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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody, welcome to the Anthropology Channel of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Yadong Li, a host of the Anthropology Channel. and a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at Tulane University.
In today's episode, we'll be talking about a new book of the leaves of priest politicians in northeastern Brazil. Drawing on over two decades of back and forth ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, today's new book explores the complex and often paradoxical word of of Meyer Priest.
Catholic clergy who hold elected political office in small-town Brazil. Through a rich analysis of desire, faith, and the intricate dynamics of religious and political leaves, today's new book offers a marvelous window into the turbulent leaves of this priest politicians and the communities they serve. And also this book explores and illustrates how desire, faith and theo politics combine to produce political outcomes.
I'm very pleased to welcome today's New Books author, Dr. Maya Mibling. So Dr. Mibling, it's my pleasure to meet you and thank you for attending the New Books Network. Thank you. It's a pleasure to meet you too. And thank you very much for having me on the podcast. It's my pleasure to have this opportunity. The new book today is Vote or Face, Democracy, Desire and the Turbulent Leaves of...
Priest Politicians, published by Faltham University Press earlier this year. Joining us today is Dr. Mai Mevling. She is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She has conducted most of her ethnographic research in Brazil. and also in Scotland. Her research interests range from political anthropology, theology, and popular Catholicism, to gender, kingship, ritual, and child labour. So Dr Mableyn, to start our conversation, perhaps you could...
tell our listener a little bit about yourself and your journey into anthropology. So what initially drew you to the discipline and what are some of the cold questions or themes that animate your ethnographic work, particularly leading up to your long-term work in Brazil? Sure. So I'm a social anthropologist. I gained my PhD at London School of Economics.
discounting a spell at King's College in the public health department and some years of maternity leave. I've basically been teaching social anthropology here at Edinburgh for most of my career. I've basically been in, I've been in anthropology all the way through ever since I was an undergraduate to now. And that was just a sort of combination of, I suppose. fluke, but also passion. I must have had some passion for the subject.
You know, coming from a mixed cultural, mixed ethnic background myself and having lived in different countries in my childhood, that might have been something that drew me to the discipline. But whatever the case, I found myself in Brazil doing my PhD research and I've predominantly worked in Brazil ever since. And as you mentioned, you know, my...
The themes that interest me are really quite broad and I'm slightly embarrassed to sort of... answer this question it always feels like I'm trying to say that I'm interested in everything you know from gender, ethics, power, kinship and religion to politics but I suppose you could say that across my career I have I have routinely returned to, I suppose, a subject of ritual and religion, and I'm particularly interested in how...
power, kinship, gender and politics express themselves in religious forms. And I've also worked a lot on Catholicism, so I've been particularly interested in Catholicisms. political dimensions, I suppose you could say. And, you know, I guess you could say that it's interesting Catholicism as a religion that simultaneously so... personal and empowering to so many people, but at the same time, you know, it's this global institution with almost imperial pretensions. I find that fascinating.
dynamic or a contradiction that I just keep coming back to. And I suppose that's how I ended up on this particular project, studying political priests in a very Catholic part of rural Brazil. Thank you very much. It sounds like a very interesting story and also it's very impressive to see how you...
combine the analyses of Mayer Press to some very classic literature in anthropology about kingship, about the gift and others, and we will definitely talk about it later. So as I've mentioned, your new book, which is your, I think it's your... Second, a monograph about Brazil builds on over two decades of ethnographic research in Brazil, particularly in its northeastern region.
Could you please share with us the genesis of this particular project? What sparked your interest in this phenomenon of mayor Priz and lead you to focus on their complex leaves and the unique challenges they navigate? Sure. So the genesis of this... book um on the mayor priest the political priest was actually in my phd research so many many years ago um and that was the research that gave rise to my first book which was um not
about politics with, you know, a big P. It was about gender morality and Catholicism. So I didn't think of myself as a political anthropologist at the time. And I was living in this community in the semi-arid interior of the region. And my PhD research happened over several field trips, one very long period of about 12 to 15 months and then a couple of other shorter trips.
