models confirmed that inner-city and suburban children were attracted to parks of different sizes and containing different facilities, and that the association between park safety and park use was also different in these two settings.

Takeaway for practice: Neighborhood parks provide the potential for active recreation, but they are often underutilized and attract only a subset of neighborhood children. Planners should take into account that different factors attract different groups of children to parks.

Research support: This research was supported by the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation.