Curving the social, or, why

antagonistic rituals in Brazil

are variations on a theme
Matan Shapiro Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

What can we learn about religious diversity in Brazil if we isolate ritual practices from their sociocultural
surround? Using vocabulary developed by Don Handelman in his framework of ritual in its own right,
I discuss this question in the context of low-income Northeast Brazil. I demonstrate that Afro-Brazilian
possession rites and Christian-Evangelical prayers (oraca
o) transform the lives of the persons who
practise them in ways that are intrinsic to their self-organization, internal complexity, and
differentiating curves. I consequently argue that these rites are not representations of antagonistic
moral prescriptions for good living but rather variations on a single theme of sociality.

As elsewhere in Brazil, everyday life in the state of Maranhao is entwined with an array of
otherworldly forces (Eduardo 1966 [1948]). These range from God, His Son Jesus, and the
Virgin Mother to the vast arsenal of saints and enchanted spiritual entities that include
caboclos, voduns, eguns, angels, and demons (M.M.R. Ferretti 1994). Competing spiritual
doctrines locally perform rituals that set in motion exchange relations with some of
these forces at the expense of others, thus producing mutually exclusive fields of practice.
In this article I will examine this process of differentiation in contemporary Maranhao
by comparing possession episodes in the local Afro-Brazilian doctrine of Tambor de
Mina and prayer (oraca o) ceremonies in various Christian-Evangelical congregations.1
I endorse this comparison for two reasons. First, during respective processes
of conversion and initiation, practitioners of Evangelical and Afro-Brazilian
spiritual doctrines engage in oraca o and possession so frequently that the ongoing
repetition of these two events marks the public institutionalization of their religious
involvement. These two rites thus become contested ethnographic hotspots that
both fuel and reflect the contemporary struggle for hegemony within the Brazilian
pluralistic spiritual economy (Casanova 2013). Yet, to date, literature on religious
diversity in Brazil lacks a relational comparison of these core rituals, in terms
of their internal dynamics as well as of the kinds of ethical subjectivities they
set out to produce. My analysis will begin to address this gap in the Brazilianist
literature.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

48 Matan Shapiro

Second, I want to explicate and expand Don Handelmans insightful proposition to

look at society from the point of view of rituals rather than automatically fixate the
scholarly theoretical gaze on the opposing stance, wherein wider social frameworks
always-already contextualize religious events (cf. Kapferer 1979). Handelman argues:
What particular rituals are about, what they are organized to do, how they accomplish what they do,
are all empirical questions whose prime locus of inquiry is initially within the rituals themselves. The
[analytic] razor slices open vectors of studying ritual within itself and its doing, within its interior
dynamics and practices, and not initially from within the wider sociocultural fields within which
ritual is embedded (2004a: 3).

Handelman calls this ritual in its own right: an analytic move that first detaches the
event from its surround in order to examine that which is happening within it and
only then links ritual dynamics with the structures of meaning and action that buttress
everyday life. By applying Handelmans method to antagonistic ritual practices on the
Brazilian socioeconomic margins, I will outline exciting new empirical possibilities for
the study of religious diversity in Brazil and beyond.
In what follows I will analyse oraca o and possession as self-sustaining systems
that are structured differently from within through differing degrees of complexity
and self-organization (Handelman 2004a: 10-17). Further using Handelmans unique
vocabulary, I will demonstrate that each of these rites curves into its sociocultural
surround in different ways. I will, however, insist that these distinct types of curvatures
are not mere reflections on or a function of inherently antithetical systems of value.
Rather, I argue that since in low-income urban Maranhao practitioners of both
Evangelical and Afro-Brazilian religions adhere to common notions of intimacy, family
life, and relatedness, possession and oraca o are best conceived as variations on a single
theme of sociality. I will begin to unpack this argument with a thorough elucidation of
Handelmans analytic razor.
Ritual in its own right: self-organization, complexity, and the curve

Rituals are social forms (Rappaport 1999: 24-31) that (1) are distinct from everyday
practice; (2) are demarcated in time and space; (3) are formal; (4) are encoded by
rules; and (5) convey a meta-message that transcends the activity itself (cf. Handelman
1998: 187-9; Seligman, Weller, Puett & Simon 2008: 70). Handelman goes beyond this
definition to argue that in the very practice of separating itself from its social surround,
the ritual contains the surround, thereby acting on the surround through what is done
within the ritual (2004a: 12). He thus develops a unique gaze: rather than assume
a priori a symbiotic relationship between the flow of everyday life (the surround)
and the activities that take place during demarcated ritual events, he treats those
events as distinct phenomena that hold together coherently and cohesively from within
themselves (Baecker 2001). He argues:
What we are calling ritual, however loosely, is treated here as a class of phenomena whose forms,
in greatly differing kind and degree, are characterized by interior complexity, self-integrity, and
irreducibility to agent and environment. Thinking of ritual in this way is attempting to recover
aspects of its phenomenality, yet doing so in the domain of the micro, the domain in which ritual
phenomena are practiced (2004a: 10).

For Handelman, this is not a purely theoretical abstraction. Rather, ritual in

its own right is continuous with what research interlocutors cross-culturally tell
anthropologists, namely that rituals are not prosaic; they are deliberately organized
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66
Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

Curving the social 49

to do something beyond commonplace experience. Pushing this heuristic to its limits,

Handelman thinks of rituals as self-contained systems that compel degrees of selforganization and complexity. Self-organization refers to procedures intrinsic to the
ritual framework, which regulate action in it and thus generate degrees of autonomy
from external intervention. In Handelmans words, the phenomenon organizes . . .
the phenomenon as it unfolds (2004a: 11).2 Degrees of self-organization are linked to
differing levels of complexity, which Handelman associates with the intensity of mental
and emotional states produced within some rituals as opposed to less intense passages
in others. Ritual events that emulate the humdrum of mundane occurrences are more
continuous with their sociocultural environment and less complex in terms of their
self-organization and internal integrity. Handelman summarizes this as follows:
I suggest . . . that within ritual forms, autopoietic qualities of self-organization and qualities of
complexity go hand in hand. Perhaps the greater the degree of interior complexity within a ritual, the
greater will be its tendency to self-organization. And so, the greater the tendency to self-organization,
the greater the capacity of the ritual for temporary autonomy from its sociocultural surround. Then,
one step further, the greater this relative autonomy, the greater the capacity of the ritual to interiorize
the distinction between itself and its surround and so to act on the latter from within itself, through
the dynamics of the ritual design (2004a: 12).3

Handelman conceives of ritual dynamics as literal curves or folds in the continuity

of space and time (Deleuze 1993): the more rituals are self-organizatory (sic) and
complex, the deeper they curve (Handelman 2004a: 12). Once again, this is not a
metaphor but an ideography of existential processes taking place within demarcated
ritual events (2004a: 15). The curve enfolds as suspension of regular social order, a
distinct dynamic that participants feel on both sensorial and cognitive levels, and it is
this experience of enclosure that makes the event temporarily autonomous from its
surround (2004a: 12-13). Handelman ultimately claims that the distinctiveness of rituals
emerges as they form; it is a property of their internal, self-sustaining rhythm.
For example, the complexity at White Hart Lane football stadium on Sunday
afternoon is higher than that achieved while waiting in a queue for a London bus
on Monday morning. This is so not only due to differing levels of effervescence, but
also because the queue albeit structurally distinct from regular movement to and fro
is in concert with ordinary activity. After all, people cut queues and cross through them,
thus interrupting their self-sustaining integrity. Whereas one reason to watch the match
is the majesty of good football in and of itself (alongside a desire to see Spurs win),
the queue is primarily contingent on objectives external to it, such as getting to work
on time. Both these events thus mould time and space in particular ways, but their
respective curvatures are utterly different. Curvature during the match resembles a
parabola: gestures, symbols, and sounds curve inwards and bend to forge participants
experiences in the transformation of feeling, poise, and tact. In fact, the curve is even
spatially embedded in the rectangular/oval shape of the stadium. Queues, however, are
but a minor diversion from a straight line, almost overlapping with everything that
happens around them. In London, queues literally tend to self-form as straight lines,
and this is not reducible to agent or environment (Handelman 2004a: 10).
Handelmans razor enables comparison of queues with football matches on the
basis of their dynamics, not their structure (contra Turner 1969). By focusing on
curves, Handelman relinquishes the image of unique ritual events surrounded by
concentric fields of significance against which they are understood and from which they
obtain both their moral and aesthetic properties (Geertz 1973).4 This shift of register
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