And I think it was between one of these field trips in that early phase of research that the local priest had ascended to the role of mayor in the very municipality which encompassed the parish. That was the parish where I had been living. And I remember hearing people referring to him in conversation using his honorific title of Padre. This was Padre Ivo.
But they were also referring to him as the mayor. And I was actually unaware of this turn of events that he'd been... been made mayor in the interim so I was kind of confused um I initially put this confusion just down to the normal challenges of being an anthropologist you know having particularly if you're working in a country which is not not your own and in a language that isn't
your first language, you're always having to exist in this constant state of translation. So you're missing cues, you're getting lost in conversations. So my confusion didn't bother me too much initially. And also, I suppose, because I thought I... I wasn't a political anthropologist, so maybe I wasn't interested because these were conversations predominantly about politics.
But the more people kept mentioning this man, the more it started to niggle at me. And I think eventually I just asked someone outright, you know, was I hearing things wrong? was Father Eva also now the town's mayor. And to my surprise, the answer was yes, you know. And then I subsequently discovered that he was not the only mayor priest in the region, that there were actually several others dotted about and, you know, in neighbouring municipalities and neighbouring states.
So this kind of stayed in the back of my mind, you know. And then I started noticing, of course, that locals were recalling these other figures, these other mayor priests, and, you know, with this mixture of kind of mild amusement or a sense of tragedy. commenting on the ups and downs of their administration. So I started to sort of get sucked in. And, you know, this then became very intriguing to me because I then looked into it.
only to learn that, of course, canon law forbids priests from holding secular public office. So although you get political priests, you know, with a kind of, with a small p, priests who are the... heading up new social movements or perhaps they're charismatic leaders, starting breakaway religious groups. So they're doing politics in that sense. You don't get...
priests participating in party politics in quite the same way because it's actually forbidden. So of course I just became fascinated, you know, who the heck were these men, you know? What did they see themselves as and what were they actually getting up to? And so the project was born in that way and just went from there. Exactly. It borns from very reasonable curiosity. And you mentioned they are both priests and mayors, and they are not mayors of cities like Rio or St. Paul, but they are...
layers of some small towns. And the fieldwork for this book took place between 2011 and 2017 across several locations in northeast in Brazil. But most of these locations are small towns you describe in the book. Could you please paint a picture for us of your field size? What characterised the small towns where this male place operates? And what did your ethnographic approach look like in terms of building rapport and gaining insights into their often turbulent words?
Sure. So it perhaps makes sense to say a little bit more about the region generally, that the northeast of Brazil is its own kind of... cultural but also geographic region. It's known for its semi-aridness, particularly in the interior region. And so it's famed also in sort of cultural and historical memory for drought. So it's an interesting region in that sense. It's climatically quite diverse. um but the bit the bit i was working
was actually a kind of mixed agriculture. It was the food producing region. It's called the agrest, meaning countryside or the garden of the northeast. And it would produce food for the kind of... the cattle plantations further west and for the sugar cane zones on the coast.
And so this is a region where drought, suffering are really inscribed in people's memories and, you know, in the more celebrated forms of art. So it's this cultural geography which has produced this entire heritage based on suffering and endurance. and all of that stuff, scarcity, if you like. And it's in this region that the mayor priests were operating as heads of municipal governments. Municipalities operate as very important kind of mid-range political layers in the Brazilian state.
They have quite a bit of autonomy. And in rural areas, you know, they can span really vast tracts of the country. So, you know, in the northern parts of the country, you know, a municipality can be up to... 2 million square kilometres. But just to put the size thing into perspective, you know, in the Amazon region of Brazil, there are states the size of European countries and municipalities bigger than some Brazilian states.
So municipalities are very interesting as kind of units of reference or measurement, if you like, both kind of... you know, in kind of numeric or geographic terms, but also politically, you know. And so... So this was the environment that these priests were the head of. And of course, to be mayor of a municipality is to have quite a lot of power. And I write about this in the book. It's not nothing. People often know who their mayor is, but they don't know who the president is. Um,
And the other thing about the municipalities, it's very densely networked. So if it's rural and in population terms, large and spread out, people do still tend to know each other across.
through kinship, friendship and patron client networks over really, really huge extended... territorial distances and this always surprised me you know coming from a big cities um it always amazed me how you could travel so far and people would still act like neighbors and and recognize you because you news of you coming would have reached them.
