This article analyses Torín—a non-lethal form of bullfighting associated with patron-saint festivities in the Department of Paraguarí, Paraguay—as a dynamic instance of Latin American vernacular religion. Moving beyond frameworks that view such events merely as contested heritage or residual folklore, the study situates Torín at the intersection of Guaraní cosmologies, Jesuit mission history, and contemporary lived Catholicism. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork (2011–2024) and archival research, I argue that Torín constitutes a "contact zone" (Pratt, Profession 91:33–40, 1991) in which diverse ontologies meet and are negotiated. The analysis focuses on three dimensions. First, it examines the material theology of pyporé (sacred footprints) attributed to the syncretic figure of Saint Thomas/Pa'i Sumé and shows how these traces anchor an apostolic history in the Paraguayan landscape (Cadogan, 1959; Combès, Anthropos 106:99–114, 2011); González Torres, 2003). Second, it explores the ontological status of the bull not as a passive victim but as a co-celebrant and spiritual agent, whose presence activates a logic of conviviality rather than sacrificial death (Descola & Lloyd, 2013; Marvin, 1994); Mitchell, 1991); Viveiros de Castro, J R Anthropol Inst 4:469–488, 1998)). Third, it interprets the ritual arena as a site of "corporal prayer" in which bodily risk functions as a non-lethal sacrificial offering embedded in conditions of rural precarity and popular Catholic economies of vow and exchange (Parker, 1996. By reframing Torín through the lenses of material religion (Meyer, 2010), the ontological turn, and lived religion (Orsi, J Sci Study Relig 42:169–174, 2003), the article shows how rural communities actively appropriate Christian narratives to assert a distinctive, autochthonous relationship with the divine and the nonhuman world. The Paraguayan case invites a rethinking of how animals, landscapes, and saints co-produce religious life and complicates simple oppositions between tradition and modernity, cruelty and devotion. The article also attends to the gendered distribution of participation and clarifies the analytic use of "agency" by distinguishing local attributions from the conceptual vocabulary of animism and nonhuman agency debates.