50 Matan Shapiro

evinces new analytic descriptions that are ethnographically dependent on degrees of

interior complexity, differing levels of autonomous existence vis-`a-vis social order,
and the particular ways by which the contingency of ritual design is reintegrated into
mundane life through time. I now turn to demonstrate how this methodological tool-kit
enables rethinking the relations between spiritual doctrines competing for hegemony
in contemporary Brazil.
The ethnographic context

The state of Maranhao is located in the geopolitical division between Northeast and
North Brazil, bordering from east to west the states of Piau, Tocantins, and Para. So far
I had conducted twenty months of field research in Maranhao, living most of the time
in a low-income neighbourhood which I fictionally call Santo-Amaro in the capital
city Sao Lus. My work included explorations into the cosmogony of local networks of
relatedness, focusing on how research interlocutors constitute interpersonal relations
both in the course of mundane encounters and within the procedural procurement of
intimacy with the divine. I thus routinely visited several local Evangelical congregations
and one main Afro-Brazilian terreiro (worship house).
Although moral disagreement between proponents of these two spiritual doctrines
did surface, differentiation between them boiled down to contrasting typologies of
otherworldly entities with whom practitioners created viable exchange relations (Prandi
1997). My interlocutors pragmatically distinguished images of cosmic vitality through
the phenomenal self-organization of the ritual practices that underscored them, rather
than that primarily being the result of profound reflection on the mysteries of the
sublime (Goldman 2007; Kramer 2005; Pares 2001: 92; cf. Das 2012: 134; Handelman
2004b: 214, 219-20). For example, my friend Wilson, a Presbyterian pastor, once
commented:5
My faith in Jesus and anothers faith in entities that possess him are antagonistic [because] whoever
receives these entities later doesnt remember what happened to them . . . Now, I am a channel of
God when He manifests in the world [e.g. glossolalia] but this does not invade my intellect. God
doesnt change my personality; He waits for me to work it out. He gives me tools . . . but He does not
turn off that person who is me.

Wilsons emphasis on ritual action challenges the association of religious lifestyles with the truth-value of certain moralizing narratives (Robbins 2009), which
still dominates the three main analytic modalities dealing with spiritual diversity in
Brazil (Pierucci & Prandi 2000).6 First, there is the rational choice model, which
advances the assumption that members of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches in
Brazil cultivate relations with the Holy Spirit mainly to access faith-healing (Lehmann
2007). A prominent advocate of this model, Andrew Chesnut (1997; 2003), argues that
consumer-orientated logics inform worship practice in Brazil from a micro-economic
perspective that cuts across spiritual doctrines. In this formulation, rituals are significant
ethnographically mostly in terms of their practical use-value for the sick and as means
for the accumulation of socioeconomic capital, rank, or status.
Second, there is the identity politics model (Burdick 1998). Arguing against
socioeconomic reductionism, Stephan Selka (2005) and John Burdick (2005) delineate
religious discourses as markers of social boundaries in political struggles to override
long-standing racial discrimination in Brazil (Collins 2011; Gill 1998). They correctly
identify the paradoxes associated with an essentialist root metaphor of the Brazilian
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66
Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

Curving the social 51

Negro constructed as generic to Afro-Brazilian religious practices which collides

with the flexible negotiability characterizing both the colour and religious spectrums
in Brazil (Segato 1998). However, they portray Afro-Brazilian religious sessions and
festivals as arenas for semiotic construction of blackness that empower marginalized
Afro-Brazilian women in particular (Sterling 2010).
Finally, there is the moral hostility model, wherein religious practitioners actively
seek the incorporation of mutually exclusive values into the practice of everyday life.
For example, Stephan Selka (2010) argues that Evangelical moral asceticism constitutes
a technology of the self (Foucault 2000) through which low-income practitioners
of Evangelical faiths differentiate themselves from practitioners of Afro-Brazilian
doctrines. Alternatively, Maya Mayblin (2010) illustrates how Catholic prototypes of
ethical personhood take part in the production of gendered spaces, thus inspiring
situated power struggles between men and women in the domestic sphere. Both these
scholars focus on intersubjective negotiations of virtue as the social background against
which rituals are understood analytically.
Despite obvious theoretical discrepancies, these three frameworks analyse rituals
from the point of view of their sociocultural contexts. In the first case, ritual is about
triumphant inventiveness contextualized as such by the hallmarks of a Lewisian culture
of poverty (Fry & Howe 1975). In the second, it is about forms of resistance (Selka 2005)
contextualized by the longue duree failure of Brazilian racial democracy to override
deeply rooted class and colour hierarchies (Ribeiro 2000). The third concerns the
horizons of personal agency contextualized by the ethical intricacies across discordant
religious praxes (Selka 2010). To reiterate Handelmans general critique, within these
frameworks ritual is perceived and made into a storehouse of symbols and scripts
originating in the world outside ritual, activated within ritual in prescribed ways on
predicated occasions, in order to inform and somaticize participants with appropriate
meanings and feelings related directly to their cultural world outside ritual (Handelman
2004a: 2).
Alternatively, it is possible to endorse Wilsons perspective and think about religious
diversity in Brazil through core rituals, which primarily refer to other rituals in terms of
their internal dynamics. I will adopt this method to compare oraca o and possession in
their own terms, that is, as effective means for communicating with the divine. This,
however, does not completely obviate the context. As both oraca o and possession
are central to respective processes of Evangelical conversion and Afro-Brazilian
initiation, they slowly elicit differentiation between these competing cosmogonic
projects. Their curves consequently become elements in the gradual constitution
of religious personhood at large, rather than that being primarily the product of
preconceived moral principles, by which persons somehow a priori become convinced
to engage in rituals. I begin to elaborate these claims by turning to possession.
Possession in Tambor de Mina: intense somatic climax with a deep
curvature

Tambor de Mina (hereafter Mina) originated in the states of Maranhao and Para in
the middle of the nineteenth century (M.M.R. Ferretti 2000a: 25-7). It draws on the
exchange of sacrifice, food, alcohol, and presents with enchanted spiritual entities
(encantados), which takes place during designated or unwitting episodes of possession.
Possessing deities are classified into lines (linhas) or nations (nacoes), each stretching
hierarchically from African Orixas at the top, through African voduns and Catholic
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

