Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Johnson, Paul Christopher (1964-....)
Titre(s) : Automatic religion [Texte imprimé] : nearhuman agents of Brazil and France / Paul Christopher Johnson
Publication : Chicago (Ill.) : The University of Chicago Press, 2021
Description matérielle : 1 vol. (x-322 p.) : ill. ; 23 cm
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references and index
"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?"
Sujet(s) : Religion -- Philosophie
Libre arbitre
Religion -- Brésil -- 19e siècle
Automatisme
Indice(s) Dewey :
128.4 (23e éd.) = Action et expérience humaines
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780226749723
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb47572594s
Notice n° :
FRBNF47572594
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
Table des matières : 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
