Echoes from Kerizinen: pilgrimage, narrative, and the construction of sacred history at a Marian shrine in northwestern France

Drawing upon theoretical perspectives developed by Coleman and Elsner, this article contributes to the anthropological understanding of pilgrimage by presenting and interpreting oral narratives and published texts about Kerizinen, a Marian apparition shrine in Brittany, France. Since the Kerizinen apparitions have never been recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, pilgrims and shrine promoters construct a corpus of narrative evidence that serves for them to validate the shrine's authenticity, despite the ambivalence and opposition of the institutional Church. Following William A. Christian, Jr, I show how the construction of sacred history at Kerizinen involves a process of selective editing privileging certain types of narratives and narrators.     

Charismatic Catholic Renewal in Bougainville: Revisiting the power of Marian devotion as a cultural and socio‐political force

This article explores the interplay between culture and Christianity by detailing the history, experience, and impact of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1985, the PNG Catholic Bishops' Conference approved the charismatic movement as one of the authentic movements for spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church in PNG. However, the conference stressed this renewal not to be made independent or outside of the Church. In this article I discuss how in Bougainville the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) has been predominantly operating ‘outside’ the institutional Catholic Church, drawing upon both Catholic and cultural logics to mobilise devotees across Bougainville towards renewal and political change. In particular, I will focus on various local Marian movements, elucidating the power and force of the CCR in contexts of Bougainville's civil war (1988–1998). In doing so, this paper will explore what Catholicism and CCR may contribute to discussions about the positioning of culture within Christianity, at the same time showing how charismatic Marian devotion invites reassessment of recent prevailing discussions on cultural ‘continuity’ versus ‘rupture’, as well as doctrinal boundaries held so dearly by the CCR and the Roman Catholic Church in general.     

Is the Pope a Catholic?

The whole-part relationship is generally considered transitive, but there are some apparent exceptions. Componential sortals create some apparent problems. Homo sapiens, the Pope, and his heart are all individuals. A human being, such as the Pope, is an organism-level component of Homo sapiens. The Pope’s heart is an organ-level component of both Homo sapiens and the Pope. Although the Pope is a part, and not an instance, of the Roman Catholic Church, it seems odd to say that his heart is a part of that church. This is largely because the Pope’s heart does not have a place in the ecclesiastical government. However, it does contribute to the functioning of the organization. One popular alternative to the view that Homo sapiens is an individual is the notion that it is a natural kind. This has been done by redefining ‘natural kind’ in such a manner that not just the Roman Catholic Church, but the Pope and every other human being is a natural kind as well.     

Catholic social policy and U.S. health care reform: a relationship revisited

The Roman Catholic Church is the single largest denomination in the United States and the one with the most extensive provider stake in health (and related social service) care. As a follow-up to an earlier analysis of the Catholic role in the thwarted health care reform effort of 1993-94, this article looks at the revival of interest in reform and at the rationale behind and strategy of the Catholic Church's current agenda-setting initiative. The emphasis in this article is on the delicate relationship between organized religion and social policy in a society with an officially secular culture.     

The Italian Way to Stem Cell Research: Rethinking the Role of Catholic Religion in Shaping Italian Stem Cell Research Regulations

Stem cell research regulations are highly variable across nations, notwithstanding shared and common ethical concerns. Dominant in political debates has been the so‐called embryo question. However, the permissibility of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research varies among national regulatory frameworks. Scholars have explained differences by resorting to notions of political culture, traditions of ethical reasoning, discursive strategies and political manoeuvring of involved actors. Explanations based on the role of religion or other cultural structural variables are also employed. This paper analyses the emerging of the Italian regulatory framework on stem cell research using an analytical framework that considers the interplay between cultural structural features, political culture, traditions of ethical reasoning, institutional settings and the discursive and political agency of the actors involved. It aims also to explain the role of Roman Catholic Church in shaping the Italian stem cell research regulation not by treating religion as an autonomous causal factor, but through the analysis of the agency of Catholic and allied actors in the Italian political culture and institutional setting.     

Obstetrical events that shaped Western European history.