52 Matan Shapiro

saints, to spirits of the dead (eguns) and caboclos at the bottom (M.M.R. Ferretti
2000b).7 These entities reside and act in what is best described as a parallel reality,
to which Mina practitioners refer as the enchanted world (mundo da encantaria).
Entities from each of these categories and across the nations transgress the boundaries
of the world of encantaria into the human world in order to possess mediums, often
unexpectedly (Prandi 1997). The overall assemblage of entities that possess a particular
medium is referred to as that mediums chain (corrente), to which he or she is seen to be
interconnected throughout the temporality of possession. Here I will analyse possession
as a ritual with a deep curvature, which gradually transforms sets of relations both
within the terreiro and across wider networks of relatedness.
The life-history of Pai de Santo Carlos,8 in whose terreiro in Sao Lus I learned
about Mina cosmology, exemplifies this argument. Carlos was born in the hinterland of
Maranhao in the mid-1980s and from a young age suffered from mysterious illnesses.
When I was inside my mother, it was the vodum who took care of me, he explained.
[But] when I was born I had many health problems from one hour to the next. I was
already receiving entities at the age of one and two. Carlos was thus sent to live with
his parental grandmother Dona Silvanda in Sao Lus, where he was baptized at the
Mina terreiro in which she served as filha de santo (an initiated dancer). The local Pai
de Santo applied a service an act of witchcraft which stabilized Carloss condition.
Yet the problems persisted, and when he was 7, Carlos experienced his first recorded
possession. He asked for a blessing (benca o) from Seu Manezinho a caboclo from the
Legua family who was in possession of one of the dancers in the terreiro but when the
latter took his hand to bless it, Carlos fell (cair) into seizures. Carlos described that
moment as a form of synaesthesia:
It is like you fall into a bottomless pit, no light, as if your heart is about to explode from so much
acceleration. But . . . after this pain goes away, you feel peace . . . It is like the ground was cut open; as
if you try to touch the wall and it turns into water, everything escapes from you . . . it always begins
with dizziness which just gets stronger and stronger. When this happens that thing has already taken
you, and then it goes by the stages until you are totally possessed (see Fig. 1).

Despite healing rituals he sought throughout his childhood, Carlos continued to

suffer from intermittent, at times violent, possessions.9 His situation only worsened,
although he regularly served the entities as a drummer (abatazeiro) at the terreiro he
joined as a child. When Carlos was 15, his unwitting possessions became so frequent
that he had to stop working. Carlos said that this was also accompanied by intervals of
ill health and mental discontent that ultimately culminated in depression. At 19, Carlos
was drinking heavily and had by then left his teenage wife with the care of their two
babies. Then his life changed:
One day I left the house and went roaming through the streets of the city centre like a madman. I had
no destination. I stopped in front of a house . . . and a person [who stood there] told me I will
take you to a house of one person there. So I went to the house of Arao, the person who paved my
way into Tambor de Mina. At that moment there was an entity possessing him, called Dona Maria
Legua. She told me, I have been waiting for you here . . . Then she told me my whole life-story since
I was born until the time I arrived there at the house . . . she also said I had a burden (carga), I am
a person that has a [spiritual] position (posica o), and I need to look for a pai de santo to make an Or.

Or in Yoruba means head (Johnson 2002). It is an initiation ceremony that

both reveals and delineates the main entities responsible for the mediums destiny,
personal characteristics, and future worship obligations (S.F. Ferretti 1996).10 Carlos
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66
Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

Curving the social 53

Figure 1. Possessed dancers at Carloss terreiro. The circular movement curves bodies, time, and even
space as it distorts sight, sound, and smell. (Photo by the author.)

explained that mediums undertake this process literally in order to organize their
head (cabeca) and synchronize their capacity to receive (receber) the entities grouped
together in their chain. Or is crucial because although mediums are predestined to
receive these entities, they cannot simply choose the time and location of possession.
The entities themselves are said to compel mediums to abide by their eschatological
calling. When possession suddenly strikes, it is therefore treated as inevitable. Ignoring
unwitting possessions can cause illness, madness, discontent, or even death. Possession
is thus treated as a pivotal point of connectivity with otherworldly forces, whose social
implications differ significantly according to the mediums position within or outside
Mina (cf. Stoller 1997).
Organizing ones head distinguishes uncontrollable episodes of possession popularly
associated with depression and weakness from productive possessions that benefit both
the entities and the medium. As Or incorporated Carlos to a designated flow of caboclos
and vodums, it routinized possession within a self-organizing process of recursion.
Institutionalizing possession thus linked Carloss internal world (which included his
entities) with the sociocultural surround. Evidently, soon after his encounter with
Dona Maria Legua, Carlos moved in with his new girlfriend, Cleidiane. He began
practising possession at Cleidianes house and joined an established terreiro, where he
made new contacts. Through recurrent possessions he even started enacting witchcraft
for money.11 While initiation publicly confirmed that a transmission of knowledge and
symbolic powers had taken place (Favret-Saada 2012), it also singled out possession as
the concrete space in which internal and external worlds collided. As Carlos put it:
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

54 Matan Shapiro

I used to arrive home and Dona Maria Legua used to give me instructions . . . That
is how my chains (correntes) became aligned, my people (meu povo) began taking the
right path; they started working!
Carloss people worked so well that three years after his initiation he managed to
build his own terreiro in Santo-Amaro. As the story goes, one of his pombagiras12
received money and gifts from the clients who paid Carlos for his services as a witch,
and stored this away from his conscious reach. One morning a cabocla called Dona
Teresa possessed Carlos and revealed roughly 3,600 BRL accumulated to that point.
She then passed the money on to Carloss kinsfolk and ordered them to begin the
construction of the terreiro. According to Carlos, the entities themselves demanded this,
so they would have a place to descend (descer, i.e. manifest). Dona Teresa continued to
instruct the builders daily, and even personally travelled on top of Carlos to purchase
building materials in stores.13 Within three weeks, the terreiro was erected. By organizing
his head, Carlos thus gradually transformed destructive linkages with his entities to
productive co-operation, which entailed personal and collective growth.14
I contend that this transformation has become possible only within the accumulative
dynamic of Carloss possessions, which folded and unfolded, initially as a deep interior
sense of enclosure and then as a strong push into the surround. In the first stage, the
synaesthesia experienced during possession curved inwards to isolate Carlos from
meaningful others by temporarily suspending his regular mental capacities. During
these temporalities, he none the less developed intimate familiarity with his people, as
his close relations with Dona Maria Legua indicate. In the second stage, Carloss entities
began interacting/exchanging with wider local networks of relatedness at home, in the
terreiro and in the neighbourhood. Possession thus engendered new intimate linkages
between Carlos and meaningful others, both humans and nonhumans.15 Inspired by
Gregory Bateson, Don Handelman imagines this two-phase dynamic as a smoke
ring, a torus, turning in upon itself, giving itself a separable existence (2004a: 12-13).
Handelman describes this transient/emerging structure elegantly:
The social torus is constituted through a double movement: curving inwards, torqueing outwards,
through form recognizing itself within itself, and on the basis of this self-integrity moving outwards,
driving into broader cosmic and social worlds. The double movement simultaneously curving
towards closure and twisting towards openness baldly describes ritual in its own right, separable
yet inseparable from its surround. As separable, ritual can be examined as such. As inseparable, ritual
twists back into relations with the broader worlds within which it is embedded and from which it
takes form (2004a: 13).