I'm talking in the days before mobile phones and social media. So, you know, somehow or other. And one of the reasons news is traveling and people know each other is because they're circulating, you know. So people in this region, although they I talk about people from villages, I talk about people. from towns, but actually people inhabit the region rather than just the village or town because access to schools, markets.
healthcare requires travel. So people are always crossing into neighbouring municipalities and they're sometimes crossing into neighbouring states. And so my research kind of had to follow that. So it had a bit of a multi-sided flavour in that sense. I too was travelling between towns and states and municipalities in this hire car that I had.
And in that process, and over 20 years, really, I suppose you could say the research spanned, you know, I was hanging out with people across a really wide social spectrum in the interior, you know, from... landless farm workers and single unemployed mothers living in the town, the sort of more favela or shantytown areas of the urban areas to, you know, religious leaders.
politicians, doctors, even state deputies. So I really sort of was very fortunate in a sense. I managed to kind of connect with people across a very... um broad range um and and so to the mayor priest you know of that region i mean i think in the end that there were there were more of them than i actually formed the central cohort with whom I worked closely. Not all of them made time for me and for important reasons, you know. The ones who did, I think, bought into my project perhaps in stages.
It wasn't easy for me to establish contact at first, you know, as a female researcher, a foreigner. That was me trying to sort of gain access to really quite close patriarchal worlds and the worlds of politics and power, which, as I talk about in the book, is also very macho. a patriarchal place in this part, and it can be very hard to get in. But with persistence, I managed to get access to enough mayor priests to really get to know their lives and worlds.
And I think I managed to build quite a strong rapport with some of them, with a core group. ultimately this was facilitated by my outsider status, you know, but also my just sheer interest in them and their stories. And I think, you know... Looking back, I think these were all men who were either in the middle of or were still dealing with the aftermath of very turbulent periods of their careers and lives. And they were seeking deeper self-knowledge.
They also wanted to understand what they'd just been through or were going through. And I suppose in some ways I offered them a non-judgmental platform to reflect on the nature of their worlds and politics. And so often the conversations... would veer into a kind of form of an equal... set of exchanges and reflections in which, you know, they're analysing things as much as I am. You know, they're kind of offering up analyses and explanations much. They're thinking anthropologically, if you like.
So it felt like a lot of the analysis was co-produced in some ways. But that said, you know, I would... definitely say there might be stuff there that they wouldn't agree with you know because ultimately these are all also they remain very deeply religious men um and so there would certainly be points aspects of my secular social theory that they might not quite like. Yeah, it always happens. And my feminism, not to mention my feminism, they probably wouldn't like that too much either.
Yeah, a little bit. I can imagine that. But thank you for painting this picture for us and for our audience about your field site and also the picture of your interlocutors. all this information will serve as very important background for our following conversation on desire. So the figure of the mayor priest in Brazil.
while not entirely new, presents fascinating tensions that you explore in the book. So for listeners who might not be very familiar with the Brazilian politics, could you please outline the historical and contemporary significance of the Catholic Church and its priests in Brazil's contemporary political landscape? And based on your research, what comments read or perhaps telling differences did you observe among these mayor priests you work with?
Sure. Okay. So this is a hard one because I want to say just go and read the book. It's a very broad question, but I'll try and pull out some key points. three important things to get across about this context. And I think the first is that Brazil's relationship with Catholicism in politics is quite different from what we've seen elsewhere in the world. Rather than the sort of aggressive secularism that you get in France, say, or the separation that you see in the US, Brazil basically said...
you know, right, let's negotiate, you know, in Brazil, church and state very much said, let's negotiate this. So the church has been... embedded in Brazilian political life ever since colonial times when it was effectively a handmaiden of the colonial state. It was subservient to the state. And in that... saints priests from that time were bureaucrats, deputies. You know, they helped to populate the provisional government after the independence.
after the fall of the Regency government. So when we see Mayor Priest today in office, this is not really some radical departure. It's actually part of a much longer historical pattern. in which priests have been active as Politically in all sorts of ways, not just theologically and as intellectuals. We all know that priests do that kind of thing, right? You know, they're often strong advocates of political positions and utopian theology.
