Body parts lie scattered around the B. Carroll Reece Museum. One table contains legs and feet. Another displays hands. A table of wooden carved ears rests against the wall as entire bodies stand motionless on pedestals.
The creaky floor and hissing radiator inside the old building add to the eeriness.
The body parts are not some endeavor by the university’s medical school, but they are “part” of a haunting ritual.
Carved from wood and wax or embossed into metal, the eerie elements of Carroll Reece’s latest exhibit are part of the “ex-voto” tradition in Brazil.
An “ex-voto” is a representation of an afflicted body part, or in some cases, the entire body. After the wound or ailment is healed, the healing “ex-voto” is deposited at a shrine.
These rare objects were collected in 1996 by Dr. Lindsey King, a professor in the sociology and anthropology department at ETSU, at two locations.
Some were found in the town of Canidid in northeast Brazil and the others were gathered at a shrine to St. Francis.
King was working on her doctoral dissertation when they were collected. “One of my professors had been there so I was quite compelled to go there [Brazil],” she said.
Her journeys to gather ex-votos furthered King’s doctoral study and documentation of healing, hope and beliefs – or what the people of Brazil call “Milagres do f” or miracles of faith, she said.
This miraculous tradition can be traced back to civilizations pre-dating the Greek and Roman societies.
It “is, today, a vital part of the folk Catholicism of the Americas,” King said in a brochure on the exhibit.
In fact, so many “ex-votos” are made and deposited at different shrines each year, the brochure says, that monks have no choice but to destroy them.
At the end of the year they are burned, so very few people outside the culture have seen one.
The monks living at the shrine to St. Francis of Assisi – whom the Brazilians call “Sao Francisco das Chagas,” or St. Francis of Wounds – graciously allowed King to bring a few of the “ex-votos” back so she could tell their story and teach their meaning, she said.
The images are created, she says, as an offering, for “payment of a spiritual contract.
When a person is wounded or has a medical condition, the Catholics in Brazil fashion one of these objects.
They make a promise to the saint that when the wound is healed they will “make a pilgrimage and/or make an ex-voto in fulfillment of their part of the vow,” the brochure says, sometimes traveling a great distance to deposit the image at one of the shrines in northeast Brazil.
King is careful not to call these items “art.” “They are not art,” she says.
“They are a manifestation of what these people consider miracles in their lives.”
This display will be on exhibit at Reece Museum until Feb. 29. King is also holding a lecture Wednesday, Feb. 4 at 2:30 p.m. in the gallery where the work is displayed, to explain her work and answer questions about the exhibit.
For museum hours, directions or information, call the Reece Museum at 439-4392.

Author