Patricia R. Pessar has written a solid, engaging, and provocative book that explores the millenarian movement led by Pedro Batista, a charismatic leader in Brazil who rose to fame in the late 1930s and whose followers continue to practice a type of folk Catholicism in the community of Santa Brígida in the northeastern part of the country.
Pessar follows in line with the majority of the studies on millenarian movements, accepting the general precepts of deprivation theory as a primary explanation for the rise of millenarianism and relying heavily on seminal theoretical works by authors such as Max Weber. She departs from previous scholarship in how millenarian movements have engaged with the concept of modernity. Millenarian movements have typically been cast as alternative stories to modernity rather than of modernity. One of the major contributions of this book is a challenge to this assumption, and Pessar’s argument is compelling. Although Pedro Batista and other beatos -- religious intermediaries much like priests -- often referenced past prophets and past prophetic movements as sources for authority, their ideology, both religious and political, was not grounded in the past, nor was the past idealized as being inherently better, something that should be returned to through an apocalyptic reversal. Rather Batista and his followers, or romeiros, proposed a system of values that accommodated many aspects of modern life. The millenarian movement provided a spiritual path through and into the modern world in opposition to a nationalist, secular one proposed by the national government. Resistance expressed by this group was directed not to modernity, but to political, economic, and religious oppression they experienced by repressive church authorities and government officials.
Pessar’s discussion of modernity, however, could be clearer. It would have been helpful, for example, if she had articulated an operational definition for modernity. The term is clearly not agreed upon by the major players in the book, and Pessar never specifically defines the term within the various groups either. One can, however, piece together a general concept by gathering together references throughout the book: a state of affairs marked primarily by economic success, new technologies that place man in domination of nature, and a sense of national unity. In Brazil, it also meant a secular orientation to progress. For the romeiros, modernity also brought with it the demand for engagement in political discourse, something viewed by many as a corrupting influence. Fairly early in the movement, Batista established the community of Santa Brígida, which at least economically fit the national agenda for a shift from the patronage system of the countryside into a modern nation. The romeiros accepted new technologies and attained some measure of economic success, but stressed a spiritual orientation that guided their daily lives and resisted key elements of the national agenda. Pessar points out that this millenarian movement was about resistance, certainly, but equally about compromise, collaboration, and in its final stages, perhaps even cooptation, and therefore favors the term “negotiation” to describe Batista’s millenarian movement.
True to the subtitle of the book, Pessar’s analysis is heavily intertextual, linking the specific millenarian movement of Pedro Batista to the narratives constructed by and about previous millenarian movements and the narratives about Batista constructed in the popular media. When the community Batista founded at Santa Brígida begins to become economically successful, what was once seen as a community of religious fanatics is transformed into a model of Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas’ “March to the West” policy for modernizing Brazil. “Thus, in little more than a decade, Batista had been refashioned in leading regional newspapers from a beato—and hence a retrograde and dangerous religious fanatic—to ‘old Pedro Batista,’ a contemporary bandeirante [bold explorer] and getulista [a system advocating subsidies for the poor] modernizer” (121). In the mass media, the movement and the prophet leader are indistinguishable; the transformation of one is the transformation of the other. Pessar generally blames the government for its intentional and self-serving construction of Santa Brígida, Batista, and the romeiros as secular agrarians, but as she points out less often, Batista himself regularly admonished his followers to present a secular image to the public (e.g.162).
This reconceptualization of Batista and the romeiros was not permanent. From the 1930s to the 1990s, the relationship between the popular media and the romeiros was a highly volatile one. Batista and his followers began as fanatics, were transformed into models of modernity, then transformed back into fanatics with the sometimes violent civil unrest following Batista’s death. But Pessar does not end her narrative with the death of Batista and the devolution of the movement into competing factions, as one might expect. Instead, she tells a story that not only pays close attention to the struggle for power within a millenarian movement, but also its transformation into the present, as “folk” culture, with valuable economic benefits through tourism, ideological benefits in the rewriting yet again of the history of the movement, and cultural benefits by providing an avenue for not merely the preservation, but also the maintenance and revitalization of communal traditions. Folklorists often wrestle with the effects the commodification of culture has on the traditions we study. Pessar is right to eschew the misguided but popular notion that when a cultural performance becomes public and accommodating to tourists, popular media, and national politics, it moves out of the realm of the authentic and into a jar of formaldehyde, preserved as a curiosity but dead of most meaning. Instead, she spends the final two chapters of her book analyzing the effects of the mass media and, perhaps most interestingly if not most importantly, of scholars such as herself. Pessar presents a series of scholars who have studied the group and analyzed their roles in crafting the image of the romeiro both outside the community as well as within. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the effect of the scholar in the community is found in the prophecy that “a dark-haired woman who was a messenger of God would soon arrive from across the seas to take stock of the community and to report back to God” (94). Many romeiros believed the author herself was the fulfillment of this prophecy, casting Pessar unwittingly in a role of substantial power in the community, particularly in terms of conflict resolution. More mundane effects of the efforts to study and document the culture of the romeiros are less dramatic but no less powerful. The inclusion of herself in the narrative is neither self-serving nor a bland nod to the post-modern trend of reflexive awareness, but clearly an integral part of understanding the dynamic articulations of the identify of this community.
