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Table of Contents: Selected Papers on Science and Religion in Brazil David J. Hess These are all final drafts prior to typesetting. Page 2. 1987. “Religion, Heterodox Science, and Brazilian Culture.” Social Studies of Science 17: 465-77. Page 9. 1989 "Disobsessing Disobsession: Religion, Ritual, and Social Science in Brazil." Cultural Anthropology 4(2): 182-193. This paper argued that positions among social scientists about Spiritism, Umbanda, and their relations had homologies with positions in the religious field. Page 19. 1990 "Ghosts and Domestic Politics in Brazil: Some Parallels between Spirit Infestation and Spirit Possession." Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 18(4): 407-38. This was the first paper to link "poltergeists" and related forms of “spirit attack” to domestic violence. Page 40. 1991. Spirits and Scientists: Ideology, Spiritism, and Brazilian Culture. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Introduction. Page 49. 1991 "On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Reading Spiritist Otherworldly Ethnographies." In Roberto Reis (ed.), Toward Socio-Criticism: Selected Proceedings of the Conference "Luso-Brazilian Literatures, A Socio- Critical Approach." Arizona State University at Tempe, Center for Latin American Studies. This paper showed how Spiritist and American descriptions of the spirit world showed important cultural differences related to this-worldly Brazil and the U.S. Page 57. 1992 "Umbanda and Quimbanda Magic in Brazil: Rethinking Aspects of Bastide's Work." Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions. 79: 139- 53. A structuralist analysis of Umbanda and Quimbanda rituals with the theoretical argument that Bastide over-estimated “religious degredation” of African religion in his studies of Umbanda. Page 74. 1992 "New Sciences, New Gods: Spiritism and Questions of Religious Pluralism in Latin America." Occasional Papers of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies, "Conference on Competing Gods: Religious Pluralism in Latin America." Brown University. A paper that questioned the current view of some scholars that Latin American was becoming Protestant by discussing the continued vitality of spirit mediumship religions. Page 84. 1995 "Hierarchy, Hegemony, and the Construction of Brazilian Religious Therapies" The Brazilian Puzzle: Culture on the Borderlands of the Western World. Ed by. David J. Hess and Roberto DaMatta. Columbia University Press. Theoretically, an attempt to bridge hierarchy and hegemony (culturalist and social structural approaches) in the study of the religious system in Brazil. Page 104. 2000 "Medical Integration and Questions of Universalism." In Laura Graziela Gomes, ed. Twentieth Anniversary Commemoration of Carnavais, Malandros, e Heróis. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Fundação Getúlio Vargas. This paper connects my work on Spiritism and religious therapies with the second project on complementary and alternative medicine. 2 1987. “Religion, Heterodox Science, and Brazilian Culture.” Social Studies of Science 17: 465-77. This was my first article publication, and I acknowledge the patient work of the editor David Edge, who was known for helping junior authors with their first publications. Previous social studies of parapsychology have focused on the academic, secular parapsychology of North America and Western Europe; this paper brings a comparative perspective to this area of research by examining parapsychology in Brazil.1 The principal argument of this paper is that parapsychology is significantly different in Brazil: it is characterized by the relative absence of the academic, secular parapsychology that is dominant in North America and Western Europe, and instead it is dominated by the rival schools of the Catholic Church and the Spiritist movement. One might argue that the religious parapsychology of Brazil should be compared with popular versions of parapsychology in North America or Western Europe, but this would miss the following points: first, there is no community of academic, secular parapsychology in Brazil like that of the northern hemisphere; second, Spiritist and Catholic parapsychologies represent, replace and reinterpret the academic, secular parapsychology of the northern hemisphere; and third, Spiritist and Catholic parapsychologies are considerably better organized and more sophisticated than the popular parapsychologies and occultist groups of the northern hemisphere. In short, the heterodox science of parapsychology (and probably other heterodox science, especially ufology) has developed differently in Brazil, with the result that social studies of heterodox science can benefit from consideration of the specific features of the Brazilian case. Methodology and