“The War of the Saints”: Religion, Politics, and the Poetics of Time in a Sicilian Town

Extract

Serge Gruzinski (1996), in an analysis of the Feast of Corpus Domini in the colonial Mexico of the modern era, notices the extreme importance that the protagonists of the events that he studied gave to the tiniest details of the ritual procedure. Because he is interested in understanding the political sense of these and other “baroque” ceremonial moments, Gruzinski implicitly rejects all functionalist readings and prefers to examine the connections between power and the elements within the ritual mechanism. He notices, for example, how the Corpus Domini was in no way a moment of controlled expression of the political tensions in colonial Mexican society. On the contrary, the ritual seems to him to be an occasion in which and by means of which the various Corpora constituting that society could publicly display and negotiate status, power, and prerogatives (Gruzinski 1996:150–51). The concrete ceremonial performances establish and contribute to “redefining the status quo” (ibid.:151). This explains the attention to what may seem to us to be insignificant details of the ceremony, but certainly they were not so for the protagonists (ibid.:142).