Go With God: Sensory Life & Political Exhaustion in Brazil’s Suburbs

Laurie Denyer-Willis, Assistant Professor, University of Edinburgh

Part of the Anthropology Departmental Seminar Series 2022

Abstract

With deep attention to sense and feeling, failure and hope, this talk grapples with the centrality of Evangelical faith to Rio de Janeiro’s subúrbios -the city’s expansive and cobbled together peripheral suburbs. Based on years of multimodal ethnographic fieldwork attuned to religious desire and sensation in lived politics in Brazil, this talk considers how Evangelicalism has changed the way people understand their lives, the role of the state, and their racialized citizenship in Brazil’s long history of violent racial differentiation. In the talk, through attention to feeling, smelling and touching, I think about reoriented sensoriums of hopes and hollows, where organized leftist causes and other well-worn routes out of systemic injustice struggle to find traction amidst enduring anti-Blackness in the city and nation. I try to return to Evangelical life as it is lived, and not as it has been demonised. This book reveals how and why Evangelicals turn elsewhere: going with God to seek grace, a future, and possibility through otherworldly hope, if in capricious but credible ways. 

Biography

Laurie Denyer Willis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work is multimodal, concerned with the the sensory life of bodies. She works through feminist affect theory to develop a theory of power that foregrounds the senses, feeling, and emotion to break apart entrenched public-private binaries in analyses of religious communities and right-wing populism in the city. 

Convened by:      Dr Maria Nolan and Dr Nikita Simpson