Automatic Religion
Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France
by Paul Christopher Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Cloth: 978-0-226-74969-3 | Paper: 978-0-226-74972-3 | Electronic: 978-0-226-74986-0
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226749860.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
What distinguishes humans from nonhumans? Two common answers—free will and religion—are in some ways fundamentally opposed. Whereas free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity, authorship, and deliberation, religious practices seem to involve a suspension of or relief from the exercise of our will. What, then, is agency, and why has it occupied such a central place in theories of the human?
Automatic Religion explores an unlikely series of episodes from the end of the nineteenth century, when crucial ideas related to automatism and, in a different realm, the study of religion were both being born. Paul Christopher Johnson draws on years of archival and ethnographic research in Brazil and France to explore the crucial boundaries being drawn at the time between humans, “nearhumans,” and automata. As agency came to take on a more central place in the philosophical, moral, and legal traditions of the West, certain classes of people were excluded as less-than-human. Tracking the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic, Johnson tests those boundaries, revealing how they were constructed on largely gendered and racial foundations. In the process, he reanimates one of the most mysterious and yet foundational questions in trans-Atlantic thought: what is agency?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Paul Christopher Johnson is professor of history and Afro-American and African studies at the University of Michigan and editor of Comparative Studies of Society and History. His books include Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé and Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa.
REVIEWS
"Johnson has created a groundbreaking, significant, and provocative addition to scholarship on how people conceive of religion. And... he is also the first in religious studies to broach the neglected subject of agency—which should be a key term in the academic study of religion—in a book-length study... Any writers who embark on future forays into the subject of agency and religion will be fortunate to have Johnson’s Automatic Religion as a resource with which they can start."
— Reading Religion
"Automatic Religion is an important text that analyzes the convergence of nearhumans, humans, and nonhumans in an ongoing game of contingency, played out in everyday social action... Automatic Religion problematizes notions of religion and agency in a refreshing way that will be of definite interest to readers in both the humanities and social sciences."
— Nova Religio
“Automatic Religion is a work of sweeping ambition and true originality. Wide-ranging, erudite, and eloquent, Johnson compels us to rethink everything we thought we knew about religion, agency, machines, animals, and the human. The histories he tracks have uncanny relevance in the age of Amazon’s Alexa and the algorithm.”
— Webb Keane, author of 'Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories'
“In this fascinating and fantastic account of what Johnson calls religion-like and near-human phenomena, he succeeds in obliquely calling us to a radical reappraisal of what we might mean by religion. Recentering the religious on situations in which we see humans ‘playing across’ agential ambiguity, he vividly brings to life a remarkable series of characters who demand our attention and our recognition. The modern religious—maybe all religion—is both more and less than we had thought. It figures, on Johnson’s account, between automatism and agency, always swapping out woman, machine, and animal.”
— Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, author of 'Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law'
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226749860.003.0001
[agency;automatism;automaton;religion-like situations;religion;nearhuman]
The Introduction presents an interrogation of the discursive fields of “agency” and “the automatic” as they impinge on the notions of religion, religion-like situations, and classifications of the human, nonhuman, and nearhuman.
1: Rosalie: Psychiatric Nearhuman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226749860.003.0002
[psychiatry;religion;Charcot;Dom Pedro II;Afro-Brazilian;hysteria;race;monkey;visions]
Late-19th century French psychiatry was key to the formation of psychiatry in Brazil. The most famous French psychiatrist, Jean-Martin Charcot, was the personal doctor and close friend of the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II. Charcot’s monkey named Rosalie was a gift from the Emperor, and shared the same name as Charcot’s prized patient suffering from “hysteria,” Rosalie Leroux. The chapter demonstrates a Brazilian monkey’s role in constituting notions of automatic action in France, and French psychiatry’s infiltration of Brazilian psychiatry, where “hysteria” wasshifted from a category applied mostly to women to a category applied to Afro-Brazilians and their religious practices.
