Research Catalog
Automatic religion : nearhuman agents of Brazil and France
- Title
- Automatic religion : nearhuman agents of Brazil and France / Paul Christopher Johnson.
- Author
- Johnson, Paul C. (Paul Christopher), 1964-
- Publication
- Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021.
- ©2021
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| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person. | Book/text | Use in library | JFE 21-3759 | Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315 |
Details
- Subject
- Genre/Form
- Case studies.
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Contents
- Introduction: Religion-Like Situations -- Rosalie: Psychiatric Nearhuman -- Juca Rosa: Photographic Nearhuman -- Anastácia: Saintly Nearhuman -- Ajeeb: Automaton Nearhuman -- Chico X: Legal Nearhuman -- Conclusion: Agency and Automatic Freedom.
- Call Number
- JFE 21-3759
- ISBN
- 9780226749693
- 022674969X
- 9780226749723
- 022674972X
- LCCN
- 2020026470
- OCLC
- 1143624927
- Author
- Johnson, Paul C. (Paul Christopher), 1964- author.
- Title
- Automatic religion : nearhuman agents of Brazil and France / Paul Christopher Johnson.
- Publisher
- Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021.
- Copyright Date
- ©2021
- Description
- x, 322 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
- Type of Content
- text
- Type of Medium
- unmediated
- Type of Carrier
- volume
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Summary
- "Paul C. Johnson begins his new work, Automatic Religion, with the observation that two of the capacities commonly taken to distinguish humans from nonhumans-free will and religion-are fundamentally opposed. Free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity, authorship, and the conscious weighing of alternatives. Meanwhile, religion is less a quest for agency than a series of practices--possession rituals being the most spectacular though by no means the only examples--that temporarily relieve individuals of their will. What, then, is agency and why has it occupied such a central place in theories of the human? Based on a dozen years of archival and ethnographic research in Brazil and France, this book tests the boundaries between humans and non-humans in an unlikely series of episodes from the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when ideas related to automatism lurched into motion on multiple tracks and, not incidentally, "religion" as a topic of study was being born. Brazil provided a particularly fertile place for reflection as the nearest site of what Europeans and Euro-Americans too often, too naïvely, and too imperially saw as raw nature, and thus also a laboratory of the human. In this context, the French would call Brazil's people monkeys; its slaves were called automatons; and Afro-Brazilian spirit possession priests were classed in the terms of French psychiatry's newly minted terms, dissociation and hysteria. Johnson shows not just how automatons can take on unexpectedly human-like lives when animated but also traces how certain groups have been excluded as less-than-human. In so doing, Johnson reanimates one of the most mysterious and yet foundational questions of trans-Atlantic thought-what is agency?"-- Provided by publisher.
- Chronological Term
- 1800-1899
- Other Form:
- ebook version : 9780226749860
- Research Call Number
- JFE 21-3759