Taking into account that marriage, the family as a social unit, and concepts of legitimacy developed to ensure the devolution of property and that, when these concepts apply in a society based on hierarchically organized monarchies, they also involve the devolution of power, this essay furnishes examples of dislocations in such devolutions, in terms of familiar incidents in western European history. That Jane Seymour died in childbirth but her son Edward VI survived long enough to ensure the stability of the Church of England is the first example. The infertility of Mary Tudor, when married to Philip II of Spain, prevented the formation of an Anglo-Spanish dynasty that would have been Roman Catholic is the second example of such a dislocation. Likewise, the infertility of Charles II's wife, Catherine of Braganza, led to the succession of James II, a practicing Roman Catholic, whose attempts to undermine the Church of England led to the Glorious Revolution of 1788 and the preservation of English Protestantism. Another example is the death in 1817 of Princess Charlotte, in childbirth, which led to the scramble of George III's aging sons to marry and beget an heir to the throne. The only success led to the birth of the future Queen Victoria, whose dynastic competence remains unquestionable, but who herself had some passing involvement with obstetrical developments. Finally, the delivery of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who sustained a brachial plexus injury that produced Erb's palsy of the left arm, is considered, and the question of intrapartum fetal hypoxia is raised as a hypothesis, in addition to the mechanical trauma and its effect on his personality.     

Faith,culture and fear: comparing Islamophobia in early modern Spain and twenty-first-century Europe

Abstract

In 1609, King Philip III of Spain ordered the expulsion from his kingdom of circa 300,000 Moriscos (Muslims forced to officially convert to Christianity). This expulsion marked the end, and failure, of over a century of concerted efforts by both the Spanish government and Catholic Church to assimilate this minority by destroying its culture. This article explores how the fate of the Moriscos was not inevitable but rather the result of an explosive situation in which (1) faith and culture became conflated and (2) the minority came to be perceived as politically disloyal and a threat to the survival of the state and Church. It draws parallels with the current situation of Muslim communities in contemporary Europe to highlight the similarities between them and to sound a cautionary warning to all Europeans, whatever their creed.     

Estimation of inbreeding from ecclesiastical dispensations: application of three procedures to a Spanish case

The inbreeding coefficient of a population, estimated from ecclesiastical Roman Catholic dispensations, results from the relative contribution of different degrees of relationships (uncle-niece, first cousin, etc.). The interpopulation comparisons of consanguinity patterns may be obscured by the fact that in 1918 the Roman Catholic Church norm regulating the closest marriageable kinship was modified, limiting the application for an ecclesiastical dispensation to relatives of third degree (second cousins) or closer. Depending on the length of the period before or after the change of regulation, coefficients and rates may differ. Deviation of frequencies for multiple marriages may also occur. The aim of the present paper is to determine how the chosen procedure based on ecclesiastical dispensations may affect results, regarding the inbreeding coefficient, the consanguinity rate, the structure of consanguinity and the close/remote kinship ratio. As a sample case, information from the Gredos mountain range (central Spain) has been used.     

THE PLACE OF GOD IN SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY: HOW WILL THE CATHOLIC CHURCH RESPOND?

Some religious believers may see synthetic biology as usurping God's creative role. The Catholic Church has yet to issue a formal teaching on the field (though it has issued some informal statements in response to Craig Venter's development of a 'synthetic' cell). In this paper I examine the likely reaction of the Catholic Magisterium to synthetic biology in its entirety. I begin by examining the Church's teaching role, from its own viewpoint, to set the necessary backround and context for the discussion that follows. I then describe the Church's attitude to science, and particularly to biotechnology. From this I derive a likely Catholic theology of synthetic biology. The Church's teachings on scientific and biotech research show that it is likely to have a generally positive disposition to synbio, if it and its products can be acceptably safe. Proper evaluation of, and protection against, risk will be a significant factor in determining the morality of the research. If the risks can be minimized through regulation or other means, then the Church is likely to be supportive. The Church will also critique the social and legal environment in which the research is done, evaluating issues such as the patenting of scientific discoveries and of life.     

Religion and the world system: The pentecostal ethic and the spirit of monopoly capital

