'Figuring' Catholicism : the Santo Nino and religious discourse in Cebu

This thesis focuses on the Santa Nino de Cebu, which is an ancient statue of a young Jesus Christ enshrined in Cebu City. To this day, it is the subject of institutionalized rites of formal worship administered by the Cebu Archdiocese, as well as more immediate and spontaneous acts of veneration among the nearly two million inhabitants of Cebu province. While this study is concerned with describing the various modes of devotion to the figure, its aims extend beyond this. The earlier chapters discuss how the history of the figure – a history remembered in folklore and oral renditions as much as it is through the documentary archive - is intertwined with very specific and widely-held ideas about the figure’s ‘discover’ and miraculous intercession. The principal rationale here, however, is not to evaluate the factuality of these ideas but to discuss the conditions upon which historical accounts are constituted and expressed,. In evaluating religion as a discourse, this thesis conceives of ‘iconography’ as a relationship between an object and the ‘events’ are thought to be the foundations upon which dominant meanings are created and maintained. This examination of discourses is a theme that runs through the latter chapters of this study.. the last four chapters consider the symbolic friction between ‘official;’ and ‘illicit’ Catholicism in Cebu – a dichotomy that is in many ways mediated by the conception of the figure as ‘folk catholic’ , ‘localised’ or ‘syncretistic’. In this way, religiosity is portrayed here as an experience of institutional, semantic or doctrinal forces that continue to condition how icons are worshipped and revered. The Santo Nino then is more than just a topic of this thesis. Insofar as this study discusses the historical, discursive and epistemological foundations of the way Cebanos ‘figure’ Catholicism, it can be said that the Santa Nino is a metaphor for how the religiosity manifests itself among the faithful not just in Cebu but throughout the Philippine archipelago as well