28 May 2021
Interview with Maria José de Abreu
Alana Sá Leitão: Thank you for meeting with me. I’m very glad that I was chosen to do this interview! I read your recently published book, The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil . It is research you have been thinking about for a while; you have been working on it since the early 2000’s. How was it to have everything turned into a book after such long research? What are you most proud of in this book?
Maria José de Abreu: That I didn’t give up [laughs]. You know, because it has been a challenge. One of the ways of doing this thing we anthropologists call ethnography is through the relation between object and methodology. I became very busy with the question of “how can my object inform my methodology?” In past times you would have a methodology and you would go to the field to study a topic which is your object, right? I did not want that. I wanted the object to inform my methodology. But what happens when your object is…air, breathing? Pneuma, the Greek term for air, breath, Spirit is the central concept of the book, which for Brazil’s Catholic Charismatics – a form of Catholic revivalism – organizes the relation between things like body, space, and technology. Pneuma, this fluid mechanism that puts those things in circulation implicating them in each other. I asked: “how is that central concept going to inform my methodology?” Western epistemologies are [predominantly] earthbound. We say, “ground yourself”. We say, “what’s your point of view.” We say, “what’s your perspective” These vocabularies suggest we are working from an earth perspective. When you talk about air, however, you don’t really position yourself, because air is not something that is positionable, as it were. On a conceptual level, air has neither here nor there, neither inside nor outside. It’s flow. And without this realization I would entirely miss the fact that this is a religious as much as a political choice on the part of Catholic Charismatics, for it serves their aspirations for universalism. I realized that to take pneuma seriously, my point of departure is no point at all, but movement. In other words, I was having a problem of how to study the Charismatic’s infatuations with pneuma while using logics that are conventionally earthbound. For it is not about having an air perspective either, as though I did field research from an airplane or from Mars (as it goes nowadays).
And that’s in general. Then particularly, there is the fact that Brazil’s Catholicism was under the strong influence of Liberation Theology. Charismatics often regarded Liberation Theology as being way too earthly, and by that they meant different things–for one, its political theology, notably, ideas of salvation and redemption associated with taking the poor from a place of marginality into a promised land which, as you know, resulted in the political struggles for actual land/earth with the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST) to which cause Liberation Theology was particularly committed. The very idea of “grassroots activism”. All these practices helped shape a certain imaginary of earthiness among Charismatics when referring to LT. But then earthbound also in terms of its episteme. Here we have to think of the influence of Paulo Freire-like pedagogies on LT associated movements, their strong ideological bent, to the point that their political views were sometimes called “Marxist”, even Communist. Basically, what Charismatics were saying was that LT made little room for spirituality, for charisma, too busy with temporal maters — which is false for if you read Leonard Boff’s book Power and Charisma, the book that would be censored by the Vatican and lead to his excommunication. Particularly the last chapter is a profound treatise on spirituality.
Anyhow, this antagonism within Catholicism is the reason why when charismatics began to have an impact in Brazil, in the eighties and even more in the nineties, many LT people, and allied sympathizers – activists and left-wing intellectuals – would say about Charismatic Catholicism “it’s only air, there’s no substance, no point of view, no perspective”. The irony is, Charismatics were interested in none of those things. They were working from another epistemic framework. Their central theological concept was – and goes on being, despite many internal changes in its structure – pneuma. And what it is key to understand is that pneuma reflects a conception of airspace, an attempt at recuperating the airs of the premodern when air seemed more like a thick loaded substance than a mere empty dimension. For Charismatics substance meant and means something entirely different than for LT to whom “substance” – as when they say “the Charismatic message bears no substance” – implies referential meaning, ideological content. In short, politics. As though politics is strictly ideological or, better, as if the ideological cannot be something other, something more material, bodily. So, their critique misses the whole…point…
This raises an interesting question about critique itself. If critique, conventionally, implies having a “point-of-view”, how are you to criticize a religious movement that disavows such logics? How to criticize a phenomenon in its own terms? What would an airborne critique look like? In sum, at least in its early stages, LT failed to grasp the “aerial grounds” of Charismatic Catholicism. The Charismatic world is more topological, more Tory-like than Euclidean. And the consequences of this shift are vastly important. I think that the thing that I’m proud of, then, to go back to your question, is how I took seriously this epistemic conundrum, the fact that I had to first acknowledge the earthbound legacy in our academic language, our inherited vocabularies. What would an ethnography on and about air look like? How will I frame my argument? Where do I position myself not just as a researcher but politically, if positionality is precisely what is at stake? It took me a long time to figure out things because you can’t just say: “It has all been Earthbound and I’m going Air”. To do that jump was challenging for me. I think that I took seriously that challenge, and that I persevered to some result.
