The echo of the world: The castaway, the Garabandal apparitions, and the crisis of presence

Abstract

In the early 1990s, while I was conducting an ethnographic study in a psychosocial rehabilitation center in Barcelona for people suffering from psychosis, a patient and informant gave me four letters that he had supposedly sent to various recipients. Only recently did I discover that these letters, which warned of terrible catastrophes, were related to the Marian apparitions of Garabandal in the 1960s in Spain, and that their recipients had all been involved in this amazing event. This discovery led me to attempt an ethnographic reparation, and to reconsider the letters as a way of inhabiting the world. With this objective and drawing on Ernesto de Martino's concept of “crisis of presence,” I propose to understand the informant's experience as an extreme example of the porosity of presence. I conclude that the letters can be understood as the affected person's struggle for being in a human history. [crisis of presence, Garabandal apparitions, reflexivity, schizophrenia].