Conclusion As a form of social organization, Catholic Pentecostalism might be competing with the multinational corporation as much as validating the order of international monopoly capital. There is some indication that the movement appeals primarily to small businessmen and the comprador bourgeoisie, classes most directly threatened by the monopolistic ambitions of the multinationals. Religious motivation and organization provide them with a purpose and resources to enter an international arena. Just as American-based multinationals utilize the United States government as an institutional umbrella for their dealings in other nations, American-based Catholic Pentecostalism draws on the resources of the Catholic Church as an institutional umbrella for its activities. Likewise, the following statement about multinational corporations applies equally well to the religious multinational: An important component in the strength of multinationals has been their ability to organize resources in ways that other corporate institutions have not been able to do and to respond with flexibility and imagination to new conditions, including changes in the environment created by their own past actions. To be sure, this analogy too has its limits. It could fruitfully be applied to the Church as a whole as well as the movement within the Church. And in Europe, where the corporatist influence of the radical communitarians is less evident, one informant suggested an analogy between a pan-European Catholic Pentecostal leaders' conference and the Second International Communist Party. The comparison is not spurious: Catholic Pentecostalism and socialism alike are bent on world-transformation, and in Europe several negative encounters between Marxists and Charismatics have been reported. This discussion suggests that the real parallel among these three social forms lies in their mutual potential and aspiration to be the validating Utopia in a world social system.In estimating the strength of the religious Utopia, it must be recognized that Catholic Pentecostalism is one aspect, if an important one, of a much broader revival that includes Protestant Charismatics and non-denominational neo-Pentecostals. While eighteenth-century Methodism might be analyzed on a national scale with some legitimacy, even though it was bound up in the development of the world economy, to view the contemporary movement in this way would be disingenuous. Without a world-systems approach, local class articulations and international integration remain outside social analysis. This was certainly a weakness among contributors to the Social Compass symposium, which framed Catholic Pentecostalism almost exclusively in terms of its opposition to movements for progressive social action within the Church. Even this internal Catholic contradiction is overlooked by Casanova, whose argument about the politics of religious revival is weakened by locating the fundamentalist religious revival entirely outside Catholicism, while identifying Catholic revival exclusively with liberation theology. Moreover, his argument that religious revival could play a different emancipatory role depending on whether the society is characterized by internal and external socio-economic oppression, post-democratic authoritarianism, or advanced capitalism remains bound to an intranational perspective of religion and modernization. Thus the world-system implications of universal culture, international organization, and class alliances that reproduce dependent relations forged in a world economy remain invisible to his analysis of religious revival. What I have argued for instead is a perspective in which the multinational corporate utopia, world socialism, and the Kingdom of God can be analyzed as competing ideological forces in a postmodern world arena. Indeed, it is an arena in which not only is the notion of modernization transcended, but the very notion of nation-state is coming uncoupled at the hyphen in places like the Soviet Union, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yugoslavia.Let us take the argument one step farther, and for the sake of future analysis separate three alternative positions relevant to the standpoint I have taken. The generalized world system position suggests adding an explicit ideological/religious dimension to the nition of a global social system. Specifically, it would appear that the increasing articulation of the world social system generates an ideological impulse toward formulations of universal culture. However, to the extent that world systems theory is concerned with the social relation of dependency between center and periphery, there is a tendency to neglect the cultural dialectic between local and global processes. There is doubtless more than meets the eye, for example, in Charismatics' acknowledgment that everywhere in the world they do the same things in the practice of ritual healing, but that there are some very different manifestation. A vivid example of global-local interaction centers around the person of Zambian archbishop Milingo, whose innovative and peripheral work with deliverance from evil spirits resulted in his being relieved of his position and recalled to Rome. Once in Italy, he resumed his healing work with substantial impact on Charismatics there, somewhat ironically expanding the global influence of a centrally repressed local ministry. Global culture is neither homogeneous, nor are its dynamics determined by homogeneous processes.This leads to the third position, that of postmodernism. Rather than presuming that the disjunctive features of postmodernism are incompatible with the integrative implications of a world system, could it not be that postmodernism is a label that usefully describes the cultural structure associated with such a modern political-economic system? I do not believe that this suggestion requires reducing the principles of either position to those of the other. Consider Featherstone's argument that under contemporary conditions the sacred is able to sustain itself outside of organized religion within consumer culture. To construe this statement to mean that consumer culture and its spectacles relocate and diffuse the sacred into culture would be hardly more than a postmodernist version of Bellah's civil religion thesis. In fact, Charismatic religion as religion is highly adaptable to postmodern forms, as Harding has shown in her examination of the world of televangelism. At the same time, as literature on the new Charismaticism in different cultural settings begins to become available, it is apparent that the movement embodies the dialectic between local and global processes as much or more so than earlier forms of classical Pentecostalism. In the postmodern globalization of diversity, where Featherstone observes the orientalist other ceasing to be exotic as cultures stand face to face and natives talk back, the universal Charismatic culture reasserts the sacred other. It offers a distinct metalanguage for the heteroglossic simultaneity that exists due to the overproduction of signs and loss of referents in global consumer culture. After all, there is no more characteristically postmodern phenomenon than speaking in tongues — which means nothing, but which everyone can understand. Thomas J. Csordas is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University.

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The dream world in Dominica.