But, you know, from right down to the kind of like the basic bureaucratic sense of having administered governments, governance in that kind of. Foucaultian way, if you like, right? They've been cogs in the state. And of course, you know, that's despite the fact that Brazil is formally... a modern secular nation state in which politics and religion are held apart, right? They operate in, officially speaking, separate domains and should not influence one another.
So there's a kind of contradiction there. But that's been well talked about in the literature on the concept of the secular in Brazil. Lots of Brazilian anthropologists have done some very, do very good work on that. It is very nuanced, I suppose, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, the second thing that I would say is about the practicality on the ground. You know, so in the municipalities where I... um was working you know with these mayor priests these weren't your big chic
wealthy urban centres. These are typically poorer rural areas, often with very weak infrastructures, very low literacy rates. And in these contexts, of course, of practical reasons priests have historically and still today do stand out as viable candidates for office. That's because they've got a certain level of higher education. They've got administrative experience.
You know, running a parish is often no joke. And they are often already deeply embedded in charitable networks. And this ties them to systems of wealth. distribution which is mainly what politics as a domain is meant to be concerned with in this area and that's how people see politics politics is is where you go to get resources rights where you go to get things done
to get your hands on wealth. So priests are already seen as kind of operating in that fashion. And of course, they have this ritual access to people, which... is very wide. I mean, Carvalesism is still very much the dominant religion in this area. It's a normative religion, which means that priests have this effective access to very large.
swathes of the population. So all this has this practical aspect, they become these obvious candidates. And I suppose it's important to mention here that this is also an area where politics is usually... dominated by the same wealthy landowning families, often generation after generation. And so priests will sometimes be often Priests will sometimes be invited to run for mayor to disrupt those entrenched power structures.
the moral authority of the church is often the only thing powerful enough to stand against the wealth of the only landowner in a region, right? So there's that practical element as well. And the final point to get across, I think, which might sound a bit academic, but I think it's actually quite important, is about the celibacy factor or the celibacy of the mayor priest.
don't marry and have formally recognised children of their own, they can symbolically belong to everyone more equally. So that's the idea behind the kind of the celibacy of the priest. theologically or the kind of current explanation for it is that it frees him up, right, to devote himself to the work of God and to give himself more fully as a servant to the congregation he serves. Now, if we think about what the local political system is like in this area...
It's known for being riddled, if you like, with what might be called nepotism. But the sort of academic term, I suppose, would be patron clientelism. which are these sort of networks of favour owing and kind of gift exchange. So the celibate priest basically is offering something different in this system because he's everyone's father but no one's actual father. He's a bit like... you know, to use another classic
anthropological idea. He's a stranger king. He stands both inside and outside networks of favour-owing. So that makes him seem more impartial than your typical politician who's just looking after his own clan, right? a man who has biological children of his own, a big wife, a big family to feed. So he's automatically assumed to be... a potentially worthwhile politician, but more susceptible to the sort of corruption. So, I mean...
There's a very sly feat going on here that only appears if you stop and think about it more deeply, and that is that the Catholic priest's gender and sexuality is his secret weapon. right? Because celibacy is more than a spiritual discipline in this sense. It makes the priest's fathering of all his parishioners theoretically more equal. It functions as a sign for the masses of a more equal society to come. So it has this utopian idea embedded in it.