For the reader interested in issues of narrative and genre, Pessar’s analysis of the miracle stories or saint’s legends told about Pedro Batista is particularly interesting. Pessar successfully interprets these narratives as persuasive rhetorical tools in establishing Pedro Batista as a saint, addressing how these stories enter public discourse in contrast to competing narratives published in newspapers that regularly refer to Batista as a charlatan. Pessar moves beyond most anthropological and historical studies in dealing with such narratives and tackles questions befitting a folklorist. Namely, she examines the structural and thematic elements of these stories, and interprets them through relevant cultural norms and intertextual references to biblical scriptures, the broader corpus of saint’s legends, and the lives and histories of previous saints. Relying on previous scholarship, she identifies elements of the narratives establishing Batista as a beato and a santo that appear unique among other stories told about saints. One might have hoped, however, for more attention paid to emic genres and distinctions between one type of narrative and another. Pessar interchanges the terms “saint’s legends” or “saint’s stories” with “miracle stories,” relegating to a brief footnote that these stories were often elicited by asking for historias (an emic term Pessar defines as a “true story”), but were named by the tellers as um exempla or um caso, two other emic genres that Pessar does not define. In his study of Mexican and Mexican-American narrative forms, Joe Graham distinguishes the caso from the cuento, historia, leyenda, and chiste, all emic narrative categories distinct from one another (1982). Pessar is working in Brazil, so the definitions likely do not transfer exactly, but the danger of collapsing these genres or ignoring the impact of distinctions among them seems clear. Additional analysis of the genre of the bendito (defined by Pessar as “popular hymns”) would have been useful as well.
That said, Pessar does recognize the power of generic norms to shape discourse and content, and moves between emic and etic analyses in order to explicate the meanings constructed by the romeiros versus those constructed in the popular press and by political and religious leaders outside the movement. In the “testimonies of faith” romeiros tell as explanations of why they follow Pedro Batista, Pessar recognizes recurring patterns and themes; most striking is the complete avoidance of mention of economic benefit in following Batista, a benefit that is clearly visible and remarked upon in other discourses. These testimonies are framed by speakers as spiritual narratives and leave little room for discussion of secular motivations. Further, these testimonies are constructed as a response to the exoteric descriptions in the media, many of which cast the movement in economic and political terms.
In light of the impressive scope of this work, there are a few omissions that are perplexing. The first is Pessar’s omission of any real discussion of the response to Batista’s failed prophecies of the end of the world. She mentions that he prophesied the world would end in 1950; when that did not occur, he revised his prophecy to 1960. That prophecy also failed to be fulfilled. Pessar explains: “According to romeiros who remember these ominous prophecies, when the apocalypse failed to materialize, Batista rededicated himself to improving the lives of his romeiros while exhorting them to remain vigilant” (102). That is the sum of the explanation, except for a footnote that directs the reader to another scholar’s work. Failed prophecy is not unique to Batista; but in other cases where this has occurred, the response by both prophet and followers has been significant and demands attention (Leon Festinger’s work in this area is of particular relevance). The second omission is engagement with other, non-Brazilian millenarian movements. In light of her analysis and its heavily political bent, Armin Geertz’s case study of Hopi prophecy is particularly relevant and would have been usefully addressed to tease out those elements common to prophecy and millenarian movements directly engaged in political dissent. Even brief, illustrative examples would have been helpful in order to contextualize this movement within millennial movements generally. For example, the strategies used to establish Batista as a charismatic leader with divine authority—such as orphan status with no kin ties and near-death experiences coupled with visions of the divine—are strikingly similar to those found among American Indian prophets and spiritual leaders (see for example Lewis 1988).
One other frustration with the book is worth noting. Pessar rarely defines her terms, assuming an initial understanding of the topic that risks alienating some readers. Nowhere does she clearly define beato, beata, romeiro, or, as noted earlier, modernity. The reader is left to piece together definitions from multiple mentions in the text, a process made all the more difficult by an incomplete index—both in entries included and in completeness of each entry—that does not even include the term “beato” despite its frequent use throughout the book.
In the end, these omissions and shortcomings are minor; Pessar’s book is well-researched, well-written, and invaluable in the study of modern millenarian movements.
References Cited
Festinger, Leon. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Geertz, Armin W. The Invention of Prophecy: Continuity and Meaning in Hopi Indian Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Graham, Joe. “The Caso: An Emic Genre of Folk Narrative.” In “And Other Neighborly Names”: Social Processes and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore, edited by Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams, 11-43. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.
Lewis, James R. “Shamans and Prophets: Continuities and Discontinuities in Native American New Religions.” American Indian Quarterly 12 (1988): 221-28.
Weber, Max. Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press, 1947.
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[Review length: 2044 words • Review posted on March 8, 2007]