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One of the most intriguing forms the ex-voto takes is a small depiction of the miraculous event, painted on canvas or tin, which includes a representation of the saint being thanked or supplicated and a short narrative describing the event. Often commissioned by local artists, the ex-voto is taken by the pilgrim to the animita, or shrine in the sanctuary where it will remain.
Though in decline in predominantly Catholic European nations, it is a tradition fervently performed in the former Spanish colonies of Latin America and the Philippines, where the ex-voto has manifested in fascinating and unique forms. I use the word ‘performed’ here, to preface the critical discussion of the role of performance in narrative psychology, which I will come to review.
An exhibition of ex-votos took place in 2012 at the Wellcome Collection in London. Containing the work of over a hundred paintings from Guanajuato and Real de Catorce, Infinitas Gracias sought to illuminate the complexity of the votive tradition in Mexico. For the tens of thousands of pilgrims who journey each year to the Sanctuary of Atotonilco in Guanajuato and Real de Catorce’s Sanctuary of the Immaculate Conception, the power of the ex-voto is as real as the faith that leads them there. That faith is rooted in a rich history of storytelling that predates Biblical narrative.
Despite centuries of Spanish colonisation, the animism of Aztec and Mayan culture in Mexico today is indivisible from the dominant Catholic culture. The colour, chaos and festivity of Mexican ceremony, so unlike the sombre Christian ritual, are evident expressions of pre-Columbian heritage, but also indicate what Spence calls the ‘narrativisation of an experience’, without which both the individual and the collective may suffer a ‘traumatic lapse of meaning’.
In Marc Auge’s Non Places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, a home-plus is described as a tool of mediation: by adding local flavour to an introduced custom, the home-plus presents an avenue through which foreign concepts can flow more readily, but more importantly gives actants the agency of reinterpreting the colonizer-culture. Over the course of three centuries, the ex-voto has quite splendidly been home-plussed by its Mexican constituents, in that it not only reimagines the local context of the religious offering but also the relationship that an individual has with the church.
The depiction of holy entities in the same room as humble worshippers, along with the candid nature with which pilgrims address them, serve to demonstrate a sense of ownership over the space that is the church and describe a relationship with the divine that is at once public and intimate. By quite literally creating one’s own narrative, partitioning allows the church to become a realm of self-authorship, sanctioning the actant to become an active agent, thereby creating the potential for them to improve their circumstances. Turner noted an association between ‘the sacred narrative corpus and ritualistic resolution of social conflict.’ Similarly, Kotre and Schafer have both argued that the role of narrative achieves a similar purpose, in assisting individuals to overcome trauma.
Campos highlights how faith in miracles and the role of religion in times of crisis is a critical coping mechanism for low-income Mexicans, whose lives are frequently interrupted by social and economic difficulty. She argues that the reason why health-related issues are such a common feature of the ex-voto is because the majority of Mexicans live without access to modern healthcare facilities.
For Campos, the pilgrims’ participation in ex-voto offering reaffirms for them the power of the images, working as a kind of group therapy that can give participants the hope they need to deal with crisis or recover from illness. Operating in both cognitive and ethogenic modes, pilgrims use the animita as a ‘home for meaning’.
The ex-votos perform yet another interesting function; by acting as records of daily life, the ailments, disturbances, domestic and social violence that would normally be muted in the bedrock of social history are made public, their resolutions openly celebrated. This unique set of conditions allows the ex-votos to become the ‘warranting voice’ that permits these dialogues to unfold.
Moving away from the highly subjective and expressive potential of narrative, an understanding of the ex-voto in paradigmatic terms indicates a noteworthy occurrence in language, involving blame and accountability. Following on from Bruner, ‘In language, the paradigmatic favors the indicative mode, describing a world of fact, whereas the narrative uses the subjunctive mode to construct a point of view which is capable of hope and fear.’ Although having fallen out of favour with contemporary English, some linguistic devices - such as the subjunctive mode - continue to flourish in Latin languages. Another such device is the linguistic structure that allows blame to be transferred from indirect objects to direct objects. In English, we may describe the event of an accident as follows:
“I (indirect object) broke (indicative preterit verb) the vase (direct object).”