You know, I always think that, you know, that the pre celibacy is sort of gesturing. at what I'd call a cosmopolitical conundrum, which is, you know, like the lamentable condition of a fallen state world in which harmony is possible. in which harmony is impossible. So this idea of the fall, right, you know, where you're kind of in this kind of broken world and a broken society. And I suppose this idea, you know, that the priest's body offers some kind of promise, this striving that...
this division, this fragmentation in this fallen state world can be overcome. So, yeah, I mean, to sort of, you ask about common threads amongst the priests that I studied. I suppose what struck me most was precisely this role of celibacy, right? How may a priest end up wrestling with a certain paradox, whether they want to or not?
you know, that basically when they become mayors, they're trying to work sensibly within a democratic system. But because of their celibacy, they can't help but embody this implicit. theological critique of democracy as a fallen world system. So, yeah, people want them in power because they hope they will rise above the inevitable violence. fragmentation of the democratic contest. And there is a paradox there, but it's embodied in them. It's one that they carry in their sexuality.
Thank you very much. And thank you, particularly thank you for this discussion and introduction of celebacy. I think it's a very... a keyword in your book and also it's particularly important because this feature of Brazilian priests triggered a sense of hope of an alternative, more equal, not that it corrupt and surprisingly sexualized politics. for local voters. And a key analytical lens in the book for understanding all this phenomena is desire.
I think this is particularly interesting for me, given your previous very interesting, insightful work on hope in Brazilian politics. So why did desire emerge as such a critical lens for you to understand this priest? And in this book, you also discuss different theoretical traditions of desire. Broadly, there are psychoanalytic notions of lack versus continental philosophical and theological ideas of potential.
in desire. Could you elaborate on how you are approaching desire in this ethnography and how it helps unpack the complexities surrounding these figures and their motivations? Right, sure. So, yeah, so why desire rather than other concepts? I think there are a few reasons why it became so helpful to me and ended up being so central in the book. I think, first of all, the old feminist line that the personal is political had never felt more relevant.
to me as I was doing the research, you know, and the deeper I got into the project, the clearer it became that priest's private light, i.e. their celibacy and the discourse that surrounds that. wasn't just some side note to their political work. It was actually structuring of how democracy was being imagined and how it was playing out in this part of the world. So this is really about how political representation and elections work at the most intimate level.
Firstly, through spiritual, sexual and kinship yearnings. So enter the idea of desire. But why desire specifically? Well, I suppose that more than any other concept, it helped me to grasp the sheer power of also what wasn't being said. And something I'm trying to do with this book is... is grapple with the silence, the contradictions and a sort of deep sense of longing, I suppose, that runs through what I call the Catholic gender complex in this region.
So I'm using desire to kind of bring together these different strands. And I think theoretically, as you mentioned, I am drawing on two quite different traditions of thinking about desire. You've got the psychoanalytical approach. Think Freud, Lacan, where desire emerges from lack, right, from what's missing or what's forbidden. Then there's this continental philosophy tradition, particularly Deleuze and Guattari, where desire is productive, creative.
It's constantly generating new possibilities rather than just mourning what's not there. But what I find fascinating about this cultural context is that you need both these approaches, right? So purists, you know, theoretical purists would say that you can't possibly work with both of these traditions together.
But I would say that actually you can, you know, because on the one hand, there's this very biblical Christian, if you like, tradition as well, this vertical notion of desire tied to the fall, where humans are separated from God, so they're always yearning for. what they can't have. But then there's also this concept that my interlocutors were using, which was fair or faith, right, in English. But as I talk about in the book, you know, it's quite different from the English term faith.
It's got a real vitalism to it. And so it's quite productive. It seems to resonate much more with the kind of continental philosophical tradition of talking about desire. So it's not necessarily about lacking something. It's about generating energy, right? Creating connections, opening up to the miraculous.
I'm bringing together these elements and one of the things this is helping me to do is to understand why people and particularly women so often, I suppose, desire the flawed transgressive priest. And I suppose I'll...
