Enchanting History: Black Healers, Diviners, and Sacred Ecologies in Brazil, 1850s-1920s

Abstract

Enchanting History examines the worldmaking practices, intellectual repertoires, and political projects of Afro Brazilian healers and diviners in Rio de Janeiro from the 1850s to the 1920s, tracing how their sacred ecologies shaped struggles for freedom in the final decades of slavery and the post abolition period. Drawing on police records, parish documents, newspapers, travelers’ accounts, literary texts, oral histories, and material culture, the dissertation argues that interspecies relationships and more than human agencies—plants, animals, mineral matter, forests, rivers, and ancestor spirits—stood at the center of Black politics of care, survival, and emancipation. These sacred ecologies enabled enslaved, freed, and free people to heal illness, shelter fugitives, secure manumission, navigate the violence of captivity, and confront the racialized constraints of citizenship after 1888. Across case studies—Evaristo Antônio da Costa, José Sebastião da Rosa (Juca Rosa), Anna Luiza Bernardo do Nascimento, Jesuíno José Soares and Francisca Pimentel—the dissertation reconstructs the intellectual labor of Black ritual specialists whose practices unsettled the gaze and authority of the slaveholding and post abolition state. Their engagements with bitter melon, purple nutsedge, Guinea hen weed, cow foot leaf, red spiderling, snakes, porcupines, and caboclo spirits reveal a political imagination grounded in African and Afro diasporic ontological sensibilities that exceeded the secular language of Brazilian historiography. These ritualists forged networks of solidarity that destabilized patriarchal power, challenged scientific racism, and offered alternative modes of healing, justice, and relationality. This study makes three main interventions to discussions of Black histories of freedom in the Americas, which I briefly outline here, and further develop in this introductory chapter. First, it develops narrative strategies and vocabulary necessary for us to take African and Afro-diasporic ontological sensibilities seriously in writing histories of freedom. Following the traces of plants, animals, and ancestor spirits through the crevices they open up in the archive, this study effectively enchants and disrupts a language of history that commonly flattens complex life-worlds. It pushes established boundaries between cultural, intellectual and political history by showing how Black Atlantic spiritual practices indelibly shaped political imaginations and knowledge production in Brazil. Through a multidisciplinary analytical approach, Enchanting History offers new ways to understand Afro-diasporic communities’ imagined and enacted freedom in the face of enduring racial and gendered violence.