The Mystic of Friendship

Divining the Present in Settler Amazonia

von Ashley Lebner

320 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

A vivid portrait of how divine and human intimacies sustain colonization in the Amazon.

On Brazil's Amazonian frontier, settlers pursue land and opportunity, but they also gather for prayer and pilgrimage, yearning for a deep relationship with God and one another. In this book, anthropologist Ashley Lebner examines how everyday religious practices and feelings, what she calls a mystic of friendship, shape and sustain colonization in the Amazon.

Lebner invites us to a stretch of highway in Pará, Brazil, where violent colonization coexists with prophetic dreams, Afro-Brazilian prayers, and emerging evangelicalism. She shows how, amid political tensions and physical hardship, settlers believe that the violence they experience and enact derives from the bestial nature of earthly life that must be overcome. In exposing a longing for divinely-infused friendship that animates colonization, Lebner offers a powerful new perspective on the forces driving colonialism as much as religious and political expression.

• Themen: Gesellschaft und Sozialwissenschaften Gesellschaft und Kultur, allgemein Gesellschaftliche Gruppen, Gemeinschaften und Identitäten Religiöse Gemeinschaften
• ISBN: 9780226845777
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 15.12.2025
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: University of Chicago Press