Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the object-oriented ontology of miracle and how the miracle contributes to the remembering of the forgotten place associated with the image of the Virgin Mary, the local public water supply system and the architecture of the baroque pilgrimage church in an abandoned village .

Paper long abstract:

In West Bohemian abandoned village known as a famous pilgrimage place in past, two unusual events (survive of the fall from the church's roof and new spring of water in strange place) happened at the beginning of the 21st century which were described as miracles. The miracle has the paradoxical position in social sciences. It is conceptualized as a real social fact of unreal events evaluated as a projection of the social categories to the objects of the naive belief of believers. One way how to avoid the paradox is to focus on the materiality, how it facilitates the existing relations and contributes to the creation of frames of reference wherein the miracle is detectable. The paper is based on my fieldwork at the abandoned village and deals with the interrelatedness of the image of the Virgin Mary (a copy of the famous miraculous image of the Virgin Mary from Passau painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder), the local public water supply system and the architecture of the baroque pilgrimage church and how they contributed to the negotiation process about what is real and unreal in the context of two unusual events. Drawing on Latour's notion of factish (Latour 1999), paper explores the object - oriented ontology of miracle and how it contributes to the remembering of the forgotten pilgrimage place associated with the material objects.