TITLE:
Matergraphy and Heritage: Marian Shrines as Symbolic and Vector Spaces of Latinity
AUTHORS:
Christian Dennys Monteiro De Oliveira
KEYWORDS:
Symbol, Marian Devotion, Catholic Shrine, Latinity, Religious Heritage
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.5 No.10,
October
27,
2017
ABSTRACT: This article develops the transformation of studies on Brazilian shrines, based
on the Catholic invocation of Our Lady of Conception (Conceição Aparecida),
in a cultural reflection on the notion of the symbolic space in Latin
America. Considering the expressive historical, semiotic, and institutional aspects
of Latin America’s cultural heritage, this study recognizes the emergence
of a network of identification for religious spaces. A geography of cultural
projection that helps to articulate the interpretation of symbolic vectors (in
festivals, media, and tourism), facilitates both comparison with other localities
(municipalities-shrines) in Brazil and Latin America, and the characterization
of the theatrical aesthetic of devotion in the construction of continental heritage.
Summarizing the qualitative verifications made during three years of research
on strategies to irradiate devotion to the Virgin Mary, this study
achieved an aesthetic strength evaluation of religious patrimony as a challenge
to systems of the heritage of Latinity. We concluded that the greatest risk to
religious cultural patrimony lies in the growth of fundamentalist ideologies,
which seek to discredit the legitimacy of the Marian tradition, and the religious
and cultural syncretism in continental identity.