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Paper short abstract

Vigils of 'Canto a lo Divino' in Chile configure spaces where sound, image, and gesture fold/unfold heterogeneous temporal and ontological registers. Multimodality emerges from the field itself, introducing indeterminacy that blurs stable binaries.

Paper long abstract

This proposal examines the vigils of ‘Canto a lo Divino’ in central Chile; a ritual-devotional practice of Catholic roots enacted in rural domestic spaces that articulates poetic song, memory, collective listening, gesturality, and religious images. Through sensory ethnography, I explore the conditions under which these vigils generate forms of attention and knowledge that resist stable categorizations.

Multimodality emerges from the field itself. The ritual operates as a suture that folds/unfolds temporal registers (past, present, future) and ontological ones (heaven and earth, human and divine), introducing indeterminacy: they coexist without resolving into a single form. Sound, image, gesture and time blur oppositions between extraordinary and everyday, individual and collective. Altars, songs, and gestures converge, configuring thresholds where the divine can manifest through simultaneities that remain open.

Working ethnographically with these practices involves inhabiting forms of listening that attend to multiple registers: embodied memories, community archives, popular theological knowledges, immersive sensory experiences. Sustained collaboration with ‘cantores’ and ‘cantoras’ opens moments where other ways of knowing reconfigure academic analysis.

I propose that these contemporary ritual practices cultivate forms of collective relation that operate from logics distinct from dominant linear and productive temporalities. By sustaining spaces where ambiguity remains open and opposing categories coexist, the vigils offer modes of weaving worlds traversed by polarizations, keeping encounter possible without demanding synthesis or definitive resolution.