Material historicity: Rethinking objects through the mis/recognition of a Catholic saint

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic research in Santa Cruz Mixtepec, Mexico, this article investigates a local debate about the identity of a historic statue of a saint. It shows that historical and object biography approaches cannot fully account for the different ways that people draw on material evidence, religious understandings, and their own perceptions of the past when engaging with such meaningful objects. To more fully account for such processes, I develop the concept of ‘material historicity,’ which provides a framework that connects theories of materiality and historical consciousness. This framework will allow scholars to understand how objects and their material qualities provoke and enable creative and interpretive engagements with the past, and how these engagements interact with one another in the present. The case of the Mixtepec Saint shows that in addition to these analytical possibilities, attention to material historicity can also offer a politics that challenges the authority of secular, historicist interpretations of the past by allowing multiple perspectives to be considered on equal footing.