Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada Lloyd D. Barba Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (New York: New York University Press, 2020) For over a century Catholics have taken over the streets of Williamsburg to celebrate the feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and partake in the “Dance of the Giglio,” a moving monumental mass of devotional creativity. The giglio, standing over seventy feet tall, is lifted by over 100 men honoring Saint Paulinus, the patron saint of Nola, Italy. The feast is the culmination of months of planning and working, or, in a word, devotion. Beginning in 2014, Maldonado-Estrada worked alongside the faithful for four years. Such a sustained study was necessary in order to understand devotional labor in a place where “work, measurable in hours, days, months, and years, was central to belonging in this Catholic community” (16). The author writes from the perspective of an “observant participant” who herself “became a competent practitioner of masculine devotional labor” (16). Chapter-by-chapter the author’s descriptive language makes readers feel as though they are at the places under study, observing the conspicuous aspects of religion and newly considering the places where religion may be found. One can envision the colors, almost feel the textures, and sense the tension that at times builds up in the church’s basement, at the shrine, or in the money room. Through vivid descriptions of even the most ostensibly mundane moments of [End Page 152] chatter, banter, and work, readers can clearly see how devotional labor assumes gendered dimensions. By the end of the book, readers should be convinced that religion is not merely found but is actually collectively forged in such spaces and represented on inked bodies and in the conviction with which collective stories of the neighborhood are told. The men of the feast perform gender together through a series of practices in private peripheral spaces and public devotions amid a rapidly gentrifying urban context. In these private and public spaces, men’s devotion boils down to “sustaining work,” “service,” and “time, training, and giving” (7–8). Maldonado-Estrada argues that churches “continue to be vital sites for the making of masculinity” (2). The first three chapters offer a behind-the-scenes description of the development and deployment of authority and masculinity. Chapter one keeps readers within the realms of the personal at the street level, providing the context of the material culture and embodiment that makes the feast so spectacular (as something to be publicly beheld) and memorable (for those who labor intensely to make the feast happen). By introducing readers to a lively cast of characters who long for the esteemed positions as “capo” or “Turk” of the giglio procession, the author highlights the devotional aspirations of men. Most expressly, some men choose tattoos to mediate their devotion to the sacred tradition. The book is at its best when it unpacks the dense sacred material culture these men inhabit. Staying behind the scenes, chapter two moves readers underground to the basement where they enter the creative and expressive world of artistic devotion. Here is where the men spend hours together fashioning wood, papier-mâché, paint, and fabrics, all in service of the feast day and the giglio. In these unexpected places and moments, the book’s interpretation of religion shines most. Chapter three offers a peek into the money room and spreadsheets, accounting for the revenue generated by the feast. Even this sort of work affords participants devotional capital within the community. While chapters four through six further sustain the book’s central argument, the first three chapters offer the field of American religion the freshest perspectives on how to study religious devotion through material culture. Chapters four through six turn to the public dimensions of the ritual. Chapter four ventures into three “ritual spaces of feast geography:” the Questua, the Line of the March, and the parish’s Marian shrine (139). In such spaces, masculinity takes center stage according to its accepted hierarchies and displays. Excess has long stigmatized the feast, as shown in chapter...