Maria José de Abreu

Maria José de Abreu
Anthropology
Assistant Professor
md3605@columbia.edu

My book, The Charismatic Gymnasium: breath, media and religious revivalism in contemporary Brazil (Duke University Press, 2021), examines how Charismatic Catholicism in contemporary Brazil produces a new form of total power through a concatenation between the breathing body, theology and electronic mass media. The book documents a vast religious respiratory program of revival whose goal is to labor on the athletic elasticity of spirit. Tracing the rhetoric, gestures and spaces that together constitute this new theological community, I expose the articulating forces between evangelical Christianity, neoliberal logics and the rise of right-wing politics. By calling attention to how an ethics of pauperism vitally intersects with the neoliberal ethos of flexibility, the book shows how paradoxes do not hinder but expand the Charismatic Gymnasium. The result is the production of a fluid form of totalitarianism and Christianity in Brazil and beyond.

A second project in progress is dedicated to thinking the concept of household—the oikos—in southern Europe's socio-political horizon. Focusing on Portugal during and after the 2008 financial crisis, this project aims to document forms of relation that shape and reconfigure what we could call an oikopolitics of the present. Moving transversely across distinctions such as the private and the public, family and nation, inheritance and meritocracy, the colonial and the postcolonial, I theorize ethnographically informed spaces of tension in ways that make decision—though not governance—difficult or impossible.

My writings have appeared in Current Anthropology, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Culture and Religion, Anthropological Theory, Social Analysis, Scapegoat, Social Text and Cultural Anthropology. My ethnographic work has been supported by Foundation for Science and Technology Lisbon, Forum for Transregional Studies, Berlin, ICI-Berlin, and Rework: Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History, at Humboldt University in Berlin.