Alana: As a graduate student, to hear “I did not give up” as your answer is…quite a thing…
Maria José: And talk of object becoming my methodology… I mean… it was all about endurance with Charismatics too… You think aerobics with, you know, persevering….
Alana: Since we are on the air subject already… Your perceptions of air, and also of time, are what struck me the most. In your work, time is not only a variable that is there behind, it is an active subject itself, as air is a subject itself. Not only breathable air, but also airwaves. The time that passes, but also the repetition. The repetition of the images of the kicking of the saint[1], of Bolsonaro being stabbed[2]. Can you talk more about how you understand these ideas of air and of time?
Maria José: The question of temporality is crucial in the book. I open with the famous or infamous episode that started the so-called Guerra Santa of the 1990’s in Brazil, of Pastor von Helder kicking the image of Our Lady of Aparecida in front of the TV cameras. I don’t emphasize the iconoclasm as much as the serial technological reproduction of the scene. I am interested in how the repetition of the kicking of the statue of Brazil’s patron saint itself creates a perception that was not there in the first place, giving all these different accounts about what happened: that the image was smashed into pieces, that it shattered. The shock of the scene time and again shown on TV affected people’s perception, as though each time the image was being shown, the image was receiving a new blow. I’ve heard people saying that the statue lost her neck, someone even saying that he (Pastor von Helder) hurt the image with an axe. Well, there was no axe. Clearly the element of repetition itself became the scene. So, suddenly the visual is a rhythm, a rhythmic incision. Seriality as such. I’m putting that scene in the beginning of the book to say that repetition – which we tend to think of as that which comes after (as double) – is, in effect, where it all begins. As if to say in the beginning there was repetition, and thus the cut, the incisions brought about the reprise of one same “event” on TV, time and again. This initial scene I read as a pattern that will resonate in the impeachment of Dilma (who was literally kicked out) and ultimately lead us to where we are today, to Bolsonaro through the story of his stabbing, followed by the serial operations to his gut, his latest hiccup attacks, all of these are expressions of what I am suggesting when saying that sovereignty is not defined through decision but incision.
At the same time, I am trying to already prepare the reader for this mechanical art of repetition that is breathing. As the mechanics of repetition itself become apparent, the three-dimensional statue of Our Lady of Aparecida itself subsides. This is clearly the moment that Catholic Charismatics leave behind the clay image and embrace electronic media and televangelism, which they combine with breathing practices and that will lead to the phenomenon best known in Brazil as “the aerobics of Jesus”.
In this aerobic-pneumatic world, as you can imagine, repetition is key. We normally think repetition is a movement towards the past. To repeat is to recall what was there before. But that is not what interests me. What interests me is how repetition becomes a movement towards the future, in the sense that where there is repetition, there is a variation, a difference, if you will. There is a transformative potential in repetition. So rather than repetition being something that conserves, it is what transforms. It is the power of repetition in transforming not just bodies – because there is a material aspect to pneumatic prayer – but also in terms of your relation to a particular religion. You become persuaded by the very fact that you are doing it, time and again, through a kind of iteration of practice.
But then the larger political question is: how does a religious movement that focuses so much on transformation turn out to support a conservative like Bolsonaro? How does pneuma with its seemingly open-ended and flexible universe re-enter the logics of authoritarianism and the rigid worlds of the military politics of the radical-right? This is huge. I think it points us toward at least three key concerns: One, the oddly symbiotic relation between neo-conservativism and neoliberalism that people like Wendy Brown and Melinda Cooper wrote about; Two, how right-wing logics are appropriating into their camp aspects that we used to associate with the left-wing camp (and here we go back to the Tory-structure mentioned above); and Three, how capable Catholic Charismatics are at hiding the particular behind the universal, which Catholicism was always very good at doing anyways (hence their fascination for Byzantine theology and aesthetics and so on). These three aspects combined from, I think, the political nature of the contemporary religious-right in Brazil. And again, the motor behind these three points is, in my work at least, the aspect of repetition, its relation to rhythmic incision, and clearly the problem of sovereignty.
