Ritual is envisaged here not as a pacifying response to potentially problematic situations, but as a means whereby challenging circumstances – worshiping at interreligious sacred sites, disposing of sacred objets, bringing what has been erased to mind – are aknowledged and given hightened legitimacy.
Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, this paper aims to propose a new theoretical approach to the study of interreligious relations among Christians and Muslims by introducing an aesthetic and semiotic approach to interrituality. The theoretical and methodological claim of this paper is that this framework is applicable to the study of all types of interreligious relations that are mediated through different rituals and ritual acts. The introduction of an aesthetically and semiotically informed concept of mimesis will account for the relational configurations and intersections between textual representations, ritual imitations, and sensory simulations as they materialize in the ethnographic case under consideration through the coordination of the specific times and places in saint veneration rituals at shared sacred sites and festivals. Defined as a relational concept, mimesis indexes the triadic relationships and dynamic configurations between persons, times and places that can be accounted for as dynamic processes of continuous appropriation and transformation.
According to US flag code, flags that have become damaged or are in some way no longer serviceable must be disposed of in a solemn and respectful manner. Paradoxically, burning flags which is often done in protest is viewed as one of the most disrespectful acts to a flag, is the same method of how they are supposed to be disposed of, albeit within a ritual context. In a flag retirement ceremony, the flag takes on the same status as a deceased human body. This reflects the fact the flag is a symbol for all those who lost their lives fighting to defend the flag, America more broadly, and the cultural values symbolized in a single piece of cloth. Cremation (and sometimes burial) are seen as the most appropriate methods for respectful disposition of sacred remains.
From Pierre Nora to Paul Connerton, memory theorists have argued that “modernity forgets.” Nowhere is this said to be more obvious than in the urban landscape, whose ever-shifting and always-expanding topography reflects the alienation intrinsic to capitalist modernity. But if modern space is “space wiped clean” (Connerton 2009), we might ask: wiped clean of what? Through an examination of a vibrant devotion to the souls of the suffering dead at a small chapel in São Paulo, Brazil, this paper examines “forgetting things,” or the material culture that conjures a sense of absence, loss, or erasure. In so doing, it argues that in the Americas, “modernization” has depended upon the eradication of Black and Indigenous presence. And it traces how at the Chapel of the Afflicted, devotees and activists have produced “forgetting things” to advance a political project of material and mnemonic reparations in São Paulo.