Suchergebnisse

"The first time I witnessed a Spiritist surgery, a young man named Jose Carlos Ribeiro inserted a used scalpel taken from a tray that I was holding, and plunged it into the eye of an elderly man. The patient did not move…." Decades of fieldwork later, Sidney Greenfield presents a riveting ethnography of the complex world of religious healing in Brazil that challenges readers to grapple with the most fundamental concepts of anthropology and cross-cultural experience. In a major contribution to cultural biology, he analyses the complex social, economic, and political landscape of Brazil to

This article describes a mental health and development program being carried out under the direction of a Comboni Missionary who is an ordained Roman Catholic priest from Italy and a medical doctor presently completing a Ph.D. in psychiatry in Brazil. It is based on a theoretical framework that integrates the cultural and religious backgrounds of migrants coming into the slums of Brazilian cities with a form of group therapy based on the assumptions of Liberation Theology and the teachings of Paulo Freire that was developed by Prof. Adalberto Barreto, a practicing Brazilian trained M.D.–psychiatrist with European Ph.D.s in psychiatry and anthropology. This unusual combination of anthropological insight combined with a unique approach to group psychotherapy, rooted in a humanistic approach to religion, has resulted in an extremely effective development program that is beginning to be applied in slum areas in other parts of Brazil and elsewhere.

The following pages examine the relationship between the transactions that constitute systems of patronage and clientage and politics as it operated in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in the mid-1960s. The objective will be to show how the asymmetrical exchanges of patronage and the political-electoral system served to articulate local communities with the institutional systems of the larger society.The data and analysis will be presented through an examination of the activities of individuals in two small municίpio communities in the Zona da Mata of the State of Minas Gerais during the critical election campaign for governor in the year 1965. By examining some of the activities of a local doctor and a lawyer involved in politics, we shall be able to make explicit the transactional process by means of which segments of local communities in the region were articulated, through the political-electoral process, to the state and national level institutions of Brazilian society.