Roadside Miracles: Commemoration and Non-Synchronicity in Ecuadorian Ex votos

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgement

This paper was originally published in Chile in 2001. Mary Louise Pratt has since developed some similar ideas.

Notes

 1 Pynchon, T. (1965, 1966) 1979. Picador: London, 89.

 2 For an excellent historical overview of the period see Guillermo Bustos, ‘Quito en la transición. Actores colectivos y identidades culturales urbanas (1929-1950)’, in Bustos et al. 1992. Quito a través de la historia. Quito: Dirección de Planificación, 163–88.

 3 See Johannes Fabian. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, especially 71–104.

 4 José Lezama Lima. 1993. La expresión americana. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

 5 Pedro Morandé. 1984. Cultura y modernización en América latina: Ensayo sociológico acerca de la crisis del desarrollismo y de su superación. Santiago: Cuadernos del Instituto de Sociología Pontifícia, Universidad Católica de Chile, 129.

 6 E. Bloch. 1977. Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics (1932), trans. Mark Ritter. New German Critique 11: 22–38.

 7 W. Benjamin. 1979. Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, particularly 148.

 8 Unless we note otherwise, all the ex votos analysed here are to be found in the Sanctuary of the Virgin of El Quinche, on the outskirts of Quito. Any faults in the photographs are my responsibility. In general the ex votos were anonymous; with few exceptions only the most institutionalized and academic appropriations of the miracle genre bore any signature of the author.

 9 On the European history of ex votos see Elisabeh Galanti 1988. Per Gratia Ricevuta. Aspects of Italian Ex Voto. International Folklore Review (London) 6: 78–85. Gloria Kay Giffords offers a useful background to Mexican retablos in Mexican Folk Retablos: Masterpieces on Tin. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974.

10 The ex voto in figure 2 is to be found in the Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Waters in the municipality of Baños, Ecuador.

11 David Hume. 1748. Of Miracles, edited and introduced by Anthony Flew. Illinois: Open Court Publishers, 1985.

12 Manuel M. Polit Moreno, ed. 1941. Historia y milagros de la Santísima Virgen del El El Quinche (de un manuscrito inédito de 1640). Quito: La Sociedad, 20.

13 On the railway as a agent of modernization see Wolfgang Schivelbusch. 1977. The Railway Journey: the Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

14 J. Jijón y Caamaño. 1943. La ecuatorianidad (Conferencia dictada en la Universidad Central el 18 de noviembre de 1942. Quito: Prensa Católica.

15 See his ‘Course in Ecuadorian Prehistory’ given in 1933–34 at the Central University. These materials can be found in Jijón's remarkable personal library in Quito.