Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race and Popular Christianity in Brazil [Hardcover]

John Burdick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0415912598 | ISBN-13: 978-0415912594

Blessed Anatacia describes how popular Christianity confronts everyday racism and contributes to the formation of racial identity. Most explanations of the weakness of Brazil's black movement focus on Brazilian blacks' weak ethnic identity. Burdick challenges this view by revealing, after three years of field research and a hundred in-depth interviews, the multi-layered reality of black consciousness in popular Christianity. Burdick looks at how religious practices, race consciousness and collective political action interact in Urban Brazil.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A nuanced and brilliant ethnography, this is a major contribution to scholarship. -- Foreign Affairs
The puzzle of the Brazilian style of race relations has intrigued generations of scholars, but Burdick charts out new territory by examining racism in the context of Afro-Brazilian activism, popular religion, and the cultural politics of gender and desire. Avoiding simple formulas and always attentive to complexity, Burdick has produced both a nuanced ethnography and a contribution to theories of social movements and activist scholarship. -- David J. Hess, professor of anthropology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and author of Samba in the Night: Spiritism in Brazil
Blessed Anastacia is a brilliant, passionate study of the realities of race and injustice in Brazil...and represents the very best in new thinking from anthropology and cultural studies about Latin America. -- Orin Starn, author of Nightwatch: The Making of a Movement in the Peruvian Andes
A nuanced, multidimensional and sensitive analysis of race and popular culture in Brazil. -- Robert Stam, author of Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Culture and Cinema
Burdick focuses on the ways in which women of color in Brazil experience three separate forms of Christianity: the inculturated Catholic mass, Pentecostalism, and the cult of Anastacia, a Brazilian symbol of black female slavery...Blessed Anastaciais a model for research into why and how individuals are attracted to particular religious forms and expressions. -- -Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino Latin American Research Review
In Blessed Anastacia Burdick contributes to a growing literature on the analysis of race in Latin America debunking the myth of racial democracy that teaches those who want to believe it exists to interpret inequality mainly in class, not color, terms...This book is a must read for its rich ethnographical, historical, and analytical challenges. It is a book that is truly interdisciplinary and a breath of fresh air for those of us who look to make our research meaningful to a broad audience. -- -Milagros Pena University of Florida
Blessed Anastacia destroys stereotypes. Analyzing how women of color contend with issues of self-identity and pride via the prism of beauty, love, marriage, family and work within three religious contexts, the author concludes that Christianity can be a useful mechanism for expressing black identity, as well as for confronting racism..His [Burdick's] view of social movements is one in which contradictions, unexpected outcomes and contrariness are accepted as a natural outcome of the complexity of human choices. This is the strength of this work, in which his informants' views dominate rather than the author's. -- Luso-Brazilian Review, 38/1
It is unusual and refreshing for a scholar to acknowledge openly a motivation for a publication beyond that of pure research. Burdick's beautifully-written ethnography is strengthened by his candor.

About the Author

John Burdick is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University. He is the author of Looking for God in Brazil (1993).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (October 13, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415912598
• ISBN-13: 978-0415912594
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,208,813 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant integration of race, class, gender and religion, March 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race and Popular Christianity in Brazil (Hardcover)

In a course on Afro-Brazilians, this book was by far the favourite of the class. It's pleasurable to read, no prior knowledge of Brazilian culture is necessary, and it provides insights even to scholars in the field. It brings to life the situation of black women in poverty in Brazil, describing the role of religion and Brazil's attitude towards race. Burdick illustrates the complexity of race and the effects on the women he interviewed, and ties it all to the curious figure of Anastácia, the blue-eyed slave.

And rather than being a lofty academic exercise, Burdick uses his research and involvement in the communities to help advance their social situation. One chapter describes his attempts to promote communication between groups which have radically different approaches to the same goal of ending racism. This is academia with its feet firmly planted in the ground.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Examination of Movements from the Outside, December 15, 2006

By 

Cathy "of the band, Cathy and the Wuthering H... (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race and Popular Christianity in Brazil (Paperback)

John Burdick's examination of race and gender in Brazil is insightful and innovative. Blessed Anastacia looks at several different movements in Brazil, notably, the inculturated mass, evangelist religion, and the devotion to Anastacia, Brazil's slave saint. Burdick focuses his analysis of these movements through a lens of exclusion, talking to many different women who feel excluded from these movements which are supposed to benefit them. This multi-layered perspective provides an in-depth understanding of beauty standards, racism, and gender inequality in a very racially blended (if not racially equal) society.

Although I enjoyed Burdick's approach to analyzing these problems, I would have liked more discussion of why certain movements are excluding women who "don't fit". However, overall this book is a complex analysis of a complex problem, and I recommend it to anyone interested in learning about race in Brazil.