Believing is seeing. Discursive establishment of the miracle among the population of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries

Abstract

The article analyzes the discursive establishment of the miracle in the religious sensibilities of the population of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, the Spanish American colony Empire, based in Bogota, during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He turned to the identification of miraculous events both in the territory (cities, towns and villages of indians from the central part of NRG) as the reports and descriptions of them are made in relationships or travel diaries written by clerics of different regular and secular orders and a typology of the facts identified was performed. The methodology was oriented from three views of miracles: the discursive construction from the social appropriation of these phenomena, the popular acceptance of an unexpected event and symbolic configuration that these were in the process of social cohesion between this and other provinces of Nueva Granada territory; also four categories of miracles were identified: those of an image on itself, assistance, physical and thaumaturgic; these, in turn, were grouped as impersonal, individual or collective.