Vision, subalternity, and religious imaginary in southern Italy

Vision and divine voice, however defined, are at the heart of religious experience. The meeting with the Other sustains new ways of life and grants deep transformations in subjectivity. After chronicling the difficulty, indeed outright impossibility, of circumscribing and defining these complex experiences, as well as the opacity of the dominant categories that have been adopted by sociology, anthropology, phenomenology, and psychiatry, this article explores three case histories from southern Italy. Each one reveals a particular knot where private (and traumatic) experience has incorporated historical horizons and collective anxieties. By adopting a historical and comparative perspective, the author investigates how visions, voices – and more generally the encounter with transcendence – enable subalterns to deal with suffering and marginality and, more importantly, to build a view of how the world is and works. Finally, the article suggests that these experiences allow a transformation of the nostalgia for agency into new ‘horizons of expectation’.