To the natives of the Caribbean island of Dominica, the dream is proclaimed la konpanyi la nuit (the companion of the night). Belief in dreams is grounded in diverse cultural influences, including those of the French, West African, British, and the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. In this richly imaginative dream world, myths and truths are finely interwoven to create an unwritten glossary of dream symbol interpretation. Although these interpretations have not enjoyed scientific validation, practical, historical, and psychological data are found to resonate with these traditional Dominican interpretations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Family size and religious denomination in Northern Ireland

During the summer of 1983, a provincewide representative sample of all ever-married women and single women with children, under the age of 60, was interviewed to examine variations in family size in Northern Ireland. The valuation list of domestic dwellings was used as the sample frame and a clustered sample was drawn from this using the 526 electoral wards as individual clusters. Wards were stratified according to socioeconomic structure, religion, location within Northern Ireland, and whether they were predominatly rural or urban. Sampling within selected clusters was on a systematic basis and proportional to population size. For women currently married, 1 in 5 of the husbands was interviewed using a shorter questionnaire focusing on attitudes to fertility. Of the 3914 houseolds where contact was made and which contained an eligible female, there were 2997 successful interviews with females, giving an effective response rate of 77%. An additional 392 interviews were obtained from husbands. The most persistent fertility differential in Northern Ireland going back at least to the beginning of the 20th century has been that between Protestants and Roman Catholics. According to these preliminary findings, this remains the case. The average number of children born alive to ever-married Roman Catholic females was 3.24 in 1983, compared with 2.29 children for the corresponding group of non-Catholic women. Yet, the survey relates to an instant during a peirod of considerable flux in Roman Catholic fertliity, and comparison of these 1983 data with those collected at the 1971 census of population shows that Roman Catholic family size declined by 11% over the intervening 12 years, although this is marginally reduced after standardization for changes in the age structure of ever-married women. Non-Catholic family size, by contrast, remained virtually static during the same time period. The pace of change has been more pronounced in Belfast and its suburbs. Data are not yet available from the survey to chart these processes by marriage cohort, but some pointers can be obtained from the tabulation of family size by denomination and age of mother. With the exception of the under-20 age group, the average size of Roman Catholic families was consistently and substantially larger than that of the corresponding non-Catholic age group. The absolute difference in terms of mean numbers of children widened steadily with increasing age. These preliminary data also show that there is still a strong geographical dimension to the religious differential in fertility. Average family size was larger in rural than urban areas but moreso for Roman Catholics (16% larger) than for non-Catholics (9% larger). Although differences in family size between Roman Catholics and non-Catholics still prevail, there has been a considerable degree of overall convergence since 1971.     

Lawful Sinners: Reproductive Governance and Moral Agency Around Abortion in Mexico

The Catholic Hierarchy unequivocally bans abortion, defining it as a mortal sin. In Mexico City, where the Catholic Church wields considerable political and popular power, abortion was recently decriminalized in a historic vote. Of the roughly 170,000 abortions that have been carried out in Mexico City's new public sector abortion program to date, more than 60% were among self-reported Catholic women. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork, including interviews with 34 Catholic patients, this article examines how Catholic women in Mexico City grapple with abortion decisions that contravene Church teachings in the context of recent abortion reform. Catholic women consistently leveraged the local cultural, economic, and legal context to morally justify their abortion decisions against church condemnation. I argue that Catholic women seeking abortion resist religious injunctions on their reproductive behavior by articulating and asserting their own moral agency grounded in the contextual dimensions of their lives. My analysis informs conversations in medical anthropology on moral decision-making around reproduction and on local dynamics of resistance to reproductive governance. Moreover, my findings speak to the deficiencies of a feminist vision focused narrowly on fertility limitation, versus an expanded framework of reproductive justice that considers as well the need for conditions of income equality and structural supports to facilitate reproduction and parenting among women who desire to keep their pregnancies.     

The lapsed and the laity: discipline and lenience in the study of religion

This article cautions against an ‘earnest turn’ within the anthropology of religion, pointing up the tendency for anthropologists of religion to over‐emphasize the role of discipline in the construction of the religious subjecthood over mechanisms of leniency and compromise. Taking the Catholic Church as an example, I show how discipline and lenience have been co‐constitutive of Christian subjectivities, as different movements in a gigantic choreography which have spanned and evolved over several centuries. By looking at certain technologies of lenience that have emerged over the course of Catholic history, I trace an alternative genealogy of ‘the Christian self’; one in which institutional growth, power, and survival depended not only upon the formation of disciplined bodies and interior dispositions but also upon a carefully managed division of labour between clergy and laity, as well as upon a battery of legal commutations and practical avoidances aimed at minimizing the effort and pain of the ascetic approach. Taking the concept of ‘lapsedness’ as cue, I ask to what extent the ‘lapsed Catholic’, rather than indexing an ever‐increasing tendency towards secularism, might already be contained and accounted for within Catholicism as a living, evolving form.     