Alana: In this sense, you also discuss the in-between, the ongoing, and there is a reflection of it in your field sites. You divided your book in two, your ethnography on Canção Nova and your ethnography around Father Marcelo Rossi. I imagine that you had many fieldwork challenges, going between those different spaces where the charismatic movement was happening in Brazil, between multiple places and multiple people.
Maria José: Even before I was interested in Canção Nova and in Marcelo Rossi, I started where the charismatic movement started itself, which was in prayer groups. I never wrote much about it, because I became so interested in the aspect of mass (in the triple sense of mass media, mass builders or aerobics, and mass celebration) so central to their practices nowadays. The charismatic movement comes from the U.S to Brazil in the late 1960s. And it does not come to just any place in Brazil. It comes precisely where liberation theology is the strongest: they want to be where the strongest opponents are, the São Paulo archdioceses well known for their resistance against the dictatorship. In the archdioceses of São Paulo there was the very strong ecclesiastical bent of the CEBS, and liberation theology, and Brother Paulo Evaristo Arns was there. Once in the São Paulo State, Campinas, Valinhos and surroundings, they started to meet in groups. The two American Jesuits, Father Eduardo Dougherty and Father Harold Rahm, became very active but by adopting different orientations. The first was very interested in launching a media station in the style of American Televangelism, whereas the second had a more social orientation, working with drug addicts and the homeless. Rahm, unlike Dougherty and others, wanted to maintain relations with liberation theology. Because I was interested in the media component of the Movement, I began to participate in groups that followed the orientation proposed by Dougherty, also because it was this faction of the Charismatic Renewal – then called Catholic Pentecostals – that was most criticized by the proponents of LT. They saw such attempts at using big media as a tactic that mimicked so called “third-wave” evangelicals, as Paul Freston called it. So, all these processes and decisions were already happening in the early 70s, during the hardest years of the military dictatorship, where war between “big-media” and “small-media” became a proxy for a war between religions, gradually preparing the grounds for what in the 1990s would become known as Guerra Santa, the point in time where the book starts.
My book thus itself kicks off with the kicking of the saint in the 90’s as the crucial moment in time when Charismatics leapfrogged from their position of (self-enhanced) marginality into the center of power in Brazil’s Catholicism. Charismatics had long been using the pretext that they were resisted by LT-which they were, in part, if we consider the Charismatic movement was only officially recognized by CNBB[3] in 1993. But the thing is, this “resistance” authenticated their attempts to restage the parable of the first Christians, the apostles, and indeed they saw themselves as the expression of a Second Pentecost. The fact that they were in the margins of some hegemon, both geographically and institutionally, allowed them to connect them with the original “fire of Pentecost”. So today when their institutional power is undeniable on a global scale, they talk with nostalgia about those early years when they felt “marginal”, as more authentic to “charisma”. The problem was the classic ‘how to both remain charismatic and detain institutional power’. Well, mass media was the solution to that predicament. For media is in essence an institution that runs on charisma. So, the “fire of Pentecosts” – pneuma – enters the “airwaves” spaces of TV, radio, the Internet, Second Life, and so on. While I participated in prayer groups, including at the periphery of Sao Paulo in places like Campinas, from the mid-eighties Charismatics were also in the center of São Paulo city, in places like “Sé”[4]. In the early 2000’s “Sé”, a center of power for Liberation Theology sympathizers (I met with Frey Paul Arns in the parish there for an interview), had a very strong Charismatic prayer group, led by this woman with a lot of energy. She was really the soul of that group. She would be someone who would take me to Canção Nova, and then take me to Father Marcelo Rossi, and to charismatic group meetings. The Charismatic movement grew into this big network of prayer groups, and each prayer group had their own particular “charismas”. Inside each group, there would be people with different charismas, all the charismas St. Paul describes in Corinthians: the charisma of prophecy, the charisma of liberation, the charisma of speaking in tongues, the charisma of science…much as the first apostles first met in hiding and then through Pentecost went out into the world, so prayer groups moved away from seclusion into media global networks.