Background This study is divided into two parts: a survey of Brazilian parapsychology and how it differes from that of North America and Western Europe; and an examination of the social, historical, and cultural factors behind these differences. The research is based on two field trips to Brazil, the first during the summer of 1983, and the second from September 1984 to March 1986. The results of this study are part of a doctoral dissertation project on the intellectual production of the Spiritist movement in Brazil.2 Research methods involved extensive library research in all of the major Spiritist, government, and university libraries in São Paulo, Curitiba and Brasília; observation of sessions at representative Spiritist centers in several cities; attendance and participation in meetings and conferences of Spiritist intellectuals (especially those of the Spiritist Medical Association of São Paulo); teaching (participant-observation) at the Spiritist college in Curitiba; and interviews and informal conversations with both Spiritist intellectuals and other, non-Spiritist intellectuals, such as Catholic parapsychologists and intellectuals. The term “Spiritism” will be used here to refer to the religious movement that adheres to the ideas of Allan Kardec, a nineteenth-century French pedagogue who developed a doctrine about spirit mediumship and spirit communication. Although the Spiritist movement is international in scope, it is strongest in Latin America and especially in Brazil. Spiritists believe that their doctrine provides a synthesis of science, philosophy, and Christian morality; their central beliefs are the ability of mediums to communicate with spirits of the dead, the existence of an astral body and vital fluids, and reincarnation. Spiritism is therefore a sibling of Anglo-Saxon Spiritualism; however, Spiritists tend to be more vociferous defenders of reincarnation, and in addition there is 3 an important group of Spiritist intellectuals who study and write about parapsychology, for which there is no exact parallel in the Spiritualist movements. The largely white, middle-class Spiritist movement mediates between two strong religious traditions in Brazil: Christianity, which is dominated by Catholicism but has a rapidly growing Protestant sector, and the Afro-Brazilian religions (for example, Candomblé and Umbanda) which, like Spiritism, are spirit mediumship religions. Although about 90 percent of the Brazilian population is nominally Catholic, most Brazilians are also firm believers in the powers of spirits and mediums, and many Catholics do not hesitate to attend Spiritist, Candomblé or Umbanda sessions. Thisis true even for highly educated, white Brazilians. Spirits and mediums are not just the province of the lower classes; instead, they form an integral part of Brazilian culture and national identity. Brazilian Parapsychology The most salient feature of Brazilian parapsychology is the relative absence of a secular, academic community of researchers of the type associated with the Parapsychological Association, which is the principal organization of scientific parapsychologists from Western Europe, the United States, and a few other countries. Its members present papers at annual meetings and publish articles in refereed journals, and they have a strong bias in favor of rigorous laboratory studies with quantitative analysis. No association of this type exists in Brazil, and no journal is published. With the exception of one doctoral dissertation and a pair of articles on the psychoanalysis of telepathic dreams, the secular university environment has fostered no empirical research, either of the quantitative or “spontaneous case” genre, which is comparable to that of the Parapsychological Association.3 In my review of all of the major Brazilian psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis journals ofr the 1960s and 1970s, I found only a few articles that provided cursory reviews of northern hemisphere parapsychology, and two of the authors of this group of articles were a Catholic parapsychologist and a Spiritist psychiatrist.4 Although orthodox scientists and doctors probably regard parapsychology as slightly less heterodox in Brazil than in Western Europe and North America, parapsychology is still a heterodox science in Brazil. As psychiatry professor Darcy de Mendonça Uchôa summarized, “The Brazilian university environment has show itself to be adverse to this material.”5 The only other important case of secular parapsychology is the work of Dr. Osmard Andrade Faria.6 Faria is a somewhat anomalous figure because he is neither a Catholic nor a Spiritist; instead, he had a background in journalism and view himself as a kind of debunker. In his first book Hipnose e letargia (Hypnosis and Lethargy), Faria debunked the Catholic therapist Irmão Vitrício,