Like a Mobius-strip loop, possession twisted and torqued into everyday life in
ways that at once isolated Carlos from and interconnected him with the networks
of intimate relations that intersected his person. This exfoliating dynamic recursively
integrated these episodes of synaesthetic agitation and self-enclosure into the regular
movement of mundane life. The self-organization and complexity characteristic of
Carloss possessions ultimately endowed his life with a new rhythm and a novel
configuration of both human and nonhuman kinsfolk. The depth of this curvature is
best appreciated in opposition to Evangelical rites in Maranhao, which work to reduce
ecstatic sensory alteration by the appropriation of rituals with a relatively flat curve. I
will now turn to analyse these Evangelical prayer rites, which, through delivering and
listening to the Word of God (a palavra de Deus), aim towards the generation of a
Christian conscience.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66
Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

Curving the social 55

o and the making of a Christian conscience in Maranh

Oraca
ao

Evangelicals in Brazil distinguish between four main oral performances:

orar/oraca o (orate), rezar (pray/prayer), louvar (praise/glorify), and pregar/pregaca
(preach/witness). While oraca o is carried out virtually everywhere and by anyone, the
other formulations normally require figures of authority and instituted ritual contexts.
Persons thus commonly and spontaneously group together for an oraca o, often standing
in a circle and closing their eyes, while one of them speaks to God on behalf of the group
as a whole. I focus on oraca o as a speech act whose relatively flat curvature entails a
slow transformation of intimate relations in the mundane.
I will begin with an oraca o that Presbyterian Pastor Darci carried facing the sickbed
of 40-year-old Genilson, who in 2000 had become quadriplegic after he was shot in the
back of the neck by a robber while he was living in Sao Paulo. Genilson has since been
living with his parents in the countryside of Maranhao, completely helpless and with
a notable depression. We stood around Genilsons bed Pastor Darci, Pastor Wilson,
Genilsons father, and myself and closed our eyes. We listened to Darcis deep, secure,
voice:
Oh God. God of mercy, God of all-mighty power, you are our sovereign, you are our creator . . . Now,
Lord, you know your stakes in relation to Genilson your son, who has already confessed to you . . .
and is journeying with you in his heart. Lord, help Genilson, oh Father! Take responsibility over this
life, my God. Oh, beloved God, strengthen his organism, his body, and strengthen also his conscience,
his thinking, his ideas, his heart. Beloved God, give him comfort, give him stability, give him assurance
(confianca), plenty of faith, perseverance, my Lord, [in] your ways and your greatness, so that he will
always be able to talk to the Lord. With joy we thank you, it is happiness to praise you, and in moments
of difficulty, oh Father, [moments] of pain and tribulation, that he be able to direct his gaze to you
. . . so that he will see your bliss; oh Lord, pour from your bliss, [and some] consolation . . . over this
life. Prevent all discomfort and pain, so that the Lord will be helping Genilson in everything. God!
Look at the other people who reside here and take responsibility, oh my Father (toma conta meu pai)!
Help with grace, strength, and health to your children, my Father, take responsibility over this house,
this environment here, the garden, the lands, everything that they grow, Father, help! Pay attention,
God, and bless them. We thank you in the name of Jesus your Son. Amen.

Darcis oraca o includes a fusion of tenses, pronouns, and speech styles that intertwine
pompous or formal Portuguese with down-to-earth, everyday slang (i.e. now, Lord,
you know your stakes . . . or toma conta). This fusion introduces a heteroglot quality
to Darcis dialogue with God (Bakhtin 1994: 74-80), and this invokes an ideological
polyphony shrouded under the authority of a unitarily authoritative voice.16 The
different socio-ideological groups (Bakhtin 1994: 75) imbued in the text (Faith Culture
followers, peasants, Genilsons family) thus compete over the appropriation of the
emotional harmony which is God, rather than simply absorb it effortlessly. This
underlying contestation signifies active enhancement and a certain pragmatism that
manifests in such practices as gazing at and speaking to the Lord. The call for God to
take responsibility ultimately constitutes Him as an omnipresent responder rather than
a silent bystander.
Importantly, within oraca o, words are not merely indicative, in the sense that
they do not only convey certain propositions about God or even about indwelling
Christian faith. Rather, approaching God by means of oraca o also necessarily serves as
an indirect speech act that targets the crowd of listeners (especially Genilson). As with
Fundamentalist witnessing in the United States, the speakers monologue reinstates a
relationship in which the performer assumes responsibility for a display of competence,
indirectly instructs the listener about how to interpret messages, and invites, elicits,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

56 Matan Shapiro

participation (Harding 2000: 42). This way, as Simon Coleman claims, words come
to create the very reality they purport to describe. Words of joy create happiness, and
those of defeat result in despair (2000: 131). Beyond devotion, Darci used the power of
words in order to evoke some sense of joy in Genilson.17
Many of my Evangelical interlocutors in Maranhao claimed that the creative force of
such rhetoric is pivotal in the constitution of a Christian conscience and self-control:
two aspects of a Protestant representational moral economy that Webb Keane (2002:
74-84) characterizes as embodied dematerialization focused on sincerity, authenticity,
and subjective freedom. Darcis oraca o could only become meaningful through this
active pursuit of conscience and spiritual growth. Its congenial style produced the
immanence of complacency, consolation, and perpetual benevolence as a property of
continuous conversation with God. It repetitively cited the sources and conventions of
spiritual authority (i.e. in the name of Jesus your son) as preconditions for the work of
conscience to emerge. Yet this process of emulation does not mean passive acceptance of
the narratives of others. Rather, it consummates in the development of an independent,
self-conscious, inner voice. Bakhtin summarizes this brilliantly:
Consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses
surrounding it . . . [W]hen thought begins to work in an independent, experimenting and
discriminating way, what first occurs is a separation between internally persuasive discourse and
authoritarian enforced discourse, along with a rejection of those congeries of discourse that do not
matter to us, that do not touch us . . . [O]nes own discourse and ones own voice . . . will sooner or
later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the others discourse (1994: 79).

Through redundant oracoes (as either speaker or listener), the Holy Spirit penetrates
the conscious mind and becomes a voice, a real person, who begins to recast [the
practitioners] inner speech . . . [This] seems to alter the very chemistry of desire
(Harding 2000: 47). Under these terms, Darcis oraca o in fact characterizes the
cultivation of ongoing affective relationships with God as intrinsic to salvation. Oraca o
is the site in which this salvation becomes tangible because it does not merely emphasize
a metaphysical relationship with God. Rather, these speech acts are utterly social in the
sense that they prescribe the acquisition of a particular kind of affective relations with
friends, neighbours, and family members, who all take an active part in this gradual
constitution of a Christian conscience (Birman & Machado 2012). Recursive sequences
of oracoes structurally demarcate a form for experiential immersion with the positive
affects shared vertically with God, as well as horizontally with meaningfully intimate
others. I now turn to analyse the curving dynamic of this process through the life-history
of Pastor Wilson.
o
The flat curve in oraca

For most of his childhood and adolescence, Wilson had been a devoted Catholic and a
member of Catholic youth groups in Santo-Amaro. Although already as a teenager he
began questioning his tutors in church about Catholic saint worship which he began
to think of as literally contrasting with the scriptures Wilson was appointed to teach
catechism as young as 15 years of age. He thus continued to practise Catholicism on a
daily basis for several more years. When he was 20, he nevertheless went through an
experience that was to become foundational to his eventual departure from the Catholic
Church. I quote his narrative at length:
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66
Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

Curving the social 57

I served in the army base in Alcantara [across the bay from Sao Lus], so I used to come back home
by boat every other weekend . . . On one of these journeys, about five kilometres from the shore, the
engine exploded and fire broke out. I could not enter the cabin to take a life-jacket because it was
full of black smoke . . . so I stayed on the deck and made an oraca o to God in a loud voice: my Lord
(Senhor), I know that there is no other God but you I know that Maria cannot hear me, I know that
Joao cannot hear me, I know that Sao Pedro cannot hear me, I know that none of the saints can hear
me but I know that you can save me, Jesus. And if you save me, I will serve you, I will become a
crente [believer or faithful]. Around me there was panic, the flames were closing in and you could
already feel their heat . . . At first I didnt want to jump into the water because I dont know how to
swim . . . [But] in that moment I cried out loud: Father, my life is in your hands. I climbed to the
other side of the fence, holding, imagining that something must happen so I will be saved. All of a
sudden I felt something next to my leg. It was a life-jacket hung right there from the external side of
the deck. I pulled it towards me and threw myself into the water.