So, I started to see this connection between bodily charisma and the media but also how media could be not simply an extension to bodies or religion but constitutive of it. I became very interested in the nodal articulations between breathing bodies, media, space and how pneuma organized this almost ‘machinic’ circulation of Spirit. I realized how my entire vocabulary was not about one or the other aspect but the articulations and suddenly I realized that was working on an idea of the gymnasium: I started to pay attention to how charismatics sport language, how prayer is a bodybuilding of sort, their penchant for big stadiums, gymnasiums, their own pneumatic architectures, like with large tents. I began to restrict my analysis to key media sites of the Movement. I would still visit other sites, because you could not really separate them, and these people move back and forth. They move a lot and they all know each other. But eventually I ended up restricting myself to two key media nodes, Canção Nova and Father Marcelo Rossi, who was the real charismatic media savvy [figure]. He really exploded the charismatic movement to the point that people at Canção Nova don’t like him – or at least did not when I was doing fieldwork. They think Marcelo Rossi went “beyond” the limits, because they wanted to be able to expand institutionally, but also charismatically. Marcelo became so famously “charismatic” that fame threatened to freeze him. An idol. But of course, the Church also appreciated his popularity so the hierarchy sent Bishop Fernando Figueiredo, the shadow, to control him. Bishop Figueiredo, who is an expert on patristic Christianity, suggested: “we will send Padre Marcelo to Ukraine to a monastery to be indoctrinated in Byzantine forms of prayer.” Like this he would ally his love for sports, particularly bodybuilding, with orthodox Eastern Christianity. The result of this was this regime he branded “the aerobics of Jesus”, which exploded in Brazil in the late 1990’s. I mean really…Just google “Padre Marcelo and Xuxa”[5] …The second reason that people at Canção Nova didn’t like Padre Marcelo is that he is not “Community”, he is a “one man-show”. For Canção Nova the idea of community is very important. There is this founding story, they repeat time and time again, about the 12 people who first “volunteered” (were moved by their leader) as a “community”, and then they say, “let’s launch the nets,” in an attempt to reproduce the 12 apostles. That’s going to revive this second Pentecost. So, again, repetition, analogy, allegory…Padre Marcelo didn’t really want to be in a community, he had it all in him. It’s very interesting, because if Liberation Theology disliked the charismatic movement, if they didn’t like Canção Nova, Canção Nova did not like Padre Marcelo Rossi. So, the field was – and is – an extremely dynamic one…
Alana: That reminds me of a question I have. Dunga, who was this huge figure while you were doing your research at Canção Nova, a few years ago interrupted his work there, with the agreement of the community assembly, citing private family reasons. Lately, I have seen on Instagram that Dunga and Father Marcelo Rossi are doing many things together now. Do you know how the Canção Nova community and people are reacting to this move?
Maria José: Oh yes, some gossip [laughs]. You see, this is also what charisma does, it’s fluid stuff. It’s all about anointment, nothing is supposed to be rigid but flexible. In being flexible you are apt to shift gears. Move with the blowing of the Spirit. You can say this today, tomorrow you can say something different, because it’s fluid. In 2001, in the 20th National Meeting of the Charismatic Movement in Sanctuary of Aparecida, I heard Dunga, during a press conference, accusing Father Marcelo Rossi of marketizing religion with his CDs and songs, while Dunga himself is producing CDs and songs in Cançao Nova, and is followed by young people like an idol. It turns out they are collaborating again. It is not surprising, because at some point, as good pragmatic well-lubricated networkers, they will again find a project in common. The Spirit goes about suggesting things to you. Yesterday you thought this, and now there is this possibility, this opportunity that comes to you, and you can again collaborate. So, Marcelo Rossi has been recently invited to come to Canção Nova again, despite all the criticism against him. He was a radio broadcaster in Canção Nova at an earlier stage, and he was in fact part of that community. He left because he thought “God has a different project for me”. But then he comes for his own fall, literally. Father Marcelo was back in Canção Nova and a woman appears out of the blue on stage while he was celebrating and kicks him, and he falls three meters out of the stage, almost breaks his head in front of the TV cameras. Later she is diagnosed with bipolarity but it’s striking how bipolarity is an image that comes up a lot. I don’t know what the arguments are that lead Dunga to change his mind after all that he said about Padre Marcelo, but I do know that there are all sorts of inconsistencies, and there’s no attempt at hiding these either. To say something yesterday, and tomorrow to do the opposite, only shows there is flexibility, anointment, and capacity to dwell in contradictions without the slightest discomfort. It surprised me for a while, and then I just got used to it, that there was no need to justify much if today you say something that is different from what you said yesterday. Because it all comes in this language of an ongoing indeterminacy, of being opened to what the Spirit may tell you today, like in a kind of enthusiastic resignation to the contingencies of life. This might sound like spirituality, but it is also the logic of neoliberal capital, and one should do more than assume that this in itself is a contradiction in terms.