What I mean by desire is not necessarily sexual. And that's something that I can talk more about, you know. But I suppose one of the things that desire helps us get at... is is how people desire things desire we desire desire is very transgressive it is in itself we desire what we can't have right um and so it's about desiring the priest
not despite his contradictions, but because of them. So I guess I'm trying to sort of think about... you know, mayor priests as figures who embody a very complex Catholic model of desire that's simultaneously about lack, but also about abundance. So it's simultaneously about prohibition but also possibility, right? It's about all these things. I think this is...
the magic of ethnography to show how different theoretical tradition is not actually separated but can be interconnected to explain and understand the real-world events and real-world phenomena. It's very interesting to see this. And also in the book, you compellingly draw on classic anthropological theories of the gift to illuminate the dynamics of patronage and what is often termed vote-buying or plédi-gogé in small town.
Brazilian politics. These are very crucial for understanding the environment in which Mayer Pris operate. So could you please explain this concept for the listeners and discuss how this established local practices? intersect with and perhaps even shape the political careers and strategies of these politicians with theoretical background and also what does the classic theory in anthropology about the gift can contribute to our understanding of this?
Sure. So, yeah, so this is really crucial background for understanding why Mayo pre-submergent in the first place, right?
And I don't think we can grasp what's happening with these figures without understanding the broader political landscape that they're operating in and the way the gift works in that. So, I mean, just to go back to the basics, you know, following Marcel Mauss's famous... work on gift exchange we know that when you give something to someone you're really giving part of yourself right and that creates bonds moral obligations but it also creates influence right
And in Brazilian politics or small town Brazilian politics or municipal politics, however you want to frame it, this plays out in a particular way. anthropologists typically call patronage or clientelism, where essentially wealthier patrons hand out resources to poorer clients in exchange for loyalty and, more importantly, votes in elections. So that's why it's sometimes also called vote exchange. So there's this interesting divide in...
in the literature on this. And of course, there's a lot of discourse about this, a lot of writing on this. And at the time that I was working, there was a broad division in how learned people were writing about this. So on the one side you had, you know, the political scientists and the liberal politicians and commentators in Brazil and outside who were classifying it as corruption, classifying clientelism as corruption.
You know, it undermines proper democracy. It's not voting for people on the grounds of ideology and what they represent, but because they're giving you something. So, yeah, the idea is that people shouldn't be voting for people because they've given them a bag of cement or help pay for their kids' medical treatment. They should be doing it. on the grounds of policies and principles. And this is exactly what's not going on in local level politics in northeast Brazil.
On the other side, you have anthropologists who have been studying patronage systems for decades and writing about them up close. And, you know, they're finding something much more complex. They're seeing these gift exchange systems as operating. according to their own moral logic. These are intimate relationships that create Intimate hierarchies, as the anthropologist Aaron Ansell talks about. They're based on a sense of mutual obligation.
So they're basically alternative moral political systems and they're as valid, if you like, as kind of these abstract democratic or liberal ideals, right, of voting for people on principle. And of course, there's been a lot of good work in this vein, particularly in northeast Brazil. And it's a whole field of its own, really, corruption studies, I suppose you could call it. But here's the thing, and I suppose this is where my ethnography comes in.
My interlocutors weren't buying into either of these interpretations of what was going on. They have their own critique of politics on the go. And it's what I call in my book an emic critique.
And it was pretty damning, you know. They used this term politikaging, which is like politics, but with this derogatory suffix that makes it mean something a bit like dirty politics or politicking or... political wheeling dealing it's kind of you know got this sort of dirty edge but I suppose what I'm trying to do in this chapter is show that this critique
I suppose critique might even be the wrong word. It's more like a lament half the time, right? The different things, critiques and lament. And sometimes, you know, this isn't just a sort of... calculated critique of a political system, sometimes this lament is shading into a kind of quasi-theological or existential.
sort of anxiety on a cosmic level, you know, and what people are saying here is that this system that we have of gift exchange isn't working because it's already from the start a kind of sinful end. prize, right? So it's got this Christian tinge to it, you know, that this problem that we have of politics is not necessarily one that can be fixed with new political ideologies or systems.
And the phrase they use is politics is in the blood. You know, it's already part of the kind of sinful human condition. And this is how they already see. It really, no matter what you do, can't be anything other than corrupt. So this is exactly where the priests come in, because in a context where ordinary...
