Usos sociales de las velas. Aproximación desde el análisis de materiales visuales

• Main Author: Esmeralda Ballesteros Doncel
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) 2014-05-01
• Series: EMPIRIA: Revista de Metodología de Ciencias Sociales
• Subjects: Candle Lighting; Material Culture; Intangible Heritage; Emotions; Visual Sociology
• Online Access: http://e-spacio.uned.es/revistasuned/index.php/empiria/article/view/12122/11442

States of devotion, sensual romances and esoteric rites are held in the light ofthe candles. This functional commodity is used as a ‘ritual artifact’, incorporatedwith creativity to social events of dissimilar orientation. In this paper the imageused as a resource document has revealed the ubiquity and repetition with whichcandles are lit in cultural practices as ‘atrezzo’ and/or metaphor. The analysisof four contemporary frameworks which demonstrate the presence of a ‘candlelighting’ –Decoration of public places, protest actions, popular mourning andmemorials- suggested, on the one hand, the importance of aestheticization processesand on the other hand, the centrality for this expression to evoke removethe symbolic heritage. Both mechanisms -ethics and aesthetics- described conditionsof possibility in the activation of human emotions that regulate, imperceptibly,cultural systems in social life.