Wilson remained in the water for several hours before he and the other passengers
were saved by rescue ships. Their original ship sunk, causing the death of four people.
When he arrived on the shore, Wilson went directly to the Catholic church in SantoAmaro, which he says was the only religious reference I had at that time. He describes
that experience vividly:
I entered, soaking wet, barefoot, still in uniform . . . I kneeled down and thanked God. I cried . . .
[because] I have never been in such an intense situation, in such salvation . . . I realized that despite
all that fear something created an impulse in me [to believe that he would be saved]. When I felt that
life-jacket next to my legs I immediately said Thank you, my Lord . . . There was no other life-jacket
fixed in such a way from the outside of the deck. And there were so many people there, how come
none of them saw that life-jacket before I did? I think it was a miracle done for me.

In church, Wilson decided he would actively seek an Evangelical congregation in

which to serve God. In the following months, he and his wife Tati began attending
sermons and services (cultos) in different Evangelical churches in Santo-Amaro. They
sought the most suitable for their own spiritual convictions. Wilson told me that
during that time he was continuously communicating with God through daily intervals
of oracoes, asking for the strength to make the right choice. On Holy Friday the next
year, Wilson and Tati attended a service at the Assembleia de Deus (Assembly of God)
in Santo-Amaro. When the local pastor started singing about depositing ones life to
Christ, Wilson recalled his promise to God:
When they appealed to come forward to the altar and hand your life over to Jesus, I went along.
I felt a huge force from within me, like a magnet that pulls you. It was exactly the same feeling I
had felt on the boat when I did that oraca o to Jesus: I felt shivers throughout my body, I felt that
something is touching me and as if penetrating into my life. At the same time I also felt something
flowing (fludindo) from me . . . I started crying because of this great peace. Actually the handing-over
(entrega) of my life was there on the boat, but at the church it was a public testimony.

Evolving Christian conscience was the pivotal aspect of Wilsons conversion, which
is methodologically inseparable from the appropriation of oraca o as an effective medium
of communication with God. Sequences of oracoes that lasted for years were intrinsic to
Wilson and his wifes decisions to join the Assembly of God and then, some years later,
to leave the congregation and join the Presbyterian Church. The official stamp, their
self-identification as believers (crentes), was celebrated in church; but that merely
publicized an internal shift that had been taking place over a long period of time
through recursive oracoes. Crucially, this gradual process swept through and rearranged
a wide range of social relations. For example, the couples conversion influenced Wilsons
parents and some of his brothers to join Evangelical circles, as well as most of Tatis
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

58 Matan Shapiro

Figure 2. Collective oraca

ao Lus. Still bodies form straight lines
o in an Evangelical congregation in S
that emit a flat curving of time and space. (Photo by the author.)

inner-circle family. They thus began to engage in collective oracoes either at home or
in church. On the other hand, distancing from Catholicism and at a later stage also
from the Assembly of God meant the suspension of ties with close friends. Through
time, collective oracoes have thus become signifiers for membership in a particular
congregation of believers (see Fig. 2).
The accumulative experience of emotional passages through years of oracoes
thus curved from the personal to the public sphere. Oracoes first signified reclusive
conversation between Wilson and God, but then, as markers of collective indebtedness
in a community of speakers and listeners, they engendered productive collaborations
with kin and kindred.18 Wilsons newly acquired Christian conscience thus inspired
a thorough rearrangement of the types of intimate relations that constituted his
person. However, unlike possession, which evinces deep curving with a strong sense
of enclosure, oraca o enfolds and unfolds flatly. Its performativity and intensity are
simply too contiguous with everyday discursive dialogues to create a complete vortex
inwards. I now turn to compare these two types of curves deep and flat in terms of
the ethical subjectivities they produce.
o and possession as variations
Ethics, subjectivity, and relatedness: oraca
on a theme

The rituals I surveyed above are core events that gradually become central activities for
being with others in local spiritual communities. Joel Robbins (2004) calls this gradual
process of integration moral reorientation: the adoption of new tastes and preferences
that direct and govern newly acquired religious life-styles. For example, balancing
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66
Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

Curving the social 59

between doing good (fazer o bem) and doing evil (fazer o mal) becomes crucial to forms
of subjection associated with an Afro-Brazilian religious life-style (Bastide 1978). Or,
as I heard several pastors in Maranhao rigorously preaching, overcoming temptation
(tentaca o) is a precondition for the reinstatement of the Kingdom of God. Under these
terms, preconceived moral attitudes direct that which the ritual is meant to achieve.
Across Brazil, Evangelicals and followers of Afro-Brazilian religions render their
cosmogonic disciplines mutually exclusive on such moral grounds. Some of my
Evangelical friends in Santo-Amaro, for example, claim that possession is the work
of demons who seek to steal, kill, and destroy (robar, matar, e destruir). Amongst Mina
practitioners, on the other hand, it is common to condemn Evangelicals as charlatans,
money-grabbers, and hypocrites. Carlos even once told me that those practitioners
of Mina who also attend Evangelical churches are serving the enemy (cf. Reinhardt
2007: 120). All in all, the antagonism is mutual and it is predicated on what at first
glance seem to be competing standards of ethical personhood. And yet, several scholars
have pointed out that Evangelical and Afro-Brazilian faith clusters draw [followers]
from the same social sector: working-class [and lower middle-class] people . . . with
limited educational attainment, low social prestige, and little political power (Selka
2010: 303). Despite competing moralizing narratives, then, the ritual contexts in which
practitioners respectively immerse themselves always relate back to complementary
notions of intimacy, relatedness, and sociality.19
Peter Fry and Gary Howe (1975) were the first to make this point. They argued that
Evangelical puritanism overrides socioeconomic inequality by promoting a rational
image of the world (1975: 82), while practitioners of Afro-Brazilian spiritual doctrines
deny the very hierarchies that constitute their marginalization through an alternative
moral economy based on sorcery and magic.20 Both these attitudes, they claim, become
attractive for potential followers by virtue of their lower-income positioning in the
Brazilian socioeconomic universe. Vagner Goncalves da Silva (2007a; 2007b) has recently
refined this argument, claiming that both Evangelicals and Afro-Brazilian adherents
initially seek to experience religion in the body. Evangelical practices of exorcism,
for example, at times pragmatically invoke Afro-Brazilian entities (exus, eguns, and
pombagiras) in order to publically renounce their spiritual authority (Birman 2009).
In other words, Evangelicals in Brazil recognize the ontological status of these deities.
Silva consequently claims that Evangelical and Afro-Brazilian doctrines in fact depend
on each other to extend their moral prepositions and through interchange to affirm
their own bounded identities:
For these spirits to enter the bodies of people as exus and leave as demons, an operation is required
in which the meanings of the two reference systems [neo-Pentecostal and Afro-Brazilian] previously
overlap and interpenetrate, one at the service of the symbolic efficacy of the other. If not, not only
is it impossible to answer whether the orixas, caboclos and guides are gods or demons, the question
itself makes no sense. Before the terms swap place from one system to another, equivalences need to
be established between them on the basis of the positions that they occupy in their own systems and in
the systems that receive them (2007b, emphasis added).21

This argument treats Evangelical and Afro-Brazilian practitioners in terms of their

intrinsic similarities. Across Brazil, practitioners of these faith clusters are indeed
neighbours and relatives, often even co-residents (Almeida 2004). Only rarely do
conversion and initiation entail a radical break from this context of common dwelling,
along with its mundane acts of sacrifice, prevalent tropes, and economic exchange
(Mayblin 2010; 2014).22 Both the members of Evangelical congregations and persons
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

