Voicing Souls: Embodying Uncertainty in a Portuguese Borderland Village

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Abstract

Focusing on the ritual of the Commending of the Souls in Penha Garcia (Portugal), this article analyzes how its recasting as heritage is re-inventing a declining rurality and aiding an uncertain future. A renewed vernacular engagement with the ritual, along with the local use of heritage policy to render it intangible heritage is 1) generating a vernacularization of Portuguese Catholicism (analogous to “religious pluralization”), and 2) construing heritage-making as an efficacious technique of religious belief. This article argues that the collective engagement of local actors in the processes of vernacularization and transforming of this ritual into heritage is (re-)enchanting the virtuosity of their local religiosity, which embodies and suspends a structural uncertainty.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)73-88
Number of pages15
JournalEthnologia Europaea
Volume50
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Aug 2020

Keywords

  • ritual revitalization
  • Ritual performance
  • Intangible cultural heritage
  • Uncertainty
  • Catholicism
  • Popular Culture
  • Vernacular Culture
  • Religious rites
  • Ethnomusicology
  • rural societies
  • voice
  • Performance studies and digital media
  • death
  • Heritage
  • Transcultural Heritage
  • Translocalidade
  • Translocality
  • Antropologia
  • Antropologia da morte

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