Bones, Blood, Wax, and Papal Potencies: Neo-Baroque Relics in Mexico
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Mexico the dispatching of relics—body parts, skin, blood, or other personal objects with saintly residue—has become relatively commonplace. With a focus on the 2011 tour of the wax effigy and relics of Pope John Paul II, this essay draws on recent work at the intersection of religion, aesthetics, materiality, death, and violence to reveal the unique dimensions, coherence, and patterns of movement within contemporary Catholic Church evangelism that is necessarily both spiritual and political. In emphasizing the role of media, I develop two main lines of exploration: first, the dynamics of contemporary mediatic global Catholicism which has increased its reliance on images and objects such as relics; and second, the media-spectacle of narco-violence through which images of dead bodies circulate and saturate the Mexican social imaginary. I suggest that critical scholarly attention to Catholicism as a dynamic theopolitical infrastructure is critical for a broader and more dimensioned anthropology of Christianity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it