Alana: The opportunity to work with a group that embodies so well the idea that paradox and changing one’s mind are not necessarily inconsistencies, gave you a privileged point of view for all these political events that happened in the world in the last few years. While a lot of people were impressed with how figures such as Donald Trump, or even Bolsonaro, could say something and do something else, you had a different perspective. I mean, you were in a place where you could give a more interesting analysis of the situation, while everyone was still surprised. Can we discuss your perceptions of the current political scenario?
Maria José: It is very clear to me that the rise and expansion of Charismatic Catholicism in Brazil in the last four decades both anticipates and mirrors the rise of bolsonarismo. It’s an irony that his middle name is Messiah, and a messiah with the hiccups, if you saw his latest videos! As a matter of fact, just weeks after he became president, he did go to Canção Nova, and the people at Canção Nova received him. There, Father Jonas Abib, the founder of Canção Nova, did tell Bolsonaro that he was elected by God. There is that explicit acknowledgement. Still, while I do see lines of continuity in terms of their operational logics, Bolsonaro is not the charismatic movement, neither does he represent it. But it became very clear to me, in the midst of shock and perplexity, why bolsonarismo is possible today. The fact that I’ve studied this charismatic movement and its logics has trained me to grasp the methodologies that Bolsonaro explores, like the logical fluctuation and bipolar oscillation between one thing and another I was just referring to. You always heard about Brazil as a place of extremes but also Brazil as the country of the future, of “order and progress”[6], a positivist credo that postulated telos and linear time: solution. But Bolsonaro is anything but that. He is a bouncing sovereign with a rubber spine. Extremes meet in him. He is at once a clown and a military, he is the idea and the enemy to that idea, the supreme institution and its opposite, both the Messiah and the anti-Christ. No central core and thus no actual meeting point for extremes to converge. Instead, he bounces and buffets like a flag in the wind…the preoccupation of living with opposites, rather than overcoming them is one of the most important assets of bolsonarismo. It is clear that Bolsonaro doesn’t want to go anywhere, and yet he moves nowhere with all the energy he can. This is why somewhere I compare Bolsonaro to a kind of moonwalker: a walking for-back-ward. Bolsonaro treasures his enemies more than his friends, because he desperately needs people around him who’ll prevent him governing. He wants to say “I would love to govern, but they don’t let me”. There is a pandemic and he fires the Minister of Health, he has no interest in solving this or other problem. He governs through chaos, by bringing contradictions into full view and turning these into the system’s generic expression, not obstacles. His goal is how not to govern. So, both Charismatics and Bolsonaro have a particular way of inhabiting the middle of things, to ignite undecidables and dwell in them with peculiar “grace”, in an ongoing [process] that has neither beginning nor end, cause nor effect, but intensifies the middle-of-its-being. Except that until no more, until this frantic middle, like the Cossack-dancer in Kafka, [he] ends up digging his own grave…
Alana: This reminds me of an article you wrote, before the rise of bolsonarismo, I believe just after Trump’s election. It is an article about a situation in Portugal when a radio station re-enacted Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the reaction among the population was similar to the original broadcast in New York. However, your discussion is about how after the radio started to state and repeat that it was not true there was still some chaos because people were asking themselves “what if”, “what if there is some truth to it?” There was already an idea of threat, a worry, in the context that the piece was enacted.
