‘The Borja Christ’: about memes and sacred images 1 Renata de Castro Menezes 2 God is no longer frowning. His wrinkles, his lined mouth, are expression marks from smiling at me so much. Adélia Prado, Brazilian poet Over recent decades the social sciences have been immersed in a series of intra and interdisciplinary debates concerning art objects, both from a renewed interest in the theme of material culture, or the relations between art, culture and society. 3 ‘Objects’ or ‘things’ have become valued for their heuristic potential when it comes to interpreting the relations between the body, the senses and materialities, or reformulating our conceptions of the subject/object relation, investigating processes of transformation (which involve forms of production, mobilities of exchange and practices of use and consumption), and also analyzing policies and 1 This article was originally published in Portuguese, as MENEZES, R.C. . Reflexões sobre a imagem sagrada a partir do Cristo de Borja . In: Patrícia Reinheimer; Sabrina Parracho Sant Anna. (Org.). Reflexões sobre arte e cultura material. Rio de Janeiro: Folha Seca, 2013, p. 235-263. and it can be downloaded at: http://r1.ufrrj.br/wp/ppgcs/2014/02/24/docentes-do-ppgcs-publicam-livro-sobre-arte- baixe-gratuitamente/ . My thanks to Patrícia Reinheimer and other colleagues from Cultis/UFRRJ for the invitation and encouragement to present this work. I also thank Daniel Bitter for his kind help in editing the images. The text is an outcome of the project “Devotion and forms of sociability in festivals and everyday life,” funded by the Young Scientists of Our State Program, of the Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support Foundation/FAPERJ. 2 Doctor of Anthropology, Assistant Professor (Level IV) of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 3 In order to help the reader situate these debates, these have been fed by books like those of Strathern 1990, 1999, Thomas 1991, Weiner 1992, Gell 1998, Severi 2007, or collections like those edited by Appadurai 1990, Marcus & Myers 1995, Miller 1998, 2005, Myers 2001, Westermann 2005, Tilley 2006, Henare Holbraad & Wastell 2007, and others. These discussions can also be found in special issues of classic periodicals in the area, such as the Spring 2002 issue of Sciences Humaines, issue 165 of L’Homme in 2003, issue 2 of volume 54 of Social Analysis, issue 13 of Gradhiva, published in 2011, and volume 14, 2007, of Archeologial Dialogues, as well as, obviously, articles in various leading periodicals from the area. It is also visible in the flourishing of more specialized journals on the theme, such as Res – Anthropology and Aesthetics, Journal of Material Culture and Material Religion.