Ottavia Paternò

Ottavia Paternò is a Visiting Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), funded by the Fyssen Foundation Postdoctoral Grant. She holds a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris (2021). Her research focuses on the ethnography of intimacy, religion, and everyday life in urban Argentina, particularly exploring domestic Christianity through ritual practices like the rosary and the cult of the Virgin Mary.

Her doctoral research involved 18 months of fieldwork in Salta, Argentina, examining rural-to-urban migrant women’s devotional relationships with the Virgin Mary, emphasizing how these practices shape family life and kinship models. Her current project at LSE investigates the Catholic rosary’s role in fostering intimacy with the divine through ritual imagination, focusing on how mental imagery and emotion contribute to the formation of a Christian feminine ethos.

Research Interests: Anthropology of Christianity, ritual studies, kinship and reciprocity, gender studies, religion and imagination, urban anthropology.

Awards:

• Fyssen Foundation Postdoctoral Grant

Grants/Projects: Her work is supported by the Fyssen Foundation, and her book project expands on her thesis, Living with the Virgin Mary. Domestic relations to the Virgin Mary in a contested Christianity (Salta Capital, Argentina).