– Which research project are you mostly working on now?
– At present I am working on two different research projects that address religion and politics in Brazil. The first examines the conditions of possibility for religious politics in liberal contexts. More specifically, it asks how the state recognition of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions as religions, and the de facto relegation of their governance to government offices on racial equality, influenced these religious traditions’ practitioners’ efforts to engage the Brazilian state in the early 2000s. This project is based on long-term ethnographic research I conducted with practitioners of these religious traditions in Salvador, Brazil.
– The other project I have been working on explores conservative Evangelical Christian engagements with and efforts to refigure liberal politics and law in Brazil. With this project, I have been especially interested in exploring conservative Evangelical Christian lawyers and politicians’ embrace and appropriation of such liberal notions as religious freedom and religious tolerance to justify their attacks on other minorities. As I have shown through my research so far, such discursive strategies have powerfully unsettled extant liberal politics on religion in Brazil. The research for this project is very much on-going, and so I am excited to see where it will take me in the coming years.
– What do you wish to find out?
– On the most general level, my research is motivated by a concern with understanding how liberal political structures both constrain and enable religious communities’ politics. A related question that motivates my research is how religious communities position themselves in relationship to and engage liberal political structures.
– At the same time, I am also concerned with understanding how political developments in Brazil over the past forty years created the conditions of possibility for a burgeoning of religiously-oriented and grounded political projects. Here, I am particularly interested in understanding how the progressive liberal democratic order that was established at the country’s democratization in the 1980s and the progressive democratic politics that were forwarded by its federal and many local governments in the 2000s led to the emergence of such seemingly different religious political projects as those forwarded by practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions and those forwarded by Brazil’s rapidly growing Evangelical Christian communities.
– Why is this important?
– Although we could argue that religion never really disappeared from liberal polities, it has been taken up by conservative political groups in particular in newly powerful ways in the past decades. For example, we cannot understand Trump’s rise to the presidency in the US, Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics, or growing attacks on gender and sexual rights across the globe without attention to this turn to religion and religious arguments in conservative politics. I think that understanding how these efforts not only threaten but also reconfigure liberal politics is one of the most important questions of our time. As an anthropologist, I approach it through an analysis of the particular: the particular ways in which particular religious groups in a particular place (Brazil) work to engage and reimagine liberal political ideals.
– Who are you collaborating with?
– I collaborate with a broad range of people: In Brazil, my fieldwork depends on close collaboration with practitioners and activists from Afro-Brazilian religious groups, lawyers, and government employees. On the scholarly front, in turn, I collaborate especially with scholars whose research focuses on Afro-Brazilian religious politics in Brazil, the rise of right-wing politics in Latin America and elsewhere, and secular state efforts to govern minority religions. Currently, I am working with a group of anthropologists of religion and secularism to produce a special issue that asks how secularism and secular governance are entangled with imaginaries of race across the globe. In addition, I am part of four other special issue and book projects organized by colleagues in the fields of political anthropology, legal anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and religious studies. Last month, I also met with a group of scholars from Europe and the Americas to discuss possibilities for creating a cross-disciplinary research network on the rise of right-wing politics in Latin America.
– What do you look for when choosing collaborators?
– Shared and/or complementary research interests with my own, and a synergy of interests more broadly, both in terms of the scholarly questions we are interested in exploring and the ways we want to explore them.
– What other research projects are you involved in?
– In addition to the two research projects I describe above, I am working on finalizing a couple articles from a 5-year project on the legal treatment of religious intolerance in Brazil that was funded by the Finnish Research Council.
– What do you find most interesting about being a researcher?
– The opportunities it offers to think deeply about the world and to do so in dialogue with other people, both those who are scholars like me and those who I have met through my field research in Brazil.
– What is the most common question you receive about your job when you are with others?
– Most often I get asked about what it is like to do ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil. People are often curious to learn what anthropological fieldwork is like in practice: What do I do when conducting fieldwork for my project? Where do I live? Do I only speak Portuguese when in the field? What it has been like to live in highly segregated Brazilian cities? What are Afro-Brazilian religious practices like, how much have I been able to participate in them, and what do I think of them?
– In addition, people are often interested to hear about how the Brazilians I have met through my research view Brazil’s current political situation: what are their biggest political concerns? How did they experience far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency? And, how have they found Workers’ Party president Lula’s return to the presidency after Bolsonaro?