The last apparitions of Our Lady in Latin America: An anthropological reading

Abstract

The paper presents the “last apparitions of the virgin in Latin America” as an example of a larger process of “recompositions of the believing in modernity”, from the ethnographic reconstruction of an event observed in four contexts: Pereira __Colombia__, Cuenca __Ecuador__ , San Nicolas __Argentina__, and Betania __Venezuela__ . That explicitation permits to wonder if the social reconstruction of such an event is anything but the search of a mediator instance through the setting of an imaginary in front of which the various initiatives of many actors experiment the huge variations adopted by the processes of conversion, adherence or belonging, as indicators and ways of conduct of a triple re-dispatching of the relation to time, to space and to authority; of a triple crisis that affects identity, mediation and centrality; of a triple lack of adjustment: shortage of the politic, explosion of the offers of sense, strong lacking of the credible.