A01=Michael Amoruso
Author_Michael Amoruso
Black history in Sao Paulo
Black movement in Sao Paulo
Category=JBSL
Category=JBSR
Category=JHMC
Category=QRVQ
Chaguinhas
Chapel of the Afflicted
Devotion to souls
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eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fire at Edificio Joelma
ghosts in Sao Paulo
haunted places in Sao Paulo
Joelma fire
Memorial of the Afflicted
memory in Sao Paulo
Movement of the Afflicted
popular Catholicism in Brazil
purgatorial devotion
purgatorial souls
race and religion in Brazil
race and religion in Sao Paulo
religion and repair
religion in Liberdade
religion in Sao Paulo
religious syncretism in Brazil
sites of memory in Sao Paulo
the Church of the Hanged in Sao Paulo
the thirteen souls
Product details
- ISBN 9781469685168
- Weight: 467g
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 15 Apr 2025
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In the sprawling city of Sao Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devocao as almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemporary devotion to souls is not confined to Catholic adherents or fixed to specific locations. The practice is also linked to popular tours of haunted sites in the city, and it moves within an urban environment routinely marked by violence and death. While based in Catholic traditions, devotion to souls is as complex and multifaceted as religion itself in Brazil, where African, Portuguese, and other cultural forms have blended and evolved over centuries.
Michael Amoruso's insightful work uses the methods of ethnography, religious studies, and urban studies to consider how devotion to souls embodies, adapts, and challenges conventional ideas of religion as tethered to specific sites and practices. Examining devotees' varied ways of ascribing meaning to their actions, Amoruso argues that devotion to souls acts as form of what he calls "mnemonic repair," tying the living to the dead in a struggle against the forces of forgetting.
Michael Amoruso's insightful work uses the methods of ethnography, religious studies, and urban studies to consider how devotion to souls embodies, adapts, and challenges conventional ideas of religion as tethered to specific sites and practices. Examining devotees' varied ways of ascribing meaning to their actions, Amoruso argues that devotion to souls acts as form of what he calls "mnemonic repair," tying the living to the dead in a struggle against the forces of forgetting.
Michael Amoruso is assistant professor of religious studies at Occidental College.