'From the moment of conception...': the Vatican instruction on artificial procreation techniques

An analysis is presented of Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origins and on the Dignity of Procreation, the official response of the Catholic Church to moral questions raised by the new reproductive technologies which sets down ethical guidelines for the treatment to be accorded human embryos and for procreative techniques from artificial insemination to surrogate motherhood. The document is viewed in the perspective of earlier Church pronouncements, such as The Declaration on Procured Abortion , and its definition of a person as an individual animated by a rational soul is explored in detail for its implications for discussions on the personhood of the human embryo.     

WHEN: A Conversation about Culture

For decades now culture has been a topic anthropologists argue about: WHAT it does or does not mean, IF it should or should not constitute a central concept of the discipline. This essay steps outside these arguments to rephrase the issue and our approach to it. It explores WHEN it makes sense to use the cultural concept: Should we proceed inductively or deductively in constructing connections between the concept and our data? And instead of assertions by one author, it utilizes a debate format to collectively raise possibilities to ponder, [culture, induction, deduction, anthropological analysis]     

The annual Day of the Dead song contest: musical‐linguistic ideology and practice,piratability, and the challenge of scale

Building on research theorizing scale, this article proposes augmentations to existing frameworks that will help illuminate how localities are linked to ‘stranger collectives’ like nations, ethnicities, and global religious ‘communities’. In this case of ethnic revival from Mexico's Sierra Mazateca, people use new vernacular literacy practices tied to local musical performances as a way of ‘customizing’ modular forms deployed by national and global institutions to manage indigenous difference. People ‘re‐imagine’ locality through a localized indigenous literacy that takes templates provided by the Mexican state and the Catholic Church and places them in productive tension with local context: musical properties of the indigenous language Mazatec, locally valued performance practices, and local musical‐linguistic ideologies. While this revival movement draws on immanently modular forms, once locally embedded they become ‘unpiratable’, and constitute a new resource for inscribing local belonging. This case suggests the importance of considering linguistic and musical aspects of social context often taken for granted in anthropological investigations of scale.     

Racial classification in the evolutionary sciences: a comparative analysis

Human racial classification has long been a problem for the discipline of anthropology, but much of the criticism of the race concept has focused on its social and political connotations. The central argument of this paper is that race is not a specifically human problem, but one that exists in evolutionary thought in general. This paper looks at various disciplinary approaches to racial or subspecies classification, extending its focus beyond the anthropological race concept by providing a comparative analysis of the use of racial classification in evolutionary biology, genetics, and anthropology.     

Beyond blasphemy or devotion: art,the secular,and Catholicism in Paris

In this article I explore the relationship between the secular and ‘cultural’ Catholicism in France through the lens of a contemporary art exhibit displayed at a new project of the French Catholic Church. Visitors’ varied responses to the exhibit, I argue, ultimately reinforced the organizers’ claim that the activities that occur within this ‘non‐religious’ space of the French church are self‐evident aspects of a broadly recognizable and ‘secular’ French or European culture.     

Genetic structure of the Ards Peninsula,Northern Ireland: evidence from civil registers of marriage 1840-1911

This paper uses marital migration data transcribed from the Civil Registers of Marriage 1840-1911 to estimate kinship from migration matrices and isonymy in the Ards Peninsula, Northern Ireland. The distribution of religious denominations (Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Roman Catholic) varies systematically throughout the region, with up to 77% Roman Catholic in the south and 81% Presbyterian in the north. Portavogie, a fishing village on the east coast, is exclusively Protestant, with a population 93% Presbyterian. Comparison of migration and isonymy with geographical distance by multidimensional scaling and the MATFIT procedure show Portavogie to be an outlier, more distantly related to other areas than its geographical position would predict. We suggest that this discrepancy is due to settlement history and occupational and religious isolation. Mantel tests show that marital migration is significantly related to geographical distance (rMG = 0.4257), as is the distribution of religious denominations (rRG = 0.5548) through settlement history. Migration is dependent on religion (rMR = 0.3674), and isonymy is dependent on migration (rIM= 0.2531) but not on geography or religion. With Portavogie omitted from the analysis, the dependence of migration on geography and on religion increases (rMG = 0.5583, rMR = 0.5646), as does the correlation between religion and geography (rRG = 0.7213). The dependence of isonymy on migration increases (rIM = 0.5103), and significant correlations between isonymy and religion (rIR = 0.4135) and isonymy and geography (rIG = 0.4660) appear. We argue that a full explanation of population structure requires geographical distance, settlement history, and the influence of religion and occupation to be taken into account.