A Quilombo Called Canudos - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 47

versus primitivism. This attention to deeper rationalities is important but has tended to
downplay the profoundrole ofreligious culture and local identities in fueling resistance.
Religious communities certainly reflected material circumstances but also built on
their own powerful symbolic meanings. In Brazil, millenarian and quilombo communit-
ies had been hunted out since the sixteenth century not just for “irrationality” or “hea-
thenism” but also because these communities siphoned away expensive (and necessary)
labor and posed a profound social threat, since they embodied an alternative way of or-
ganizing life and livelihoods. These communities were also attacked for their symbolic
energy and the concrete resistance that they materialized in their ritual places, agricul-
ture, music, industries, and landscapes. 30 And in their possibilities of freedom and cit-
izenship.
Rebellion in the Backlands?
Canudos was portrayed on the Brazilian coast as a primitive millenarian movement that
yearned for the restoration of the monarchy. The people of Canudos did embody an
anti-modernist,anti-statist,andanti-oligarchicmovementthatusedreligiousterrain,lan-
guage, and a lived “practical utopia” to frame its resistance to the existing political eco-
nomy.Likealmosteveryonewhohadbeenaslave(orwhosefamilymembershadbeen),
the sertanejos practically deified Princess Isabel, whose May 13, 1888, decree ended
chattel slavery in Brazil. 31 But that she was adored had less to do with the monarchy as
a political institution than with her decree. The people of Canudos had no interest in the
restoration of the monarchy or national ambitions, in spite of the frenzied accusations in
the Jacobin press of São Paulo and Rio. 32 Their assessment of the questions of power
was different.
In the sertanejo view, the Republic's “unholy” secular politics put backlanders in a
state of spiritual peril by invalidating their ways of interpreting their circumstances and
the supernatural means of intervening in them. The secularization of religious practices
with its emphasis on civil rather than religious marriage, its deconsecration of proces-
sions, saints' days, and the like, and its belittling of the thousands of small religious and
meaningful syncretic practices placed the sertanejos at the mercy of vengeful gods and
helplessinthefaceofdailyformsofoppression.Syncreticreligionprovidedmoralguid-
ance for everyday life, political critique, and revenge. As the historian of native upris-
ings Eric Van Young suggests, “The lexicon and practices of popular piety provided the
language of resistance at every turn. An intense and highly localized religious sensibil-
ity, its icons and symbols were the idiom and the arts of critique and resistance.” And
desperate consolation. 33
The Baron of the Backlands