Translated into Spanish, however, the phrase “Se me ha roto el jarron” literally means:
“It (direct object) me (indirect object) it broke (present perfect verb) the jar (direct object).”
In other words, placing the indirect object at the scene where the direct object was broken, but by maintaining that “it broke”, the indirect object is safeguarded from blame. The invention of a narrative structure that reinterprets events has been discussed by Schafer, who regards such ‘visions of reality’ as indications that identity is formed by the individual’s perception of events. Yet the individual’s externalized action makes them accountable in the physical (and social) world, and it is this accountability which ultimately draws the individual back to the social discourse that frames selfhood.
In conclusion, the ex-votos of the Guanajuato and Real de Catorce sanctuaries, along with many other forms of votive offering, play a critical role in the cycle that permits individuals to act upon their desires within the framework of their belief system. That belief system in turn forms a community whose shared ideology, interaction and support allows individuals to develop the identities through which they perceive themselves and others.
Auge, Marc (1995) Non Places New York: Verso
Campos, Patricia (2011) ‘The role of faith in miracles in contemporary Mexico’. Interview from the Wellcome Collection http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/infinitas-gracias/exhibition-films/professor-patricia-campos.aspx
Bruner, Jerome S. (1958) `Social psychology and perception’. In E.Maccoby, T.M.Newcombe & E.L.Hartley (eds.) Readings in Social Psychology. (3rd ed.) New York: Holt
Kotre, John (1984) Outliving the Self: Generativity and the Interpretation of Lives Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press
Murray, Kevin (1995) ‘Narrative Partitioning: The ins and outs of identity construction’ in Rethinking Psychology: Volume 1 – Conceptual Foundations (ed J. Smith, R. Harre & Luk van Langenhove) Sage
Schafer, Roy (1978) Language and Insight. New Haven: Yale University Press
Spence, Donald (1986) `Narrative smoothing and clinical wisdom’ In T. S. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct New York: Praeger
Turner, Victor (1980) `Social dramas and stories about them’ Critical Inquiry 7 pp. 141-68
Though in decline in predominantly Catholic European nations, it is a tradition fervently performed in the former Spanish colonies of Latin America and the Philippines, where the ex-voto has manifested in fascinating and unique forms. I use the word ‘performed’ here, to preface the critical discussion of the role of performance in narrative psychology, which I will come to review.
An exhibition of ex-votos took place in 2012 at the Wellcome Collection in London. Containing the work of over a hundred paintings from Guanajuato and Real de Catorce, Infinitas Gracias sought to illuminate the complexity of the votive tradition in Mexico. For the tens of thousands of pilgrims who journey each year to the Sanctuary of Atotonilco in Guanajuato and Real de Catorce’s Sanctuary of the Immaculate Conception, the power of the ex-voto is as real as the faith that leads them there. That faith is rooted in a rich history of storytelling that predates Biblical narrative.
Despite centuries of Spanish colonisation, the animism of Aztec and Mayan culture in Mexico today is indivisible from the dominant Catholic culture. The colour, chaos and festivity of Mexican ceremony, so unlike the sombre Christian ritual, are evident expressions of pre-Columbian heritage, but also indicate what Spence calls the ‘narrativisation of an experience’, without which both the individual and the collective may suffer a ‘traumatic lapse of meaning’.
In Marc Auge’s Non Places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, a home-plus is described as a tool of mediation: by adding local flavour to an introduced custom, the home-plus presents an avenue through which foreign concepts can flow more readily, but more importantly gives actants the agency of reinterpreting the colonizer-culture. Over the course of three centuries, the ex-voto has quite splendidly been home-plussed by its Mexican constituents, in that it not only reimagines the local context of the religious offering but also the relationship that an individual has with the church.
