Religious material culture is one of the predominant vehicles through which Italian Americans in New York City, and on the Eastern seaboard more broadly, have performed and preserved their ethnic and religious identity. Joseph Sciorra’s Built With Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City explores aspects of these traditions that make them uniquely Italian American, and what they can tell us about broader issues: the nature of tradition, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, and the notion of longue durée in the study of folklore.

The book is first and foremost a study in tradition: how religious materiality that began in Italian peasant communities was adapted to the new urban American context by immigrants. It illustrates tradition not as static repetition, but as a constant process of re-imagination and modification. Thus the saints’ shrines that began in Italy as trees or stones eventually morphed into niches and stone pillars into which human figures of saints were carved or set. In the urban landscape of New York, they became yard shrines. While the idea that tradition is a creative process in which individuals play a key role is not news to folklorists, this study demonstrates the process in great detail.

But how and why does tradition persist? How do individual tradition bearers decide to combine aesthetics of the festa illuminations with those of the presepio and department store Christmas displays to give birth to the decorated, brightly lit Christmas houses of the New York suburbs? And why do these traditions continue in the face of disapproval from clergy, neighborhood associations, and arbiters of social taste? Here is where Sciorra makes significant theoretical contributions to the argument. With respect to Italian Americans, he illuminates three aspects of habitus that have persisted even in the face of broader cultural criticism and stigmatization: the presence of the sacred in the mundane, the idea of ensoulment, and the public, communal nature of religious expression.

The traditions in this book repeatedly call attention to the fact that despite Christian religious teachings and priestly exhortations, for Italians and Italian Americans the material world is not profane; sacredness is immanent in the physical world and made manifest through materiality. This is most evident in domestic altars, the presepio, with its glorification of the quotidian world, and its outdoor counterpart, the Christmas display. Moreover, natural spaces, such as the park in Rosebank on Staten Island that houses the grotto of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, are thought to be suffused with the numinous – to the extent that some respondents preferred them to churches. The sacrality of the physical world and the immanence of the divine characterize vernacular expressions of religiosity from the Italian peninsula, and the Mediterranean more broadly, going back at least to Roman times, and very likely beyond. Considering the effects of Christianization, with its emphasis on the corruption of physical matter and the promise of eternal salvation, this represents an extraordinary example of longue durée.

Sciorra calls attention to the fact that one important characteristic of Italian American aesthetics in religious materiality is the centrality of the human figure. Whether a saint’s statue in a yard shrine or grotto, a representation of the holy family, shepherds, or the three wise men in a presepio, or Santa Clause reigning supreme in a Christmas yard display, these human representations are accorded a degree of personhood; they are endowed with a soul, spoken about in the personal, and sometimes thought to be protecting or watching over the family, house, or neighborhood in which they are found. This is a manifestation of what I call “the enchanted worldview” I found among Italian healers and magic-workers in Campania, Emilia-Romagna, and Sardinia, which extends, of course, to their clients. It is a feature of the religious imagination that allows people to project power, will, and intention into inanimate objects for the purpose of relating to them more closely. Rather than being understood as a primitive or childlike feature, this aspect of the religious imagination needs to be seen as a doorway to creativity: a way to transform emotions, even life tragedies, in a creative and ultimately healing way.

A third feature of Italian American vernacular Catholicism is the communal nature of religious expression. Yard shrines, presepii, holiday decorated houses, grottoes, and processions are public expressions of faith; they are performative declarations and manifestations of their makers’ identity. Moreover, their makers often conceive of them as gifts or vows – offerings to both the sacred and the community. Here, we need to understand the role of the gift in elevating the giver’s social and sacred capital in both the eyes of the deity and those of the community. While Christianity eliminated the need to sacrifice to many gods through the single sacrifice of Christ for human salvation, the need for this public process nonetheless persisted because of its efficacy as a means of propitiation and redistribution – a way for those who had been blessed to express their gratitude while sharing some of their blessings with the community (and thus avoiding envy, the bane of societies everywhere). Italian ethnologist Clara Gallini’s concept of “il consume del sacro” (the consumption of the sacred) (Gallini 1971) is transposed into a consumer economy.

The term longue durée, meaning “long duration,” has been used by scholars since the late 1800s to refer to folklore’s historicity, originally with the idea that folklore represented a survival of archaic practices. While I do not wish to return to the days of survivalism, folklorists are in a unique position to address historicity and the persistence of traditions through time and across space. The line connecting Italian American religious materiality to the material traditions of peasant communities in Italy can be extended into an even deeper past: we can ask, “What are the features of the Italian American habitus that are consistent with what we know about historical traditions in the Mediterranean? Can we distill principles that undergird these expressions that are uniquely Italian, even pre-Italian (meaning before the unification of Italy in 1866) or older, stretching back centuries into the Roman and pre-Roman past?” Asking these kinds of questions is useful in two ways: it can help historians and archaeologists better comprehend past cultural and religious practices, and it can help us understand why certain groups might resist specific forms of cultural and religious change—e.g., why relatively few Italian American Catholics have converted to evangelical Protestantism, compared, for example, to Latin American Catholics—while being drawn to others.

Like the handmade saints’ shrines, presepii, and vernacular grottoes of this book, all fruits of the labor of Italian Americans, this book itself is “un lavoro ben fatto”: a job well done. Informed by a deep theoretical knowledge and command of history and literature, richly annotated and illustrated, appropriately reflexive, and the result of many years of fieldwork and community engagement, it is a beautifully written and produced piece of work.

Work Cited

Gallini, Clara. 1971. Il Consume del Sacro: Feste Lunghe di Sardegna. Roma: Laterza.

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[Review length: 1166 words • Review posted on March 30, 2016]