Weeping as the Addolorata
Popular devotion at the margins of Europe
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7987490 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Giulia Liberatore (0000-0002-0960-7621, Social Anthropology & Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 452-469 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-22 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critique of Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-275X • E-ISSN: 1460-3721 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0308275x251388541 |
| OpenAlex | W7106302362 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
This article is about female devotees of the Addolorata (Our Lady of Sorrows) and the tears shed on Good Friday on the streets of the Old Town of Palermo, Sicily. Recently criticized by some Church authorities as overly sentimental and inauthentic, such weeping has become a site of tension in efforts to modernize or contain this popular ritual. These critiques echo historical attempts to regulate female embodied ‘excesses’ and reflect Orientalizing discourses that frame Southern Italian religiosity as backward, in light of Palermo’s liberal rebranding as a post-mafia, cosmopolitan city. Yet women’s tears resist full domestication, flowing between female devotees, allowing them to embody the divine and to forge alternative modes of relatedness that transcend male confraternal forms and the nuclear family. Through ethnographic attention to the effects of tears, this article examines the potentiality of these bodily fluids, as well as the gendered and class-based exclusions of liberal cosmopolitanism in a place that has been cast as insufficiently European
Cosmopolitanism · Embodied cognition · Ethnography · Hybridity · Negotiation · Prudence · Rebranding · Religiosity · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Religious Tourism and Spaces
The Media of Sensation
A Catholic Body?
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power
Personal Sentiments and Polyphonic Voices in Warao Women's Ritual Wailing
Wombs and Alien Spirits
Reversible Destiny
Contesting Race and Citizenship
Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil
On not being European enough. Migration, crisis and precarious livelihoods on the periphery of Europe
Celtic Fosterage
Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual
Totalitarian Tears
On Mauss, masks, and gifts
To cry one's distress
Introduction
The ultimate return
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |