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8 A Manger in a Sea of Mud: Material Legacies and Loss at the Temple of the Innocent Blood
Author(s) -
Gray D. Ryan
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
archeological papers of the american anthropological association
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.783
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1551-8248
pISSN - 1551-823X
DOI - 10.1111/apaa.12062
Subject(s) - temple , ideology , power (physics) , art , sociology , history , politics , ancient history , law , political science , physics , quantum mechanics
Early in the 1920s, Mother Catherine Seal founded her Temple of the Innocent Blood in what is now known as the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Under her leadership, the Temple became not just a church but also the center of an auto‐constructed and integrated space that explicitly defied the racist ideologies of white supremacy. Utilizing data from recent excavations at the site, this chapter explores how materiality is enmeshed in the daily place‐making strategies of individuals on the fringes of urban society. By constituting a singular space, the Temple, through the person of Mother Catherine, transformed ordinary, mass‐produced items, suffusing them with qualities only apparent within the totality of the social world she created. The persistence and durability of objects at the site of the Temple gave them power to transform long after Mother Catherine's death, and the traces of the Temple still resonate in the memory of the neighborhood in unforeseen ways today.