Seminars

Brazil

  • Founded
    1976
  • Seminar Number
    557

Recently completed field studies and research from primary sources on Brazil constitute the main interest of this seminar. Brazilian, the U.S. and other visiting scholars participate, contributing their interpretations of recent events. Portuguese may be spoken whenever convenient.

Co-Chairs
Diana Brown
dbrown@bard.edu

John F. Collins
zemilideias@yahoo.com

Sidney M. Greenfield
sidneygreenfield@gmail.com

Vania Penha-Lopes
vania_penha-lopes@bloomfield.edu 

Rapporteur
Tales Cardeal da Costa Cunha
talescardeal@gmail.com

Meeting Schedule

09/13/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
7:00 PM
The Pastor arrives at the Aiwekara village and meets the Pajé: conflict or adaptation?
Donizete Rodrigues, CRIA-Nova University of Lisbon
Abstract

Abstract

The objective of this presentation is to discuss the process of religious change that is taking place among the Sororó Indigenous people (Suruí-Aikewara) in the Brazilian state of Pará (in the Amazon basin). With the introduction of Pentecostal Protestantism, most indigenous villages in the process of evangelical conversion are using their traditional animist cosmology to incorporate, re-signify, and create new expressions of the sacred. From a real and symbolic dispute between a Pastor and a Pajé (shaman), there emerged the emic category of ‘índio-crente’ (indigenous believer/evangelical) and an ideal type, in the Weberian sense, that I am calling 'indigenous Pentecostalism.'

In the Aikewara indigenous context, there is no rupture with the original cosmology, but rather a logic of correspondence, cohabitation of opposites, strategies of accumulation of different logics of thought, symbolic categories, and religious practices. Even constituting themselves as distinct paradigms, the two models – indigenous-shamanism and Christianity Pentecostal – are intertwined in a web of magical-religious relationships, materialized in evident religious hybridity, in a new syncretic religiosity with distinctive healing practices, with a real and/or symbolic efficacy (Lévi-Strauss, 1958).
10/19/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
7:00 PM
Neocolonial Promises of Freedom: Brazilian Candomble in West Africa
Moises Lino e Silva, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA)
Abstract

Abstract

In January 2020, several newspapers in Brazil reported, with great pride, that a Candomblé temple (terreiro) from Bahia would inaugurate a subsidiary in the Nigerian city of Oyo. This would be the first enterprise of such kind on African soil and was meant “to affirm the importance of the Brazilian diaspora, a recognition from Africa of the importance of religious traditions that were transmitted by African ancestors and preserved in Bahia for centuries.” The initial excitement soon turned sour. Part of the Afro-Atlantic community responded to this project with accusations of Brazilian neocolonialism, deploying African aphorisms related to kinship and descent: “a child cannot give birth to their mother.” As an anthropologist initiated in Candomblé, in this talk I explore controversies on neocolonialism, religion, power, and Black identities in Afro-Atlantic perspective, considering contemporary understandings of liberty against a background of slavery and unrealized promises of abolition.
11/30/2023 Zoom
6:30 PM
Infrastructures of Unfreedom: Exponential Prison Construction and the Sustainability of Punitive Developmentalism in Brazil
Graham Denyer Willis,
Abstract

Abstract

This paper examines the collision between three forces in motion to make a provocation: Brazil is a protagonist in the global making of infrastructures of unfreedom. First, the country is amidst a historically discontinuous shift that is seeing an exponential prison construction project materialise across the country with striking uniformity. Second, countering abiding volatility, infrastructure has become a darling pet project for international investors, development banks and pension and hedge funds, who seek to extract sustained profit from the bedrock provision of services by states. Third, rising climate temperatures and global concern create novel impetus for foreign investment to finance and build new solutions. Looking to the literature on infrastructure as ‘lively’ and ‘social’, I counter with an ethnographic and humanistic look at how this collision must return us to a material understanding of infrastructure. Doing so reveals an apparently sibling relationship between sustainability and incarceration, environmental devastation and prison re-construction, and international climate finance and debt funded prisons.
12/14/2023
7:00 PM

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01/18/2024
7:00 PM

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02/15/2024
7:00 PM

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03/21/2024
7:00 PM

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04/18/2024
7:00 PM

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05/09/2024
7:00 PM

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