The Mystic of Friendship : Divining the Present in Settler Amazonia (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)

Lebner, Ashley

University of Chicago Press（2025/12発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 320 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780226845753
• DDC分類 981.11

Full Description

A vivid portrait of how divine and human intimacies sustain colonization in the Amazon.
 
On Brazil's Amazonian frontier, settlers pursue land and opportunity, but they also gather for prayer and pilgrimage, yearning for a deep relationship with God and one another. In this book, anthropologist Ashley Lebner examines how everyday religious practices and feelings, what she calls a mystic of friendship, shape and sustain colonization in the Amazon.

Lebner invites us to a stretch of highway in Pará, Brazil, where violent colonization coexists with prophetic dreams, Afro-Brazilian prayers, and emerging evangelicalism. She shows how, amid political tensions and physical hardship, settlers believe that the violence they experience and enact derives from the bestial nature of earthly life that must be overcome. In exposing a longing for divinely-infused friendship that animates colonization, Lebner offers a powerful new perspective on the forces driving colonialism as much as religious and political expression.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
First Visitation
1. Goianésia do Pará: The Recurrence of Allegory
Second Visitation
2. Marabá: The Intensification of Secularity
Third Visitation
3. Cleusa's Settlement: Poetry and the Devil's Arts
Fourth Visitation
4. Jacundá: The Cry and the Silence of Unity
Fifth Visitation
5. Fazenda Peruano: Law's Enmity
Sixth Visitation
6. Eldorado do Carajás: Divining the Event

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index