Automatic Religion

Front matter

Automatic Religion

Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France

PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction Religion-Like Situations 1

1. Rosalie Psychiatric Nearhuman 41

Chapter 1: Rosalie

Chapter 1 uncovers a web of intersections between perceptions of nearhuman animals like monkeys, nearhuman humans in the form of psychiatric patients and slaves, and nearhuman modes of action like spirit possession, somnambulism, and hypnotism. The story unfolds, on the one hand, between late nineteenth-century French psychiatry, centered at the Salpétriére under the direction of Jean-Martin Charcot and, on the other, the 1888 end of slavery in Brazil, which posed a crisis of assimilation and religious freedom. Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession rituals were classified, diagnosed, and treated in the terms of automatism, relying on the tools of hypnosis and diagnoses like hysteria, dissociation, and catatonia as minted by Charcot. Charcot, I show, was a rigorous student of medieval and early modern possession and exorcism, and the photographs of patients at the Salpétriére replicated his careful sketches of possession and exorcism as they appeared in paintings. In this chapter, I map out this network of exchanges. Psychiatric patients on Charcot's ward and their automatic acts were interpreted through the prism of the documented history of European spirit possession. In turn, Afro-Brazilian spirit possession in the wake of abolition was read in the terms of French psychiatric deviance. I show that spirit possession informed diagnoses of French psychiatric patients and of practitioners of Afro-Brazilian slaves. It was via the birth of modern psychiatry that those diagnoses were joined in a shared frame called automatism and its subsidiary categories. It was, however, not only discourses and diagnoses that moved between Brazil and France. When the emperor of Brazil went into exile in Paris, Charcot became his personal physician and close friend. His prized capuchin monkey, Rosalie (perhaps named after a prized psychiatric patient), who dined at the family table nightly, was a gift from the emperor himself. Rosalie impinged in certain respects on Charcot's new science, expanding the mediations of automatism to include animal nearhumans, a situation not unlike that of William James, whose early travel journals in Brazil also featured his relationship with a sympathetic monkey. I demonstrate a Brazilian capuchin monkey's role in constituting notions of automatic action in France. In turn, Ishow French psychiatry's infiltration of Brazilian treatments of Afro-Brazilian possession priests. The category automatism was applied to join psychiatric patients, Afro-Brazilian spirit possession, and monkeys in a single ordering frame, with significant social effects.

Chapter 2: Juca Rosa

Photography, like hysteria, arrived in Brazil from France. Chapter 2 investigates the multiple lives ofa photograph that depicted a nineteenth-century Afro-Brazilian possession priest—its social life, its ritual life, its legal life, and its afterlives. The photograph was taken around 1870 and is now folded into a faded case file located in the national archive in Rio de Janeiro. It shows a renowned “sorcerer” or fetishist (feiticeiro) named Juca Rosa standing on a proscenium with a devotee kneeling before him. The devotee points a baton or drumstick at the master, expressing humility, homage, and devotion. The photograph represented another kind of nearhuman in that it was deployed as a proxy for the presence of the priest himself and understood by his followers to communicate and carry his power. Telling this story leads to theoretical reflections on the relation of religion and photographs and the management of the religious lives of image-things as vehicles of power. I raise the issue of management to signal how, in fin de siécle Brazil, the coalition between photographs and spirits took shape within forceful regulations and regimes of appearance, legal, social, and cultural. This photograph exerted agency, yet it was far from a free agent. It worked secretly, automatically, through its sheer but barely noticeable presence. Juca Rosa staged and paid for the photograph to use as a particular kind of carte de visite, a calling card distributed to followers and clientele as an icon and index of his extended presence and power, even in his bodily absence. The photograph was nearly Juca himself. It offers a window onto a moment of social transformation and intersecting forces: the nineteenth-century abolition of slavery in Brazil and the problem of the assimilation and nationalization of former slaves and their religions as well as the emergence of photography as a new technology of mediation as it was applied to Afro-Brazilian religions and their policing. The goal is to show photography and spirit possession as intersecting, often symbiotic arts of making the previously unseen seen. But it is also to explore the differences in agency between the actual person of Juca Rosa and his iconic photographic likeness.

Chapter 3: Anastácia

Chapter 3 unpacks a different encounter between automatism and agency. It relates an iconic drawing of a human and actual enslaved humans as they were conjoined to produce the spirit saint Slave Anastácia. The story documents a slave turned saint in Brazil via a French traveler's nineteenth-century drawing. This was an instance of a sketch of a dehumanized victim, an enslaved body without will, becoming, through her depicted subjection, an object of ritual devotion. Her images and icons were reproduced in mass media, generating not only pity, trauma, and revulsion but also reverence and attraction. Anastácia was less a historical person than a composite or type. From a sketch, she later metamorphosed into a saint and mass media phenomenon, appearing in myriad shrines and multiple guises, drawing a constant flow of pilgrims and, now, Internet clicks. She is carried on prayer cards, prayed to in shrines, visited on websites, watched on telenovelas, and worn on swimwear. Paradoxically, given that her image is one of violent bondage and silencing, she circulates and speaks everywhere. Through the figure of Anastácia, I interpret the ritual attraction to the dehumanized victim-body, the martyr. I show how the kind of agency activated through exchanges with saints is differently emergent depending on the mode of saints’ material and social configurations and the mood evoked by the saint's manifestation. Slave Anastácia signifies diversely and with varying social effects for different groups of users. In this chapter, I use such radical disjunctures between the forms of presence generated by the same saint to reconsider how saints work by disseminating a mood. By paying attention to a particular unofficial Brazilian saint and her varying settings and moods, I give texture and historical complexity to the notion of automatic agency.

Chapter 4: Ajeeb

Chapter 4 considers the pull ofnearhumanness in the form of human-like machines. It moves from a broad discussion of exemplary religious and literary uses of androids to the narrower scope of the nineteenth-century romance with mechanical chessmen. After a short rehearsal of the story of the best-known figures of that company from Shelley's monster to Von Kempelen's famous Turk, the chapter dwells in greater depth on a lesser-known automaton named Ajeeb as he made his way from Europe to North America and then to Brazil, carried there by a Jewish-Czech entrepreneur named Fred Figner. In spite of Ajeeb's short career in Rio de Janeiro (from 1896 to 1897), he left his mark—a trail of wonder, questions of interiority, and polemics on personhood and fraud. His presence coincided with the large-scale immigration of Ottoman subjects to Brazil, primarily Lebanese and Syrians, in Brazil all labeled Turks. I narrate the simultaneous migrations of nearhuman things and actual humans as they collided to generate new religious forms, practices, and systems. When the chess-playing automaton named Ajeeb arrived in Brazil simultaneously with this large new immigrant group of Turks, together they helped launch a new genre of spirit entities called turcos into popular religious venues. I use the story of a particular man-machine resident in Rio de Janeiro from 1896 to 1897 to reconsider work on the automaton from a distinctive point of view, namely, that of the ritual attraction to mechanical nearhumans and their powers to generate new religion-like agents.