The ritual posture that I identify with the term "cradling" embodies, evokes, and performs the emotions of tenderness and affection for objects of the material world and the numina within them. Today, cradling, or holding as if of an infant, is one of the primary ritual engagements with small, three-dimensional religious images in Mexico, throughout Central America, and in Latino immigrant communities in the United States (fig. 1). This practice is particularly pronounced in devotional manifestations of the infant Jesus, but it is also the case, less predictably, with devotions to a range of adult saints, from Saint Jude to the skeletal saint of death, Santa Muerte. I have observed the cradling practice in domestic rites in rural Mexican pueblos, at bustling Mexico City shrines, and in religious processions on the streets of Latino neighborhoods in Southern California. It is as much the powerlessness and vulnerability of these diminutive images as their potency that often occupies the religious imagination. They are "pequeños y impotentes" as one devotee described to me-small, powerless, and in need of care. The cradling gesture underscores the nature of these object-entities as vital matter: they are "beings," I am grateful to my colleague Karl Taube for his assistance in interpreting the Mesoamerican archeological record and for his warm encouragement. Carolyn Dean provided helpful insights in her response to a paper I gave on this subject at a panel on material religion at the congress of the Latin American Studies Association in the spring of 2012. Colleen McDannell thoughtfully commented on my paper on cradling at the American Academy of Religion meetings in 2011. Sally Promey's generous invitation to speak at the Yale Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group advanced and challenged my thinking about the relationship between past and present practices. Candace Edsel assisted diligently in securing image permissions.

No abstract

No abstract

California is experiencing a proliferation of public religious celebrations like never before. The authors focus on four public celebrations: the throwing of colors during Holi, an annual pilgrimage to Manzanar, the Peruvian celebration of El Señor de Los Milagros, and Noche de Altares. Even as these and many other similar festivals simultaneously represent the irruption and interruption of the sacred in the public sphere, these festivals reflect the multi-religious character of immigration. These public rituals say something about the pursuit of belonging in California and in the United States within an increasingly diverse and multicultural landscape. Those who participate together as intimate strangers are often seeking only a temporary affiliation, perhaps a place for a moment to engage one another beyond the context of the marketplace. In sharing in these religious and cross-cultural experiences, participants become enmeshed in the complicated and vibrant diversity of California, up close and personal, as physical as the bodies encountered there.

No abstract