From Fanatics to Folk: Millenarianism and Popular Culture (review)

This is a sophisticated study of the millenarian movement founded by Pedro Batista, who began preaching in the 1930s and who established and led the "holy city" of Santa Brígida in northern Bahia in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. It includes a broader discussion of millenarianism in Brazil based on the author's earlier trailblazing articles from which many scholars, including myself, have drawn upon to make sense of this fascinating phenomenon. This book uniquely looks at the long durée of millenarianism in Brazil, and even more successfully examines the fascinating transformation of Santa Brígida from a "dangerous" lair of fanaticism to a site of "authentic" Brazilian culture. Pessar argues that her book is more than a case study, but it is precisely as a case study that From Fanatics to Folk succeeds. This is because of Pessar's unique perspective generated by extensive ethnographic research on Santa Brígida in the 1970s and again in the late 1990s. She combines long-term access to the movement with her earlier theoretical insights to produce an unusually detailed history of Pedro Batista's dealings with civil and religious authorities during an era of Brazilian history that is just now receiving the attention it merits from scholars.

Pessar argues that Pedro Batista insured the survival of his movement by hiding its "transgressive folk Catholic practices" (p. 185) and by developing a "hybridized vision of modernity" (p. 116) that emphasized hard work, commercial farming and "a willingness to take up select modern teachings and technologies" (p. 116). In turn, local landowners/political bosses who supported or at least tolerated Pedro Batista in return for his supporters' votes soon ignored and eventually erased all public references to the religious character of the movement, and focused instead on tying Santa Brígida into the growing nationalist discourse on modernizing the Brazilian interior. Batista himself not only courted local political support, but also federal approval, resources, and even protection by donating 5,000 hectares to the federal government to establish an official agricultural colony there. His followers' agricultural and commercial successes even drew the attention of President Castello Branco, who commissioned the documentary film "A Corner of Hope" touting the community's commercial success. Absent in the film is any mention of the movement's religious content and millenarian practices. "Rather, the film presents an essentialized narrative of poor sertanejos fleeing drought, then being 'rescued' and led into the modern age by agents of a generous and forward-looking state" (p. 131).

But Pessar also gazes inward, and writes the history of tensions between Batista's outward, modernist discourse, and his continued promotion of millenarian beliefs and folk Catholic practices in Santa Brígida. By the time of his death in 1967 roughly two-thirds of the community, Pessar estimates, were "traditionalists" who were poor, darker skinned, and supportive of the millenarian vision. Others, the "moderates" and "modernists," were more involved in market production, and held civil service positions that came with the creation of municipal government in the early 1960s. Pessar herself was caught up in these tensions and rivalries while conducting her fieldwork in 1974, and she presents the complexities of her own presence and the challenges of participant research in a way that serves as a useful primer to students thinking of engaging in such research. I was chilled by her startling admission that she counseled Dona Dodô, the other key spiritual leader in Santa Brígida, on whether a claimant to succeed Batista was indeed Pedro Batista reborn, as the claimant asserted, and am less than satisfied by her explanation that "I left her home knowing that I had crossed a line I then believed a researcher should not transgress, but I also knew that I had treated a remarkable woman with the honor and respect she merited-not as a mere key informant" (p. 171).

In the last decade, Santa Brígida...