Frank Graziano's Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings of Mexico is a richly textured, theoretically engaging account of Catholic devotional practices. Based on interviews and first-hand observations at eleven shrines, as well as insights from historical documents and dozens of additional site visits throughout Mexico and Europe, the book provides a multifaceted exploration of the dynamic interchange between human beings and material objects that characterizes petitionary devotion in Mexico.
From the outset, Graziano notes that the topic of devotion is “rebelliously resistant to organization” (xii). And indeed, the author steers away from a traditional introduction and centralized thesis, allowing his arguments to emerge gradually throughout the pages of the book. The result is a nuanced account that resonates with the organic and often ambiguous quality of petitionary devotion itself. Narrative interludes alternate with chapters that are analytical in tone, thus evoking the sights, sounds, and lived experiences at individual shrines. Each of the five analytical chapters, “Miraculous Images,” “Petitionary Devotion,” “Seeing Through Faith,” “Collaborations,” and “Votive Offerings,” would serve as a fine stand-alone case study in classes across the humanities and social sciences. The book as a whole will be of interest not only to scholars of Latin American Catholicism, but also to religious studies scholars in general, art historians, and those interested in questions of personhood and the agency of material things.
The opening vignette draws the reader into the sensory world of the chapel of the Señor del Rayo in Oaxaca, a miraculous image deemed all the more powerful due to the fact that it survived a lightning strike years ago. Overcome by the sheer humility of the devotees he encounters, Graziano reveals—with refreshing candor—the depth of emotion he feels at realizing that his world shares no comparable sense of the miraculous. Official doctrinal debates aside, he notes, devotees do not draw a strict line between sacred presence and material reality. Rather, they embrace a “concept of being that cannot be accommodated by current ontological categories,” endowing images of Christ and the Virgin Mary with a status of quasi-personhood (47).
The pages that follow offer insights not only on the dynamics of reciprocity that characterize the devotional relationship, but also the dazzling range of objects through which people render their petitions concrete. Included here are the photographs, locks of hair, and milagritos familiar to Catholic devotees across Mexico, but also more localized items, such as miniature cars and houses molded from naturally-occurring clay near a shrine to the Virgin of Juquila in Oaxaca. Details such as these are interwoven with theoretical meditations that provide rich ground for comparative study. Devotional offerings, Graziano argues, answer to several core psychological needs within human life.
As people present offerings and return to give thanks for miracles rendered, they manage to maintain the sense that their lives are valuable, their worlds are meaningful, and that they have a measure of control in events that transpire. Petitionary devotion, the author argues further, involves a collaboration between human will and divine power. In some cases, individuals call upon divine aid to obtain extra strength or courage. In others, they relegate control to the divine, much as a person battling cancer might entrust herself to the expert abilities of an oncologist. Most acts of petition, however, involve an intermingling of the two.
As a meticulously researched, deeply engaging case study of popular Catholic practices in Mexico, Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico will find ready company with such works as Jennifer Scheper Hughes's Biography of a Mexican Crucifix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Kristin Norget's Days of Death, Days of Life: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). The text's intimate exploration of the cognitive processes involved in religious practice also makes it an ideal comparative resource for those interested in the dynamics of conversion and religious change in Latin America. Those familiar with David Smilde's Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007), for example, will appreciate the nuance and rigor with which Graziano approaches the interplay between individual agency and collective practice.
The book closes with a fascinating glimpse onto votive offerings made to the Señor de Chalma, an image whose discovery in a cave in central Mexico links it to pre-colonial devotional offerings in the region. This detail brings to mind one element that is largely missing throughout the text: namely, the indigenous practices that have contributed so much to the dynamics of devotional exchange within Mexican Catholicism. While the book is punctuated with enticing references to material practices from medieval Europe and the ancient Mediterranean world, greater elaboration is needed on the role indigenous Mexican cultures have played—and continue to play—in shaping the logic of reciprocal exchange that animates petitionary devotion. This is but a small concern, however, for a text that demonstrates such an impressive command of the multiple material, psychological, and cultural dimensions of votive exchange.
