Premium
The bodily threat of miracles: Security, sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of public order
Author(s) -
HEO ANGIE
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12011
Subject(s) - politics , witness , order (exchange) , authoritarianism , state (computer science) , aesthetics , semiotics , sociology , public security , public order , law , epistemology , philosophy , political science , democracy , criminology , computer science , finance , algorithm , economics
This 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.