About the Book

"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 Para, 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 desire 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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A thought-provoking ethnographic account of a major highway that cuts across the heart of Brazil. With theoretical sophistication, Lebner reconsiders the relationship between religion, secularity, and politics through the allegory of friendship. This book is critical reading for anyone interested in understanding how Catholics and Evangelicals make meaning of the violence of colonization that extends beyond the secular realm of governance and into the affective realities of human relationships."--Chad E. Seales, University of Texas at Austin

"In this original work, Lebner analyzes frontier settlement along a stretch of Amazonian highway and the ongoing struggles for life and land among settlers. By attending to settlers' habit of deciphering divine messages in everyday events and relationships, she captures something that eluded conventional histories of the Amazonian frontier: the role of a diffuse, allegorical way of thinking through which people read and negotiate both their own lives and the politics of the present."--Kelly E. Hayes, Indiana University

"Lebner thoughtfully reveals allegory as an active site of moral deliberation, intergenerational connection, and religious protest. This book is an important ethical and ethnographic act of taking religious people at their word to show how faith stories animate lived religion. Lebner also presents a compelling case for focusing on religious, familial, and friendship relationships to perceive religious, spiritual, and political practices that secular or institutionalized frameworks overlook." --Todne Thomas, Yale University

About the Author

Ashley Lebner is associate professor of religion and culture at Wilfrid Laurier University.