2: Juca Rosa: Photographic Nearhuman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226749860.003.0003
[photography;law;spirit possession;fetishism;Afro-Brazilian;materiality;candomblé]
The chapter investigates the multiple lives of a photograph that depicted a celebrated Afro-Brazilian possession priest—its ritual life, its legal life, and its afterlives. The photograph was taken around 1870 and printed in the form of a carte-de-visite. It depicts a renowned “sorcerer” (feitiçeiro) named Juca Rosa, striking a ritual pose with a follower kneeling before him. The photograph was used by devotees in their homes as a proxy for the presence of the priest himself. It was also used by police to convict Juca Rosa of the illegitimate use of his religious authority, as illegal fraud. Ritual and legal trajectories collided in dramatic ways, driven by the new medium of photography, and its making of the photographic nearhuman.
3: Anastácia: Saintly Nearhuman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226749860.003.0004
[saints;mood;affect;Slave Anastácia;slavery;religion;visual]
A French traveler named Jacques Arago drew a muzzled Brazilian slave while visiting Rio de Janeiro. The drawing, later seen by the masses, birthed a spirit-saint named “Slave Anastácia.” Though never recognized by Rome, the sketch metamorphosed into a being carried on prayer cards, prayed to in shrines, and widely revered. Her image is one of violent bondage, suffering and silence, yet she circulates and “speaks” everywhere. Through the figure of Anastácia, I interpret the ritual attraction to the dehumanized automaton body. I show how the kind of agency activated through exchanges with saints is differently emergent depending on the mood evoked by a saint’s manifestation.
4: Ajeeb: Automaton Nearhuman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226749860.003.0005
[automaton;chess;Figner;technology;sound;phonograph;religion;Turks;immigration]
An automaton named Ajeeb made his way from Europe to Brazil, carried by a Jewish-Czech entrepreneur named Fred Figner. Ajeeb’s short career in Rio de Janeiro, from 1896 to 1897, left its mark—a trail of wonder, questions of interiority, and polemics on personhood and fraud. Ajeeb’s presence coincided with the large-scale immigration of Ottoman subjects to Brazil, primarily Lebanese and Syrians, in Brazil all labeled as “Turks.” The chapter narrates the simultaneous migrations of things and actual humans as they collided to generate new religious forms, practices and systems, including a whole new class of spirits: the “turcos.”
5: Chico X: Legal Nearhuman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226749860.003.0006
[documents;spirit-testimony;espiritismo;Chico Xavier;law;semiotics;automatic writing]
The chapter analyzes legal uses of “spirit-testimonies”—statements from deceased homicide victims as recuperated by spirit mediums like Chico Xavier—as they were used in a series of trials in Brazil. Spirits appear in Brazilian court in the form of documents made through automatic writing. I explore the semiotic work required for a nearhuman communiqué to convert a spirit into a document, in order to arrive in a judge’s hands. The chapter juxtaposes the legal prestige of “intent” and its requisite notion of personhood, as compared with the religious prestige of non-intentionality—in the form of mediums’ automatic writing. What happens when those two versions of personhood collide in public spaces like the court?
Conclusion: Agency and Automatic Freedom
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226749860.003.0007
[agency;craft;automatic;individual;personhood;Machado de Assis]
The Conclusion returns to theories of agency with these five episodes in mind. Working across the grain of works from Parsons to Bourdieu, Butler to Mahmood, Giddens to Sahlins and Stanley Cavell, and historians like Trouillot, Constantin Fasolt, and Walter Johnson, the Conclusion posits a theory of religious agency as craft. “Religion” is the craft of staging performative events of deferred, suspended or temporarily relinquished individual agency. Automatic religion describes experiences of being managed by nonhuman beings; or, put differently, of attuning the experience of one’s own body to the question of the other, read as an impinging external force. This is agency, then, but of a very specific kind.
