| Abstract: | Conclusion People are seldom able to account for the meanings implied in the particulars of the rituals, but the most important element in the interaction with the saint seems to be of a reciprocal character-exchange of gifts for miracles or protection. The saint cult can be seen as part of a total social phenomenon which articulates the symmetrical reciprocity in the interpersonal relationships in the social structure and asymmetrical relationships in the clientela system. The feasts amount to a popular gathering with multiple functions where all the activities that are being performed renew and confirm networks that constitute village solidarity. The saint cult also joins all these functions and meanings in a complex cultural-personal metaphor that relates expressions of reciprocity as instances of the underlying forms of the society.The saint cult does not merely express a metaphor.A metaphor uses imagery from one domain or level of experience to illuminate relationships, objects and processes in a different domain or at a different level. It follows from this that the domain of thought or experience which is being explicated by metaphor is that which metaphor is used to illuminate, not that from which the idioms of metaphor is fetched .There is also a formal similarity between the gift-giving to a patron saint and to a profane patron. But the rituals in the saint cults do not account for a divine justification of the order in the substantial world. On the contrary, the rituals of the saint cults use a known and common language of reciprocity to get hold of a difficult and inexplicable world. I thus argue that the rituals of the saint cults use idioms similar to the profane political and social relations to express the quality of the relationship between saint and devotee, but this in no way implies that the two domains are substantively confounded. The forms are part of the same world view that emphasizes reciprocity as the basis for social solidarity; receiving evokes obligations for return giving, a favor for a gift. Ritual is not a substitute for the world or displacement of action in it; it is part of, an expression of, a world articulated by those values/views of reciprocity. Consequently, the saint cults which have been analyzed here do not represent an alternative to political or other activities, but a continuation and a completion of that activity into the total means by which one seeks goals in a world so conceived.Mia Di Tota is associated with the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Oslo.
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