60 Matan Shapiro

who engage in Afro-Brazilian possession rituals constitute their disjunction from one
another on discursive epiphanies and ubiquitous scripts operating within hegemonic
local models of relatedness (Fonseca 2000; Marcelin 1999). Ritual action in both these
doctrines consequently refers back to types of intimate relations that are framed within
this unified context of relatedness.
This hints at common notions of ethical personhood in low-income Maranhao
that permeate religious phenomena as much as they inform models of relatedness
and affective relationality in other social domains, such as the family home or the
street bar (Linger 1992; Shapiro 2015; cf. DaMatta 1991). For example, both oraca o and
possession include notions of play, performance, respect, affect, and reciprocity that
are overwhelmingly familiar to potential devotees. These rituals thus deploy common
building blocks of everyday life in the gradual constitution of distinctly religious
ethical subjectivities: within oraca o a flat sense of enclosure emphasizes an affable
relationship with God, which through recursive practice is shared with the plurality of
speakers and listeners engaged in this kind of communicative action with the divine;
while closure in possession entails the institutionalization of amity relations with
entities who torque into the mundane to synchronize new social networks. Respective
processes of conversion and initiation thus evoke commonplace imageries of intimacy,
interconnectedness, and congruity with relatives, friends, and neighbours. They do not
promote completely novel, essentially differentiating, emotive styles (Reddy 2001).
This assertion does not go against my research interlocutors moral convictions,
nor does it reveal an analytic truth beyond their reach. Rather the contrary: in family
homes where some members practise Mina or Candomble and others are members of
Evangelical churches, persons heuristically claim they are affectively interconnected on
the basis of co-residence or kinship linkages but intrinsically disconnected spiritually or
ideologically, depending on their cosmogonic convictions and degrees of commitment
to ritual practices. Seldom, as I claimed above, does adoption of one life-style or another
entail radical discontinuity with forms of exchange or residence characteristic of lowincome kinship formations on the Brazilian socioeconomic margins (cf. Scott 1996).
This is so even in the case of religious attitudes towards sexual morality, itself a contested
issue, on which I cannot elaborate in this article (but see Caulfield 2000; Parker 1991;
Rebhun 1999). I will suffice with a popular joke, told to me in Evangelical circles,
which elegantly captures this point concerning the prevalence, scope, and character of
infidelity:
An Evangelical pastor once complained to his assistant that his bicycle was stolen. Why dont you
emphasize the commandment thou shalt not steal during the sermon on Sunday, so that the thief will
regret and return the bicycle? advised the assistant. The pastor agreed but the following Sunday he
simply read the Ten Commandments one by one and moved on to speak on different issues. After the
sermon the assistant approached and asked what happened. Well, answered the pastor, when I got
to thou shalt not commit adultery I recalled where I forgot the damn bike!23

Oraca o and possession distinctly recalibrate the ethical criteria that interconnect
practitioners with meaningful others (Lambek 2010: 49).24 The accumulative dynamic
of deep curves experienced through the continuous practice of possession is then
integrated into mundane life differently from the flat curves in oraca o. The fact
these rituals are semi-autonomous spatiotemporal events taking place within the
flow of mundane life thus carries profound implications: the curves actively mould
the kinds of ethical subjectivities these rituals set out to produce, rather than merely
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66
Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

Curving the social 61

represent, reflect, or mirror antagonistic images of religious personhood already shaped

before persons choose to engage in rituals. Analytic properties of complexity, integrity,
and self-organization then coincide with heuristic notions of spiritual diversity in
Maranhao, which interlocutors describe in terms of ritual efficacy as much as they
stress irreconcilable moral ideations (Silva 2007a; 2007b). Rather than present radically
distinct ethical prescriptions for good living, oraca o and possession may thus be regarded
as variations on a single theme of sociality.25
Conclusion

Don Handelman looks at rituals in and of themselves, rather than as extensions,

suspensions, or functions of mundane activities. In this framework, every social
phenomenon exists in its own right if people recognize it as phenomenal. Handelman
thus promotes a shift from the logos of the phenomenal to the logos of the phenomena
(2004a: 3), wherein difference between phenomena is a matter of degree, ranging from
the line to the Moebius-strip loop, building self-reference and complexity as it closes
upon itself and then opens to merge with the non-phenomenal. This shift allows
Handelman to focus on the ever-emergent dynamics of social action as an ongoing
process of formation:
Forming form phenomenal form emerging through practice does not necessitate any principled
distinction between mundane living and ritual. Both domains exist through the forming through
practice of temporary, interactive social units of whatever duration, space, and significance that
rejoin the sociocultural fields from which they emerge. The signal difference between mundane
encounters and ritual may be more in how they self-organize and less in any meta-definition of
sameness and difference from which all else follows (2004a: 14).

I employed Handelmans methodological deconstructionism to develop a novel

perspective on religious diversity in contemporary Brazil. One of the difficulties in
accounting for diversity in a pluralistic spiritual economy such as that of Brazil
is the continuity of faith clusters (Chesnut 2003), wherein men and women often
practise rituals across antagonistic religious modalities. This is typically described in
the literature as a problem (Selka 2010: 292-3) because analysts axiomatically expect
practitioners to immerse themselves fully with coherent sets of moral convictions,
aesthetic features, and political projects. Those who oscillate then appear as the bearers
of ambivalent cultural practices. Contrarily, when rituals are treated as interchangeable
techniques that emerge from and reconfigure a single kinship universe, there is nothing
ambivalent about transgression. Competing cosmogonic events make perfect sense in
their relational dialogue with one another as tasks orientated towards similar objectives.
Religious diversity then becomes a property of self-organization and interior integrity
that regularly unfold into public social domains previously studied in isolation from
one another (e.g. the family home and the Evangelical church).
Describing diversity in this way resists the image of homogeneous spiritual doctrines
distinguished across mutually exclusive moral orders that derive their authority from
opposing cosmogonic imaginaries (Mapril & Blanes 2013: 4-5). Rather, diversity here
manifests through different degrees of complexity that curve a unified moral order. It
is less about why certain prototypes of ethical personhood are conjoined with certain
types of spiritual activities than it is about how effective communication with the
divine is organized within the flow of mundane life. This notion of diversity then
focuses on common procedures that intra-connect faith clusters from within, rather
than assuming that respective practitioners a priori accept stagnant moral orders that
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

