Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-cjp7w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-24T21:06:13.117Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Law, Religion, and “Public Health” in the Republic of Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Paul Christopher Johnson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The essay evaluates the general problem that, while most modern republican constitutions follow the U.S. and French models in declaring religious freedom, absolute religious freedom is impossible and undesirable. How are religious freedoms constrained, and how much should they be? The essay evaluates the strategies by which limitations on freedoms of religion are constructed and imposed, especially the powerful isomorphism of law and science described by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Taking the example of Afro-Brazilian religions in relation to the Brazilian state since 1890, post-emancipation, the essay argues that pseudo-scientific discourses of “public health” constrained the religious practice of former slaves, thus allowing the trompel'oeil of religious freedom to continue in the new republic, even as freedoms were in fact constrained by the state.

Type
Symposium: Law, Religion, and Identity
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Winter 2001 , pp. 9 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2001 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, Sam. 1989. Race and Povo. In Conniff and McCann 1984.Google Scholar
Amado, Jorge. 1985. Tenda dos milagres. Rio de Janeiro: Record.Google Scholar
Andrews, George Reid. 1991. Blacks and Whites in Ssio Paub, Brazil, 1888–;1988. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Arquivo Nacional: Cartas règia de 1761 e 1785. Rio de Janeiro National Archives. Bastide, Roger. 1973. Estudos afro-brasileiros. São Paulo: Perspectiva.Google Scholar
Bello, Josè Maria. 1966. A History of Modern Brazil, 1889–;1964, trans. James Taylor, L. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Birman, Patricia. 1995. Fazer estilo criando gêneros: possessão e diferençm de gênero em terreiros de Umbanda e Candomblè no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ.Google Scholar
Borges, Dain. 1995. The Recognition of Afro-Brazilian Symbols and Ideas, 1890–;1940. Luso-Brazilian Review 32(2):60–74.Google Scholar
Brown, Karen McCarthy. 1991. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Burns, Bradford E., ed. 1966. A Documentary History of Brazil. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Burns, Bradford E., ed. 1980. A History of Brazil. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Carvalho, Jose Murilo de. 1990. A fomção dus almas: o imugiário du república no Brasil. São Paulo: Compania das Letras.Google Scholar
Comte, August. 1974. The Essential Comte, ed. Andreski, Stanislav, trans. Clarke, Margaret. New York: Bames and Noble.Google Scholar
Conniff, Michael L., and Frank McCann, D., eds. 1989. Modern Brazil: Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Conrad, Robert Edgar. 1983. Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Costa, Jurandir Freire. 1989. Ordem médica e norma familiar. 3d ed. Rio de Janeiro: Graal.Google Scholar
Cunha, Euclides da. 1944. Rebellion in the Bucklands, trans. Putnam, Samuel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Drewal, Margaret Thompson. 1992. Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Ewbank, Thomas. 1856. Life in Brazil or a Visit to the Land of Cocoa and the Palm. New York: Harper and Brothers.Google Scholar
Freyre, Gilberto. 1973. Casa grande e senzala. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympico.Google Scholar
Fry, Peter. 1999. Color and the Rule of Law in Brazil. In The (Un)Rule of Law & the Underprivileged in Latin America, ed. Juan Méndez, E., O'Donnell, Guillermo, and Sérgio Pinheiro, Paulo. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press.Google Scholar
Haberly, David. 1972. Abolitionism in Brazil: Anti-Slavery and Anti-Slave. Luso-Brazilian Review 9(2):30–46.Google Scholar
Herskovits, Melville. [1941] 1958. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Holloway, Thomas H. 1993. Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a 19th Century City. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Jaguaribe, Domingos. 1893. Influence de l'esclavage et de la liberte. Brussels, Belgium . Quoted in Skidmore 1993, 129.Google Scholar
Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1961. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dink. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Maggie, Yvonne. 1992. Medo do feitiço: relaçôes entre magia e poder no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional.Google Scholar
McCann, Frank D. 1989. The Military. In Conniff and McCann 1989.Google Scholar
Mendes, Murilo. 1869. Do aleitamento natural, artificial e misto em geral, e Particularmento do mercenario em relação às condiçôes da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Ph.D. diss., Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro. Quoted in Costa 1989, 122.Google Scholar
Murphy, Joseph M. 1993. Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the Afncan Diaspora. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Ortiz, Renato. 1978. A morte branca do feiticeiro negro. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes.Google Scholar
Prandi, Reginaldo. 1991. Os candombés de São Puulo: A velha magia nu metrópole nova. São Paulo: Hucitec, USP.Google Scholar
Reis, João José. 1986. Nas malhas do poder escravista: a invasão do candomblé do Accúna Bahia, 1829. Religião e Sociedade 139(3):108–27.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Darcy. 1978. Os brasileiros: teoria do Brasil. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, René. 1978. Cultos afro-hasileiros do Recife. Recife, Brazil: Instituto Joaquim Nabuco de Pesquisas Sociais.Google Scholar
Rio, João do. 1906. As religiôes de Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Garnier.Google Scholar
Rodrigues, Nina. 1935. O animismo fetichista dos negros baianos. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.Google Scholar
Santos, Juana Elbein dos, and Deoscoredes, M. dos Santos. 1971. Esu Bara Laroye: A Comparatiwe Study. Ibadan, Nigeria: University of Ibadan, Institute of African Studies.Google Scholar
Segal, Ronald. 1995. The Black Diaspora. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.Google Scholar
Skidmore, Thomas E. 1993. Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Sodré, Muniz. 1988. O terreiro e a cidude: a fom social negro brasileiro. Petrépolis, Brazil: Vozes.Google Scholar
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. 1995. Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science, and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Souza, Oscar de. 1928. O individuo e o meio do ponto de vista da higiene mental. Rio de Janeiro. Quoted in Ortiz 1978, 198.Google Scholar
Spengler, Oswald. 1923. Der Untergang des Abendhndes. Munich: C. H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Thompson, Robert Farris. 1983. Flash of the Spirit: Afncan and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Verger, Pierre. 1981. Notícias du Bahia—1850. Salvador, Bahia, Brazil: Corrupio.Google Scholar