Inscribing the Miraculous Place: Writing and Ritual Communication in the Chapel of a Guatemalan Popular Saint

Abstract

The analysis of ritual in linguistic anthropology has witnessed significant advances in recent years, particularly those approaches which theorize ritual as fundamentally semiotic and ritual actions being composed of different kinds of sign relations across multiple modalities.Building onSilverstein's (2009) analysis of the interdiscursive chains of signification linking private and public rituals, this article examines how writing in the form of votive text‐artifacts is used byGuatemalan devotees to a popular saint as a public metasemiotic index substantiating the successful performance of their private ritual encounters, contributing to our broader understanding of writing's semiotic potential in ritual communication.

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