62 Matan Shapiro

squarely demarcate their faiths from without. I hope this article will stimulate colleagues
to explore further the methodological horizons of this proposal.
NOTES
Allen Abramson, Martin Holbraad, Matei
I thank Don Handelman, Joao de Pina-Cabral, Ramon Sarro,
Candea, and JRAI anonymous reviewers for their astute comments. I also thank University College London
(UCL) Graduate School, the RAI, and the Wingate Foundation for their financial support. Finally, I am
indebted to my friends and research interlocutors in Maranhao for sharing their life-histories with me and
making this article possible.
1 I will use the term Evangelicals (Evang
elicos) because in Brazil it commonly includes most nominational
and nondenominational Protestant churches (Freston 1999). I will use the Portuguese oraca o rather than
prayer in order to preserve its ethnographic sense, which commonly distinguishes Evangelical worship
practices in Brazil from Catholic prayers[0] (rezas).
2 Goffman (1961) observes that people do not require instructions that tell them how to act in public: in
most cases they would spontaneously endorse situated roles vis-`a-vis one another. He thus argues that the
changing dynamic of the encounter organizes the interaction, and not the contrary.
3 Handelman here uses autopoiesis and self-organization interchangeably, although these two terms
differ in meaning. Autopoiesis refers to self-generation, which requires that the components of the system,
through their operations, further produce the components which constitute the system (Kay 2001: 466; cf.
Bausch 2002: 601). Self-organization, by contrast, is the operation of a self-regulating mechanism within the
phenomenon. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for his or her comment on this issue.
4 Handelman (2004a: 2-3) outlines three modalities to the study of rituals in anthropology: (1) model-of
model-for; (2) its closely related function-of function-for; and (3) the playground analysis, wherein ritual
is yet another arena for the performance of competition or resistance.
5 All names used in this article are pseudonyms.
6 Pierucci and Prandi (2000) build an image of clearly demarcated spaces of religious practice defined by
institutional affiliation.
7 Caboclos are the most common type of entities that manifest in the terreiro. Mundicarmo Ferretti defines
caboclos as spiritual protectors of an inferior hierarchic level to the voduns and gentis that are never confused
with these latter entities or with Catholic saints (2000b: 74).
8 Pai (for men) or m
ae (for women) de santo is the term used to refer to the head of a worship house
(terreiro), a position of spiritual authority equivalent to priesthood.
9 Some possession episodes merely manifest in muscular convulsions and slight disorientation. Others may,
however, include expressive rage or panic, as well as unwitting bodily convulsions that throw persons into
walls and out of windows. For example, the spirits of a transgendered person called Iris from Santo-Amaro
once tried to set her beautiful long hair on fire while she was possessed.
10 Mina houses in S
ao Lus were initially divided between Jeje and Nago nations, although their ritual
observations differed only slightly. Contemporary houses are syncretized and hence referred to as Jeje-Nago.
In both these traditions the mediums head is owned by three main orixas; various kinds of voduns (who
represent aspects of the orixas personalities and serve them through the enactment of magic); and an infinite
number of caboclos.
11 Possession is a precondition for witchcraft because it serves as a literal junction or a point of connectivity
between the client and the entities, who bear and carry the magic.
12 Pombagiras are female entities associated with lust, vanity, and explicit sexuality. They are often the
bearers and operators of witchcraft services (see Hayes 2008).
13 Being on top is local slang for possession. It is an analogue for a horse and rider, whereas the medium
becomes a horse controlled by the entity that rides on top.
14 During my fieldwork in 2009-10, Carlos had five filhos (sons and daughters) de santo whom he had
initiated into Mina; three irmas (sisters) de santo, who followed him from the terreiro in which he was
initiated; several helpers; and one mae de santo (Carloss paternal grandmother, Dona Silvanda).
15 What I called intimacy with the world of encantaria at times even manifests itself in erotic desire, as
some persons marry entities and build families with them.
16 By heteroglossia, Bakhtin describes the coexistence of distinctive varieties within a single narrative. It is
possible to decode various different subject-positions hiding within a single speech style.
17 J.L. Austin argues that everyday life is replete with situations by which saying something is doing
something (1962: 12). By saying I do in a marriage ceremony, for example, a person is not merely reporting
on reality but actually producing it.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

Curving the social 63

18 Wilson has taken part in other Evangelical rituals, such as healing sessions and glossolalia. I none the
less argue that oraca o has become the most crucial element in his conversion because its acquired rhetorical
style (also used in healing rituals) located him within a particularly Evangelical cosmos. In a follow-up visit
to Maranhao in 2012, Wilson confirmed this assertion.
19 I use the term sociality, which entails a sense of fluidity, as opposed to the static image of the social.
What is in order, Long and Moore (2013: 2) write, is not a highly specific, circumscribed definition of
sociality . . . but rather a theory of human sociality . . . that can account for . . . its plasticity and fragility,
and also its possible resilience (quotes and italics omitted).
20 Note that this discussion precedes the neo-Pentecostal renaissance in Brazil and the rise of Charismatic
Christian doctrines that overtly use magic and glossolalia as means of communication with the divine.
21 In this structural analysis, Exu is the equivalent of Jesus in a system of symbols and meaning that is
shared by all potential believers, who generally fit into a similar sociological profile.
22 In Santo-Amaro I know of only one small Evangelical congregation whose members withdrew from
everyday life and lived in a commune. Wilson looked down on such non-denominational congregations as
back-of-the-yard churches (igreja de fundo de quintal).
23 During fieldwork, many of my Evangelical friends commonly and openly told such jokes precisely
because infidelity was a popular topic for gossip in Santo-Amaro (see Shapiro 2011). See also Hautzinger
(2007: 69-71) on adultery in a low-income neighbourhood in the Brazilian state of Bahia.
24 Michael Lambek (2010) claims that ordinary interactions always include obligation, debt, and sacrifice
as well as honour, pride, and self-interest. Situated encounters recalibrate the compromises persons
continuously make vis-`a-vis one another in order to remain ethical.
25 Further study is required focusing on the intersections between gendered emotional labour and the
experience of ritualized curvatures in both these spiritual doctrines.

REFERENCES

Almeida, R. de. 2004. Religiao na metropole

Paulista. Revista Brasileira de Ciencias Sociais 19: 56, 15-27.
Austin, J.L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Baecker, D. 2001. Why systems? Theory, Culture & Society 18, 59-74.
Bakhtin, M. 1994. The Bakhtin reader: selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov (ed. P. Morris),
London: Edward Arnold.
Bastide, R. 1978. The African religions of Brazil: toward a sociology of the interpenetration of civilizations.
Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bausch, K. 2002. In response to Robert Kay: Luhmanns ontology, ontogeny, and epistemology. Systems
Research and Behavioral Science 19, 599-602.

Birman, P. 2009. Feiticarias, territorios

e resistencias marginais. Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social 15,
321-48.

& C. Machado 2012. A violencia dos justos: evangelicos, mdia e periferias da metropole.
Revista
Brasileira de Ciencias Sociais 27: 80, 55-69.
Burdick, J. 1998. Blessed Anstacia: women, race and popular Christianity in Brazil. New York: Routledge.
2005. Why is the black Evangelical movement growing in Brazil? Journal of Latin American Studies
37, 311-32.
Casanova, J. 2013. Religious associations, religious innovations and denominational identities in
contemporary global cities. In Topographies of faith: religion in urban spaces (eds) B. Irene, M. Burchardt &
J. Casanova, 113-27. New York: Brill.
Caulfield, S. 2000. In defense of honor: sexual morality, modernity, and nation in early twentieth-century
Brazil. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Chesnut, R.A. 1997. Born again in Brazil: the Pentecostal boom and the pathogens of poverty. New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
2003. Competitive spirits: Latin Americas new religious economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coleman, S. 2000. The globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: spreading the gospel of prosperity. Cambridge:
University Press.
Collins, J. 2011. Melted gold and national bodies: the hermeneutics of depth and the value of history in
Brazilian racial politics. American Ethnologist 38, 683-700.
DaMatta, R. 1991. Carnivals, rogues, and heroes: an interpretation of the Brazilian dilemma (trans. J. Dury).
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
Das, V. 2012. Ordinary ethics. In A companion to moral anthropology (ed.) D. Fassin, 133-49. Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

