The bodily threat of miracles: Security, sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of public order

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis article examines the political and public culture of Coptic Christian miracles through the circulation and reproduction of images and the mimetic entanglements of artifacts and objects. To understand the threat posed by one case of a woman's oil-exuding hand, this study points to how semiotic orders of security and sacramentality intersect in the regulation of bodily miracles. It explores Coptic Orthodox Church and Egyptian state efforts to contain the activity of images and transform the public nature of truthful witness and divine testimony. In doing so, it suggests how the material structure of saintly imagination introduces bodily and visual challenges to an authoritarian politics of public order.

Predestined Migrations: UndocumentedPeruvians inSouthKorean Churches

“…While respuestas can be seen as a common framework through which migrants and church leaders co‐create their global aspirations and experiences, they are not always immediately embraced by everyone, not even other Cristianos. Like miracles, even when the details of a respuesta were verified, its level of importance was still up for debate (Heo ). For example, while everyone could see that Paty had gotten pregnant, that Jaime and Miguel had evaded deportation, and that Oliver was still living and working in Korea despite his physical and emotional wounds, not everyone concluded these were significant events.…”

A minority at the bar: Revisiting the Coptic Christian (in-)visibility

“…In addition to the street demonstrations, anthropologists Anthony Shenoda (2010; 2012) and Angie Heo (2012; 2013; 2018) have also looked at other aspects of visibility that are not only necessarily situated in the revolutionary moment of 2011, but also still operate in dispute with the ‘entente’ between the state and the Church. The visibility that Shenoda and Heo write about is mainly connected to divine interventions from heaven.…”

The im-materiality of urban religion: towards an ethnography of urban religious aspirations

“…Scholars working on European cities have highlighted how the opening of new mosques can be accompanied by neighbourhood protests, embroiling Muslim immigrant communities and native citizens in power struggles over the cultural definition of particular sites (Astor 2014;Cesari 2006;Hüttermann 2006). Meanwhile in Muslim majority societies, the construction of churches or other public displays of Christian devotion are often highly regulated in the context of power-laden notions of urban order (Bandak 2014;Heo 2013). In South Asia and some African contexts, by contrast, processions play a much greater role in contesting notions of urban citizenship, sometimes leading to violent clashes between different religious communities (Tambiah 1996;Van der Veer 1994;Van Dijk 2001).…”