Bacchiddu, “Holding the Saint in One’s Arms”

Bacchiddu, Giovanna (2011) “Holding the Saint in One’s Arms: Miracles and Exchange in Apiao, Southern Chile.” In Dedele and Blanes, eds, Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices. Oxford, Berghahn Books. 

Excerpt: An approach to the body divorced from the spheres of both the social and the spiritual is unthinkable in Apiao, Chiloé, like in the rest of native lowland South America. This essay endeavours to illustrate how the body, the spiritual and the social interact and mutually build each other in the devotion to a local Catholic saint. A little statue of a miraculous saint is the interlocutor in an articulate dialectical exchange; an individual with whom people engage and build meaningful social relationships.