64 Matan Shapiro
Deleuze, G. 1993. The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (trans. T. Conley). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Eduardo, O. da C. 1966 [1948]. The Negro in Northern Brazil: a study in acculturation. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Favret-Saada, J. 2012. Death at your heels when ethnographic writing propagates the force of witchcraft = La
mort aux trousses: quand lecrit ethnographique propage la force sorcellaire. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic
Theory 2: 1, 45-53.
Ferretti, M.M.R. 1994. Terra de caboclo. Sao Lus do Maranhao, Brazil: Plano Editorial SECMA.
2000a. Desceu na guma: o caboclo do Tambor de Mina em um terreiro de Sao Lus, a casa Fanti-Ashanti.
Sao Lus: EDUFITIA.
2000b. Maranhao encantado: encantaria maranhense e outras historias. Sao Lus: UEMA Ed.
Ferretti, S.F. 1996. Querebenta de zomadonu: etnografia da casa das Minas do Maranhao. Sao Lus: EDUFMA.
Fonseca, C. 2000. Famlia, fofoca e honra: etnografia de relacoes de genero e violencia em grupos populares.
Porto Alegre, RS: Editora da Universidade, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.
Foucault, M. 2000. The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984 (ed. J. Faubion; trans. R. Hurley).
London: Penguin.
Freston, P. 1999. Neo-Pentecostalism in Brazil: problems of definition and the struggle for hegemony.
Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 105, 145-62.
Fry, P. & G. Howe 1975. Duas respostas a` Aflicao: Umbanda e Pentecostalismo. Debate e Critica 6, 75-95.
Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gill, A. 1998. Rendering unto Caesar: the Catholic Church and the state in Latin America. Chicago: University
Press.
Goffman, E. 1961. Encounters: two studies in the sociology of interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Goldman, M. 2007. How to learn in an Afro-Brazilian spirit possession religion: ontology and multiplicity
103-19. New
in Candomble. In Learning religion: anthropological approaches (eds) D. Berliner & R. Sarro,
York: Berghahn.
Handelman, D. 1998. Models and mirrors: towards an anthropology of public events. New York: Berghahn.
2004a. Introduction: why ritual in its own right? How so? Social Analysis 48: 2, 1-32.
2004b. Epilogue: toing and froing the social. Social Analysis 48: 2, 213-22.
Harding, S.F. 2000. The book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist language and politics. Princeton: University
Press.
Hautzinger, S.J. 2007. Violence in the city of women: police and batterers in Bahia, Brazil. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Hayes, K.E. 2008. Wicked women and femmes fatales: gender, power and Pomba Gira in Brazil. History of
Religions 48: 1, 1-21.
Johnson, P.C. 2002. Secrets, gossip, and gods: the transformation of Brazilian Candomble. Oxford: University
Press.
Kapferer, B. 1979. Introduction: ritual process and the transformation of context. Social Analysis 1, 3-19.
Kay, R. 2001. Are organizations autopoietic? A call for new debate. Systems Research and Behavioral Science
18, 461-78.
Keane, W. 2002. Sincerity, modernity, and the Protestants. Cultural Anthropology 17, 65-92.
Kramer, E. 2005. Spectacle and the staging of power in Brazilian Neo-Pentecostalism. Latin American
Perspectives 32: 1, 95-120.
Lambek, M. 2010. Towards an ethics of the act. In Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language, and action (ed.)
M. Lambek, 39-63. New York: Fordham University Press.
Lehmann, D. 2007. A milgarosa economia da religiao: um ensaio sobre capital social. Horizontes
Antropologicos 13: 27, 69-98.
Linger, D.T. 1992. Dangerous encounters: meanings of violence in a Brazilian city. Stanford: University
Press.
Long, N.J. & H.L. Moore 2013. Introduction: socialitys new directions. In Sociality: new directions (eds) N.
Long & H.L. Moore, 1-24. New York: Berghahn.
Mapril, J. & R.L. Blanes 2013. Introduction. In Sites and politics of religious diversity in Southern Europe: the
best of all gods (eds) J. Mapril & R.L. Blanes, 1-15. Leiden: Brill.
Marcelin, L.H. 1999. A linguagem da casa entre os negros no reconcavo baiano. Mana: Estudos de Antropologia
Social 2, 31-60.
Mayblin, M. 2010. Gender, Catholicism, and morality in Brazil: virtuous husbands, powerful wives. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C

Curving the social 65

2014. The untold sacrifice: the monotony and incompleteness of self-sacrifice in Northeast Brazil.
Ethnos 79, 342-64.
L.N. 2001. The Jeje in the Tambor de Mina of Maranhao and in the Candomble of Bahia, Slavery &
Pares,
Abolition, 22: 1, 83-90.
Parker, R.G. 1991. Bodies, pleasures, and passions: sexual culture in contemporary Brazil. Boston: Beacon.
Pierucci, A.F. & R. Prandi 2000. Religious diversity in Brazil: numbers and perspectives in a sociological
evaluation. International Sociology 15, 629-39.
19/20,
Prandi, R. 1997. Nas pegadas dos Voduns: um Terreiro de Tambor de Mina em Sao Paulo. Afro-Asia
109-33.
Rappaport, R. 1999. Ritual and religion in the making of humanity. Cambridge: University Press.
Rebhun, L.A. 1999. The heart is unknown country: love in the changing economy of Northeast Brazil. Stanford:
University Press.
Reddy, W.M. 2001. The navigation of feeling: a framework for the history of emotions. Cambridge: University
Press.
Reinhardt, B. 2007. Espelho ante espelho: a troca e a guerra entre o Neopentecostalismo e os cultos AfroBrasileiros em Salvador. Sao Paulo: Attar.
Ribeiro, D. 2000. The Brazilian people: the formation and meaning of Brazil (trans. G. Rabassa). Gainesville:
University Press of Florida.
Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
2009. Pentecostal networks and the spirit of globalization: on the social productivity of ritual forms.
Social Analysis 53, 55-66.
Scott, R.P. 1996. Matrifocal males: gender, perception and experience of the domestic domain in Brazil. In
Gender, kinship, power: a comparative interdisciplinary history (eds) M.J. Maynes, A. Waltner, B. Soland &
U. Strasser, 287-301. New York: Routledge.
Segato, R.L. 1998. The colour-blind subject of myth; or, where to find Africa in the nation. Annual Review
of Anthropology 27, 129-51.
Seligman, A., R. Weller, M. Puett & B. Simon 2008. Ritual and its consequences: an essay on the limits of
sincerity. Oxford: University Press.
Selka, S. 2005. Ethnoreligious identity politics in Bahia, Brazil. Latin American Perspectives 32: 1, 72-4.
2010. Morality in the religious marketplace: Evangelical Christianity, Candomble, and the struggle
for moral distinction in Brazil. American Ethnologist 37, 291-307.
Shapiro, M. 2011. Affective knowledge as anthropological knowledge. Anthropology Matters 13, 1-13.
2015. Intimate events: the correctness of affective transactions in Northeast Brazil. Cambridge Journal
of Anthropology 33: 2, 90-105.
Silva, V.G. da 2007a. Neopentecostalismo e religioes afro-brasileiras: significados do ataque aos smbolos
da heranca religiosa africana no Brasil contemporaneo. Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social 13,
207-36.
2007b. Neo-Pentecostalism and Afro-Brazilian religions: explaining the attacks on the symbols of
the African religious heritage in contempary Brazil (trans. D.A. Rodgers). Mana: Estudos de Antropologia
Social (online) vol. 3 (Special edition).
Sterling, C. 2010. Women-space, power, and the sacred in Afro-Brazilian culture. Global South 4: 1, 71-93.
Stoller, P. 1997. Sensuous scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Turner, V.W. 1969. The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine.

Courber le social, ou : pourquoi des rituels bresiliens antagoniques sont des

variations sur un th`eme
Resume
Que peut nous apprendre la diversite religieuse du Bresil si nous isolons les pratiques rituelles de leur
contexte socioculturel ? A` laide du vocabulaire e labore par Don Handleman dans son approche du rituel
en et pour lui-meme , lauteur discute de cette question dans le contexte des regions defavorisees du
Nordeste bresilien. Il demontre que les rites de possession afro-bresiliens et les pri`eres des chretiens
e vangeliques (oraca o) transforment la vie de ceux qui les pratiquent en fonction de leur organisation
interne, de leur complexite et de leur courbes de differenciation. En consequence, il avance que ces rites

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

66 Matan Shapiro
ne sont pas des representations de prescriptions morales antagoniques sur ce qui constitue une bonne vie,
des variations sur le th`eme de la vie sociale.
mais plutot

Matan Shapiro is a Kreitman School for Advanced Studies Postdoctoral Fellow and a Teaching Fellow with
the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Human and Social
Sciences Building (72), P.O. Box 653, 84105, Israel. shapirom@post.bgu.ac.il

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 47-66

Royal Anthropological Institute 2015


C