Your discussion made me think about some events that happened close to each other in time – Trump’s election in 2016, Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, the referendum in Colombia that decided against a peace agreement, Brexit in UK. They all happened in different places at a similar time. In many parts of the world there was a similar sense of the “what if” that you described in your article. What do you think led that to happen in so many different places almost simultaneously?
We know that among sympathizers of the charismatic movement and Pentecostal movement there has been a “worry” for a while. They believe their notion of family is under threat, and they were worried about that for a long time. But something happened in the last few years that made more people feel threatened about other kinds of family, about what they called “gender ideology”, worried by the perception that Communism could overtake power. What do you think is particular of these years, of this time, that turned the threat into something so important?
Maria José: In the case of the piece of the War of the Worlds what creates this [panic] is precisely the oscillation between: “Is it a fact that we’ve been invaded? No, it’s a fiction. No, it’s a fact, right?” The oscillation leads people to a point where they cannot be sure anymore. It’s a stroboscopic effect of Welles’s piece…. It is also about the power of repetition to transform perception, as we discussed before. In this case, however, the transformation comes out of the oscillation between fact and fiction that gradually turns into a fog of “what if?”. This “undecidability” leads to the structure of threat. And threat, especially if you can convince people, that it is not just any threat but that it is informed, it’s hugely powerful. This broadcasting of the War of the Worlds in Portugal happened in 1958. As I describe, there was the Communist threat, there was the imminent arrival of the third Fatima’s secret, there was a structure. To use this great expression, by Reinhardt Koselleck, there was a “structure of expectation” there that put people on the edge. Something was imminent, something was about to happen. The fact Portugal was not involved in World War Two, already made people think that sooner or later something would happen. So you just needed the right trigger. Matos da Maia, the radio broadcaster, saw that potential. The conditions were there for this “what if?” to emerge.
I liked to write that about what happened in 1958 to contrast with this whole literature that says threat became something important in the aftermath of 9/11. This literature says threat became a rich and important register of our current culture of temporality and more or less with the Bush administration; we started to sense we live under threat, and that was a strong change in where the enemy is positioned. Before, the enemy was positioned out there – like in the Cold War, the whole structure of the narrative of Fatima and the secrets targeted Russia, and Communism coming to the West – and what changes with the rhetoric of warfare with 9/11 is that the enemy now is amongst us. Bolsonaro takes a step further: “Okay, if the enemy is against us, let me turn this fact into an asset of governance, or better, non-governance”. One of the reasons I wanted to write a piece about 1958 is to show that the culture of threat – like Joe Masco shows in his work The Theater of Operations, or Brian Massumi very perceptively – the culture of threat has been there way before 2001, 9/11. We constantly live under this sense of the culture of imminence, that we are at the cusp of something, that something is going to fall upon us. Threat is highly productive because it puts people poised for action. It is part of the culture of indeterminacy, as much as about that sense of an end, an agitation one can’t quite identify. And that, as Frank Kermode puts it, makes you live the present in intensified ways. On the other hand, I also think we more and more have a highlighted perception that things could be different, that things could be otherwise, as Beth Povinelli notes, and it has to do with how the mass media shapes how we imagine worlds to happen.
We know things are no longer just one way, and we are very aware that being here means not being there. We are more aware of what we are excluding as well. So, there’s also that sense, which is not exactly a threat, but is a sense that I’m not in full control of the worlds that are out there. That I am always excluding other possibilities and I might just be missing out on something. This shapes how we navigate the present, and the sense of the complexity in which we live, and the anxiety that ensues…we will be reading Kierkegaard on this soon.
Regarding the other question you raise about “other kinds of family” and what “gender ideology” is, this is an important aspect. It is a question I do not deal with in my book as my focus is on the operational logics governing phenomena, not the phenomena themselves, such as family, gender, race and so on…But to give you an example, Padre Paulo Azevedo Jr. who often preaches at Canção Nova, he [states] that the Christian idea of family is under threat because of “gender ideology”. He gives the example of Sweden, which he calls “an authoritarian state” because as he puts it, “all children are obliged to wear orange” as part of the ideology of “neutral gender” or else have to find refuge on islands in the North Atlantic. Yet, in his accusations against “gender neutrality”, which he calls “totalitarian ideology”, he mimics the arguments of the Left and then flips them around to his own camp. He accuses the enemies of Christianity of not doing the intellectual work as to why in history boys dress in blue and girls dress in pink, he accuses them of being oppressive and anti-democratic, he accuses them of being part of a totalitarian machine that wants to alienate the people, he accuses them of weaponizing language. Christianity, he concludes, has to help families to emancipate from those sorts of totalitarian arguments and states that are infiltrating Brazil and the world. What this padre is doing is adopting the Tory-structure I mentioned above. He calls on norms to be flexible in its indexing, so he can accuse the opponent of the realities they themselves subscribe to. In this way, they are both the norm and its critique, the one thing and its contrary.
