Abstract
Abstract The concepts of faith and miracle frequently appear in the anthropological literature on Christianity. Yet these phenomena are rarely employed as social categories of understanding, and this is particularly true for research related to Catholicism. By way of my own ethnographic experience in three different fieldwork sites of Brazil’s Northeast (Agüera - where apparitions of the Virgin Mary occur; Monte Santo - a Catholic pilgrimage sanctuary; and Casa Amarela, a neighbourhood in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco state), I argue that a cosmological perspective is central to understanding Brazilian Catholicism. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, such a perspective reveals faith and miracle as key elements to an understanding of Catholicism as it is lived in this context. As such, I suggest rethinking faith and miracle as “social categories of understanding,” which dialectically organize Catholic logic and cosmology: the interconnectivity of humans, nature, and the supernatural.
Highlights
The concepts of faith and miracle frequently appear in the anthropological literature on Christianity
Using ethnographic work conducted in specific Brazilian Catholic contexts, I have sought to argue in this article that faith and miracle should be conceptualized as social categories of understanding that organize relationships of people to nature and to the supernatural
I proposed that to understand the native meanings attributed to faith and miracle, Brazilian Catholicism must be viewed through a cosmological lens, for natives conceive of their world cosmologically
Summary
South, Northeast, Southeast and Centralwest; each region includes a certain number of political states. Bahia and Pernambuco are two of the nine states of the Northeast, the poorest region of Brazil. We find three main ecological and geographical zones: the term “agreste” describes the intermediate ecological zone stretching from Paraíba to Bahia, which is bordered on the east by what used to be the Atlantic coastal forests, and on the west by the semi-arid sertão, or backlands
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