The depiction of holy entities in the same room as humble worshippers, along with the candid nature with which pilgrims address them, serve to demonstrate a sense of ownership over the space that is the church and describe a relationship with the divine that is at once public and intimate. By quite literally creating one’s own narrative, partitioning allows the church to become a realm of self-authorship, sanctioning the actant to become an active agent, thereby creating the potential for them to improve their circumstances. Turner noted an association between ‘the sacred narrative corpus and ritualistic resolution of social conflict.’ Similarly, Kotre and Schafer have both argued that the role of narrative achieves a similar purpose, in assisting individuals to overcome trauma.
Campos highlights how faith in miracles and the role of religion in times of crisis is a critical coping mechanism for low-income Mexicans, whose lives are frequently interrupted by social and economic difficulty. She argues that the reason why health-related issues are such a common feature of the ex-voto is because the majority of Mexicans live without access to modern healthcare facilities.
For Campos, the pilgrims’ participation in ex-voto offering reaffirms for them the power of the images, working as a kind of group therapy that can give participants the hope they need to deal with crisis or recover from illness. Operating in both cognitive and ethogenic modes, pilgrims use the animita as a ‘home for meaning’.
The ex-votos perform yet another interesting function; by acting as records of daily life, the ailments, disturbances, domestic and social violence that would normally be muted in the bedrock of social history are made public, their resolutions openly celebrated. This unique set of conditions allows the ex-votos to become the ‘warranting voice’ that permits these dialogues to unfold.
Moving away from the highly subjective and expressive potential of narrative, an understanding of the ex-voto in paradigmatic terms indicates a noteworthy occurrence in language, involving blame and accountability. Following on from Bruner, ‘In language, the paradigmatic favors the indicative mode, describing a world of fact, whereas the narrative uses the subjunctive mode to construct a point of view which is capable of hope and fear.’ Although having fallen out of favour with contemporary English, some linguistic devices - such as the subjunctive mode - continue to flourish in Latin languages. Another such device is the linguistic structure that allows blame to be transferred from indirect objects to direct objects. In English, we may describe the event of an accident as follows:
“I (indirect object) broke (indicative preterit verb) the vase (direct object).”
Translated into Spanish, however, the phrase “Se me ha roto el jarron” literally means:
“It (direct object) me (indirect object) it broke (present perfect verb) the jar (direct object).”
In other words, placing the indirect object at the scene where the direct object was broken, but by maintaining that “it broke”, the indirect object is safeguarded from blame. The invention of a narrative structure that reinterprets events has been discussed by Schafer, who regards such ‘visions of reality’ as indications that identity is formed by the individual’s perception of events. Yet the individual’s externalized action makes them accountable in the physical (and social) world, and it is this accountability which ultimately draws the individual back to the social discourse that frames selfhood.
In conclusion, the ex-votos of the Guanajuato and Real de Catorce sanctuaries, along with many other forms of votive offering, play a critical role in the cycle that permits individuals to act upon their desires within the framework of their belief system. That belief system in turn forms a community whose shared ideology, interaction and support allows individuals to develop the identities through which they perceive themselves and others.
Auge, Marc (1995) Non Places New York: Verso
Campos, Patricia (2011) ‘The role of faith in miracles in contemporary Mexico’. Interview from the Wellcome Collection http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/infinitas-gracias/exhibition-films/professor-patricia-campos.aspx
Bruner, Jerome S. (1958) `Social psychology and perception’. In E.Maccoby, T.M.Newcombe & E.L.Hartley (eds.) Readings in Social Psychology. (3rd ed.) New York: Holt
Kotre, John (1984) Outliving the Self: Generativity and the Interpretation of Lives Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press
Murray, Kevin (1995) ‘Narrative Partitioning: The ins and outs of identity construction’ in Rethinking Psychology: Volume 1 – Conceptual Foundations (ed J. Smith, R. Harre & Luk van Langenhove) Sage
Schafer, Roy (1978) Language and Insight. New Haven: Yale University Press
Spence, Donald (1986) `Narrative smoothing and clinical wisdom’ In T. S. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct New York: Praeger
Turner, Victor (1980) `Social dramas and stories about them’ Critical Inquiry 7 pp. 141-68
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