Alana: Yes, it makes me think how in all these situations we cited there was this feeling of a threat, an inside threat that was also imminent. You know, in Colombia was the FARC, in UK the free circulation… It makes me think… I am not sure about Brazil. What exactly was the trigger? Maybe the 2013 protests, and how through it people became worried that there was a political threat somehow. For sure your answers give me a lot to think about.
Maria José: Yes, think of 2013, and the protests where there was that momentum that the population of Brazil went to the extremes…
Alana: Soil, sovereignty and theopolitics are important concepts that appear in your work. Can you talk about that, about how you use these concepts and how they are important for your work?
Maria José: In classic terms, Carl Schmitt famously expressed, and we repeat ad nauseum perhaps, the sovereign is who decides on the state of exception. So, the idea of decisiveness is something important to define sovereignty, it is a definition that is at the core of the political theological. But, as we have discussed already, there is not much attempt at decision in contemporary sovereignty. So what happens to the logic of exception? As I was saying about charismatics and Bolsonaro, what is striking there is this operational solidarity between worlds that are intrinsically contradictory. So, the classic definition of the political theological and the questions of sovereignty around decision do not really apply. What I’ve been debating with Valentina Napolitano and Carlotta McAllister has to do with this inadequacy of the classical idea in political theology of sovereign decision, towards thinking about ‘sovereignty incision’. Whereas sovereignty decision entails separation, incision entails a cut through. This invites questions that have more to do with the body, with substance but also language, materiality and signification that were never really encompassed by classic formulations of the political theological.
Alana: If I remember well, you also discuss the theme of sovereignty in a piece about May Day in Portugal, when the supermarket Pingo Doce makes this huge campaign. It is a piece of such a sociological imagination! Can you talk about that too?
Maria José: So here we move to my second book project on Portugal (with extensions to Angola). Again, we need to look at the relation between sovereignty and incision. The sale happened in the course of austerity measures introduced in 2011. There is a sense of imminence in the air. Greece is threatening to leave the Euro, and in Portugal people thought that maybe all the southern countries would be doing the same. Because of this fear, people were running to the banks to get their money. At the same time, salaries were being cut under austerity measures, so there was both austerity and liquidity, like a tongue feels after a good wine, as the great Lauren Berlant put it. At this moment, there is the surprise of this hyperbolic discount on May Day. The supermarket would reduce purchase prices to 50% less if people spent 100 euros on food. The element of surprise there worked like an incision.
People were poised for action. The imminence that something was about to happen propelled a field action, a nervous network, as Taussig would say. As thousands and thousands came to the supermarket, they actually found themselves stuck and a situation of chaos and impasse was created. At some point, people are searching for who gave the order for the sale. Sovereign where art thou? Well, the president of “Pingo Doce”, after hours of people trying to find out where he was, eventually does come up and says: “you know, I’m as surprised as anybody else”. This outsourcing of responsibility, the fact that there is no origin there for accountability of what happened, that precisely allows this thing to circulate very strongly. There is only middle, there is only circulation. A vortex. The supermarket capitalizes on this atmosphere of threat, launching up this surprising sale. People tell each other about it through their social media and the message is repeated time and again, intensifying all that. People come to the supermarket, and then this sovereign is nowhere to be found, except that he is, in a populist gesture, as surprised as anybody else. He is in the middle, like everybody else…. Consequently, what you have is a scene of confusion. Many people actually thought, because it was May Day, that unions organized the sale. So, the right co-opts the camp of the left, here too….
Alana: I did not understand that people had made this association….
