A classic twentieth-century work in the anthropology of Catholicism Person and God in a Spanish Valley is a moving portrait of how individuals and communities in a remote, mountainous valley of northern Spain relate to the divine. In the late 1960s, anthropologist and historian William A. Christian, Jr., conducted groundbreaking fieldwork in the Nansa Valley, one of the most devout regions of Spain. With sensitivity and uncommon insight, Christian describes the complex system of shrines, devotions, and pilgrimages that existed in the region for centuries, and recounts the disruption of the valley’s traditional way of life as young priests from urban centers arrived carrying a more modern, Vatican II version of Catholicism. Person and God in a Spanish Valley places Catholic faith and practice within a broader history of agrarian politics and reform in northern Spain, and stands as a landmark work of modern anthropology.

Excerpt from St. Besse : a study of an Alpine cult / Robert Hertz -- Excerpt from Tarantism and Catholicism / Ernesto de Martino -- Excerpt from The place of grace in anthropology / Julian Pitt-Rivers -- Excerpt from The Dinka and Catholicism / Godfrey Lienhardt -- Excerpt from Iconophily and iconoclasm in Marian pilgrimage / Victor Turner and Edith Turner -- Excerpt from Person and God / William Christian -- Excerpt from The priest as agent of secularization in rural Spain / Stanley Brandes -- Excerpt from Women mystics and Eucharistic devotion in the thirteenth century / Caroline Walker Bynum -- "Complexio oppositorum?" : religion, society, and power in the making of Catholicism in rural south India / David Mosse -- Marking memory : heritage work and devotional labour at Quebec's Croix de Chemin / Hillary Kaell -- Failure and contagion : the gender of sin in contemporary Catholicism / Maya Mayblin -- Opulence and simplicity : the question of tension in Syrian Catholicism / Andreas Bandak -- The paradox of charismatic Catholicism : rupture and continuity in a Q'eqchi'-Maya parish / Eric Hoenes del Pinal -- The Virgin of Guadalupe and the spectacle of Catholic evangelism in Mexico / Kristin Norget -- The rosary as a meditation on death at a Marian apparition shrine / Ellen Badone -- A Catholic body? : miracles, secularity, and the porous self in Malta / Jon P. Mitchell -- Experiments of inculturation in a Catholic charismatic movement in Cameroon / Ludovic Lado -- On a political economy of political theology : El Señor de los Milagros / Valentina Napolitano -- Phenomenology and religion : making a home in an unfortunate place / Michelle Molina -- "We're all Catholics now" / Simon Coleman -- The problem of healing among survivors of clerical sexual abuse / Robert Orsi -- Possession and psychopathology, faith and reason / Thomas Csordas -- Catholicism and the study of religion / Birgit Meyer -- The media of sensation / Niklaus Largier

This study of a northern Spanish community shows how the residents of Santa MarÁa del Monte have acted together at critical times to ensure the survival of their traditional forms of social organization. The survival of these forms has allowed the villagers, in turn, to weather demographic, political, and economic crises over the centuries. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Using parish records to reconstruct local religious culture, this volume examines the relationship between the expectations of the Catholic Reformation and the religious practices and beliefs of parishioners in the diocese of Ourense in northwestern Spain.

Are there differences in artistic preferences between social classes or races or between urban and suburban homes? Similarities? How do choices in art works - and the way we display them - speak to our dreams, desires, pleasures, and fears? And what do they say about the real cultural boundaries between elite and popular, high and low?

Ethnographies exploring the vastly different ways that Christianity is experienced and understood by different groups around the world.