The web of social tensions and the feast of Corpus Christi:

contributions to religion and memory

Abstract

The investigation conducted in this work is sustained by the relationship between religion and memory—more specifically the idea of collective memory and social frameworks of memory—to understand, among other points, the issue of religious memory and the interests through which the religious factor manifests itself within society as a whole. Above all, regarding the sociological bias of representativeness and identity of collective memory, we will analyze the works of Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) as a theoretical framework within this approach. In this sense, we seek to answer the following questions: Is religion reduced to memory? What fixes this collective memory? What is the contribution of this thought to the Science of Religion? Through these lines, we will elucidate this discussion in an attempt to understand the feast of Corpus Christi as an object of these resignifications and reformulations of religious practices, in a process that can only be understood as one of long duration (longue durée). However, the focus of this work is not to reconstruct the origins of this popular feast, but rather to perceive what is related to memory—especially religious memory—as discussed and theoretically justified by Halbwachs. According to Jacques Le Goff in History and Memory (1990), memory is approached as something dynamic, socially constructed, and linked to the identity of groups.