Kicking, stripping, and re-dressing a saint in black: visions of public space in Brazil's recent holy war

History of Religions

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 122-139

  Johnson, Paul C ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61149371701     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/463493     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. The Chronicle of Theoplianes: An English Translation ofanni mundi 6095-6305 (a.d. 602-813), with introduction and notes by Harry Turtledove (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp. 96-98
2. That Catholic tradition itself, of course, has negotiated the issue of sacred presences in matter with substantial ambivalence and conflict. The 787 Second Council of Nicaea wobbled toward defining the legitimacy of image veneration as a mediating path to the divine. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, in another great dispute-this time over how to justify divine presence in human products like bread and wine-suggested an Aristotelian division between the external accidents and the internal substance. Mahayana text, Taisho Shinshu Daizokyo, 16, no. 694, cited from Robert E. Van Voorst, Anthology of World Scriptures (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1994), pp. 99-101
3. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 166-231
4. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 124-25
5. She tells Juan Diego, for example, to build her shrine at the hill called Tepeyac, the previous shrine of Tonantzin (Jeannette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994], p. 41)
6. The phrase is Andrew Apter's from his Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
7. This is the most literal, though not necessarily the best translation. Nossa Senhora Aparecida could be translated as "Our Lady of the Appearance," "Our Lady Who Appeared," or, in the case of her variant title, Nossa Senhora da Aparecida, "Our Lady of Aparecida," as Aparecida is a town name
8. Black is used advisedly here to suit the North American usage. In Brazil, black (preto) is the most perjorative of classifications, and negro is the preferred term among Afro-Brazilians; in other words, the exact opposite of African-American usage in the United States
9. This is impossible to prove, since the icon was severely altered by the long submergence. However, Brazil was under considerable Spanish influence from 1580, when the Portuguese Crown was subsumed under the Spanish Crown of Phillip II. Chapels dedicated to Guadalupe probably existed in Brazil during this period. Portuguese was only again independent when the Braganza lineage assumed the throne in 1640
10. Beginning in 1534, Joāo III of Portugal, with no resources to settle the new territory, divided Brazil into fifteen captaincies, which extended from the coast to the ill-defined Line of Tordesillas in the interior. The governors could tax and rule at their discretion but were responsible for populating and defending the territories at their own expense. They were essentially medieval-style fiefs of the Crown
11. In the Igreja Universal's own newspaper, the Folha Universal, in a special edition that appeared the week after the "kicking" of the saint
12. The first of these was a war for control of the mining rush between the local, "Brazilian" paulistas (the nation of Brazil did not yet exist) and the newly arrived Portuguese from the coast; the second was a revolt after the imposition of a new colonial tax-collecting system (E. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil, 3d ed. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], pp. 78-79)
13. The south of Brazil was settled increasingly toward the end of the nineteenth century by Germans and Italians and is regarded as "white," "civilized" Brazil in comparison with the north and northeast, where African and Indian influence increased
14. Documented but also created in part by Gilberto Freyre, especially in his magisterial Casa Grande e Senzala (Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympico, 1933)
15. Under Mayor Pedro Ernesto in particular. See Sam Adamo, "Race and Povo," in Modern Brazil: Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective, ed. Michael L. Conniff and Frank D. McCann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 202
16. Vargas served again as elected president from 1951 to 1954; just after leaving office for the last time, he shot himself
17. Included among them were the current president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then a Marxist-oriented sociologist
18. Leonardo Boff, interview in Folha de Sāo Paulo (October 22, 1995)
19. Gramsci tacitly acknowledges this when he takes pains to distinguish his idea of civil life as derived from Hegel and not from the Catholic Church's vision of civil life, apparently the more typical or, to apply his own term, hegemonic view. See Antonio Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Derek Boothman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Q6§24, p. 75
20. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 40
21. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), quoted in Casanova, p. 20. As Casanova notes, by Troeltsch's criteria, the Roman Catholic Church only acknowledged its status as a "sect" during Vatican II
22. Gramsci, Q6§87, p. 17; Q14§55, p. 44
23. Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967)
24. Von Helder contacted the icon with his feet and hands; whether they were "kicks" and "blows" depends on the perspective of the observer. Van Helder insists that he "touched" the icon
25. These took various forms: one was based on Article 20 of Law 7.716/89, which prohibits acts that encourage discrimination against a religion; another derived from Article 150 of the Constitution, which prohibits money raised in tax-exempt religions from entering private hands; another depended on Article 208 of the Penal Code, which prohibits public assaults on religious objects; still another lawsuit was based on national communication codes regulating media
26. This formula of hegemony as inexplicit, taken-for-granted order versus ideology as available to conscious reflection derives ultimately from Gramsci but is expressed in this particular form in John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 23-24
27. Folha de Sáo Paulo (October 22, 1995)
28. The prices in 1699 in the port of Bonny in present-day Nigeria, reported in James Barbot, An Abstract of a Voyage to New Calabar River or Rio Real in the Year 1699, vol. 5 of Churchill Collection of Voyages and Travels, 3d ed. (1744-46), p. 459
29. quoted in Michael Crowder, The Story of Nigeria, 4th ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), p. 55
30. Robert Walsh, Notes of Brazil in 1828 and 1829, vol. 2 (Boston: Richardson, Lord & Holbrook, 1831), p. 179
31. Eduardo Hoornaert, "The Church in Brazil," in The Church in Latin America, 1492-1992, ed. Enrique Dussel (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1992), p. 191
32. Pierre Fatumbi Verger, Orixás: Deuses lorubás na Africa e no Novo Mundo (Salvador: Corrupio, 1981), p. 25
33. Pierre Verger, Notícias da Bahia-1850 (Salvador: Currupio, 1981), p. 227
34. René Ribeiro, Cultos afro-brasileiros do Recife (Recife, 1952), p. 30
35. Verger, Orixás: Deuses loruba's na Africa e no Novo Mundo, p. 26
36. Arquivo Nacional: Cartas Régia de 1761 e 1785
37. Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 405
38. João José Reis, Rebeliāo escravano Brasil (Sāo Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), pp. 16-18
39. João José Reis, "Nas malhas do poder escravista: a invasão do candomble' do Accú na Bahia, 1829," Religiāo e Sociedade 13, no. 3 (1986): 108-127 (hereafter cited as "Nas malhas")
40. From Guimarāes written account of the invasion, quoted in Reis, "Nas malhas," p. 113
41. Zumbi was being claimed, as November 20, 1995, neared, as a hero of workers, of homosexuals, as well as of Afro-Brazilians concerned with racial discrimination
42. In a notable display of spatial ambivalence, however, the archbishop of Aparecida, Dom Aloísio Lorscheider, was absent and left a note to be read. No high officials of the church, in fact, attended