Maria José: Because of that lack of an origin, the point of enunciation of the order of the sale, you suddenly have camps interpenetrating each other. In the article, “Supermarket Mayday” I am trying to tell this story through this family: a mother, a father who is dead but was a union person, and then the son who is an activist. The mother goes to the supermarket, the son goes to a May Day demonstration. The daughter stays at home, too disenchanted to participate in anything. They come together even as they are apart and in dispute. At some point, all these fields overlap leading people to think “Oh, this is the best way to celebrate May Day. They actually gave us this amazing sale”. They think this because there was no one there to account for it as responsible. So, fog was everywhere.
Alana: It makes me think about a situation that happened in Brazil, in Pernambuco, years ago where there was a strike of the police workers, and this created a situation of panic. Without any police in the streets, if anything happens, there is no one to account for it. Then the people who were panicking that something could happen, actually started to be the agents of “violence”. Large shops in small cities and neighborhoods were robbed by regular people – like elderly people, mothers with kids, etc. They were taking merchandise off the supermarket shelves and leaving the stores without paying. No one really knows how it started, but suddenly it was happening in different neighborhoods. The next day people were ashamed and started to leave the merchandise in the streets, or close to the shops they belonged to. These people didn’t want to have these products with them anymore. No one has written an anthropological piece about that, and it is just such an interesting case of how a situation of threat leads people to action.
Maria José: The power of the threat is that you do not give any fixed content. It is precisely because there is no content burdening the reference, that threat works, and it’s toxic….
Alana: This has been an amazing conversation, but before we finish, I would like to ask you what is your current project? After publishing this book, what do you think will be your next work?
Maria José: I’m now working on a project on the notion of oikos or ‘household’ based primarily in Portugal. It is going to be a collection of essays, that more or less starts with the 2008 financial crisis, up to the present. It also considers the kind of historical precedents that were there, that led to this financial crisis. It is a project that very much thinks about the problem of housing with the explosion of the tourist industry, and extensions to Angola because of the oil economy. During the financial crisis, many Portuguese wanted to keep up with a good life that they had in the 90s and a viable solution came with the possibility to go back to Angola and offer their expertise. I will be focusing on the fact that many Portuguese live in Luanda in these gated communities, which allows them to play with this idea of being “back” in Angola and yet not quite there. It’s interesting, because many of these young people who are going back, they are critical of the colonial project, the regime under Salazar and so on. They want to detach themselves from the past and neoliberalism would allow that, yet suddenly with austerity they find themselves in the past. So the way to disidentify is to say, “Look, I’m here in Luanda, because I’m an engineer, because of merit, not because of the colonial past”. But then the very fact that they speak Portuguese brings up “that” past….
I’m also looking into the situation of the pandemic, its impact in the notion of the household. Particularly, the question of women as homeless. Portugal has a very strict definition of homeless. The homeless person is he or she who sleeps on the street. If you borrow the couch from a relative or from a friend, which women mostly do, that means they are not considered homeless. The question that I posed is who becomes entitled to claim social housing. Women are not qualified as homeless because they avoid sleeping on the streets because of obvious threats to their lives and because they are caretakers. What happens when they want to come up and ask for help from a very narrow public sector?
In the background I will be relating the problem of the oikos to a certain messianic imaginary well-known in Portugal as Sebastianism, as a kind of crisis savior who appears through the fog. So back to air…There is a long tradition of thinking Portugal and the Lusophone world through these themes that returned in full force just before the break out of the 2008 financial crisis. So, I’m again back to the relation between politics, religion and semiotic fog but now through the household, which I see as an administrative space (oikonomos) that links the house to the nation and these to an atmosphere of speculation about returns.
Alana: It is the “what if” again.
Maria José: That’s right!
[1] On October 12, 1995, a Pentecostal church pastor brought an image of the Virgin Mary to a TV show and knocked and kicked it many times to demonstrate what he understood as the lack of power of an inanimate object.
[2] During the 2018 presidential campaign, Jair Bolsonaro, who would win the elections, was stabbed while he approached the public during his visit to the city Juiz de Fora.
[3] CNBB: National Council of Bishops of Brazil, Catholic institution.
[4] Name of a neighborhood in this city.
[5] Xuxa is the name of a famous TV presenter and singer.
[6] Motto on the Brazilian national flag.