- InThe Charismatic Gymnasium, Maria José de Abreu examines how Charismatic Catholicism in contemporary Brazil produces a new form of total power through a concatenation of the breathing body, theology, and electronic mass media. De Abreu documents a vast religious respiratory program of revival popularly branded as “the aerobics of Jesus.” Pneuma—the Greek term for air, breath, and spirit—is central to this aerobic program, whose goal is to labor on the athletic elasticity of spirit. Tracing the rhetoric, gestures, and spaces that together constitute this new theological community, de Abreu exposes the articulating forces among evangelical Christianity, neoliberal logics, and the rise of right-wing politics. By calling attention to how an ethics of pauperism vitally intersects with the neoliberal ethos of flexibility, de Abreu shows how paradoxes do not hinder but expand the Charismatic gymnasium. The result, de Abreu demonstrates, is the production of a fluid form of totalitarianism and Christianity in Brazil and beyond.
- Maria José de Abreu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her work engages with a range of anthropological, philosophical and literary debates about religion, personhood, the human senses and their technological extensions. Special focus is given to logics and grammars of the political in current neoliberal governance. A second project in progress is dedicated to thinking impasse as a condition intrinsic, though not exclusive, to neoliberal governance. Focusing on Portugal during and after the 2008 financial crisis, this second project is an attempt at theorizing from spaces of tension, semantic fog, performative paradox and cynical reasoning, in ways that make decision-though not governance- difficult or impossible. Her academic articles have appeared in Current Anthropology, Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Anthropological Theory, Social Analysis, Scapegoat: Journal of Architecture, Landscape and Political Economy, Etnofoor, Journal of Culture and Religion, Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories and Contemporary Contexts, Cultural Anthropology and Qui-Parle? Her ethnographic work has been supported by Foundation for Science and Technology Lisbon, Forum for Transregional Studies, Berlin, ICI-Berlin, and Rework: Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History, at Humboldt University in Berlin. She also serves on the editorial board of Public Culture.
Maria José de Abreu’s The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil (2021, Duke University Press).
Monday, February 28th, 2022; 12 – 2pm
Eventbrite: http://charismaticgymnasium.eventbrite.ca
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