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  • From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture
  • Martha S. Santos
Pessar, Patricia . From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 273 pp.

In this book, Patricia Pessar returns to the topic of Brazilian millenarianism—to which she made contributions in the early 1980s—with a twofold objective. First, she traces the history of the millenarian community of Santa Brígida, located in Northern Bahia, from its creation in the 1930s by Pedro Batista to the 1990s. Second, she seeks to provide a revisionist approach to the study of Brazilian millenarianism as a social phenomenon. Looking upon millenarian communities as engaged with the wider world and considering Brazilian millenarianism over the longue durée, the author argues that the creation and continuation of this "holy city" over time represents a subaltern strategy of both resistance and accommodation to the demands of modernizing projects by both Church and State. Thus, she aptly delineates the collaboration between Pedro Batista and rural political bosses, as well as representatives from state and national governments, beginning in the 1940s. Paradoxically, this collaboration aligned the pilgrims at Santa Brígida more closely with the State's goals of political centralization and modernization, while it allowed them autonomy to practice their decidedly unorthodox Catholicism. For Pessar, elite discourses on popular millenarianism, along with those produced by millenarianists themselves and other actors, contribute to the social construction of millenarian meanings. Therefore, she demonstrates how Pedro Batista's disciples have been depicted as fanatics, modern rural dwellers, and guardians of an "authentic" backlands culture, according to the shifting agendas of different groups. Without losing sight of the spiritual motivations behind the movement, and its interactions with the Church, Pessar achieves this portrayal of a millenarian community in constant flux as she skillfully uses materials [End Page 148] from ethnographic and archival research she conducted in Santa Brígida in the 1970s and again in the 1990s.

In an attempt to present a corrective to approaches that regard millenarian movements as discreet social entities, Pessar sets out to examine the broad phenomenon of Brazilian millenarianism as a "traveling cultural formation" (225) and to delineate its shifts "over the long sweep of Brazilian history" (13). This perspective leads the author to interesting comparisons that show the "borrowing" among millenarian movements, especially between Santa Brígida and the Juazeiro community of early-twentieth century Ceará. Nevertheless, the book suffers from a generalizing tone in the discussion of political and economic trajectories and social relations during the historical periods which constitute the "deep background" (7) to the millenarian fervor observed in rural Brazil since the late 1800s. For instance, the work claims to map the transformation of millenarianism from an ideology of domination by colonial elites into a popular discourse of resistance among poor backlanders. Key to this discussion is Pessar's elaboration—already advanced in her earlier work—of the sacralized nature of patron-client ties between elite and subaltern groups and the adherence by the rural poor to millenarian movements when patronage ties erode. Pessar argues that these hegemonic understandings, based on ideas of reciprocity and the importance of the divine kingdom, had been "forged among and between dominant and subaltern classes over the centuries" (6). Yet, the book does not present any compelling evidence showing how this process occurred, except for references to generally older scholarship on the colonial period (16–17). Indeed, the colonial period appears as a seemingly benevolent time when, although coercive, patronage ties "buffered the rural poor against extreme deprivation" (25). This colonial past is contrasted with a similar generalized depiction of the unvaryingly negative effects on the rural poor of the broad social change occurring in Brazil since the mid-1800s. Here, capitalist accumulation and land commodification unfailingly enriched only the powerful and caused them to abandon their obligations as patrons, which forced a turn towards millenarianism among the poor who more than ever needed the protection afforded by ideal patrons. It is noteworthy that in creating this portrayal the book does not acknowledge the scholarship published since the 1980s that documents the degree of economic agency and autonomy enjoyed by a significant...

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