Politics is seen invariably as a form of failure, right? Democratic failure. The celibate priest is offering something different, you know, as a sacred figure. He's someone who brings in some aspect of the transcendent. So that's what's making him attractive as this political alternative. Thank you very much. really interesting to see how the classic astrological theories of the gift can contribute to the current understanding of what is happening in small-town Brazilian politics.
And also in chapter 2 and 3, you weave together three seemingly disparate clerical celibacy, the often silenced issue of male homosexuality within the priesthood, and also the significant role of women as the backbone of the Catholic faithful. So how does your framework of desire allow you to connect these threads and reveal the underlying relationships in the context of the press politician and their communities in Northeastern Brazil? Sure, thank you.
So I think, yes, you're right in your question, you know, this, the idea of desire, the concept of desire is exactly what's allowing me to connect what might seem to be very disparate threads, right? sexual um celibacy homosexuality within the priesthood
and women's central role in the church. So you could see these as three completely separate things. And what I'm trying to do very much is bring them together to show that they're all part of what I call a broader libidinal cartography that really shapes. and religious life in the region and has direct political consequences. So, yeah, I mean, focusing on the homosexuality aspect, as you've asked.
it's incredibly important. You know, it struck me during my research that homosexuality within the priesthood isn't some peripheral issue at all. In fact, it's... really central to understanding how the priest politician functions in this particular context. And this comes out of a context in which people are talking or intimating that the priesthood is...
the majority of priests in the church, not the ones outside becoming politicians, but the ones in the church. Your average diocesan priest is probably homosexual. That is the kind of... the discourse that is in circulation with different valences. So I actually kind of tried to look into this academically. It was quite difficult because there hasn't been a huge amount of...
sensible, coherent social science research on this. There isn't a very big empirical basis to draw on for obvious reasons. You know, you can't get this data right. So I was looking at estimates and both from journalists, some journalistic research that had been done on this, and also from priests themselves and the priests that I had sort of forged. particularly good working rapport and relationships with.
And the sort of average percentage of homosexual priests was being estimated at anywhere from 60 to 90% of the contemporary priests. So, you know, quite large numbers. Whatever you think of those figures, whether they're accurate or not, it doesn't really matter. That's not the point. I suppose it's the discourse that is interesting in itself.
And it feeds very much into what, you know, religious studies scholars do talk about, which is, you know, the public secret aspect of the priesthood, you know, all the sorts of contradictions. that it encompasses. It's like everybody knows that these contradictions exist and are being lived, but they don't discuss them openly.
So when I'm talking about these things being discussed, they're only being discussed in a very formal way at the level of academic scholarship and the work of some journalists. the lay population they are certainly being discussed but not in a formal sense right um it's through jokes illusions asides that kind of thing um So I was having to read between these different registers of information about this. But what was clear to me was, you know, what was being created.
What is created is what I call a sort of queering of dominant power structures. Okay. So this is a context, again, where... particular ideologies of masculinity very prominent machismo being one right um machismo which comes which is about sort of male vigor regression um and and a form of male jealousy which as we know can be very
for women. And indeed, and I've written about this before, you know, femicide is a very big problem in Brazil. And the area where I did my research is certainly no exception for that. So this is the broader gender political context that we're talking about. And it's in this context that the illusion or the supposition or, you know, the suspicion of the...
around the homosexual priest offers something different. Okay, because, and this shades into the idea of celibacy, right? So it's the celibacy that makes, desexualizes the priest. takes away some of his figure and masculine traits. And sometimes it's understood that celibacy and homosexuality kind of go hand in hand here. So, you know, the priest might be a figure who...
those reasons doesn't trigger the same jealous response from husbands, boyfriends, and the machista population of men. So women can spend time with priests without the usual threat of male suspicion and violence. And I have to emphasise how important it is to recognise how real that violence is. It's not peripheral at all. It's something that women really do have to negotiate.
There's something much deeper going on at this level around this idea of homosexuality. And, you know, the priest homosexuality, whether real or assumed, includes... often includes masculine characteristics that are actually very valued amongst the population. And there's a coded way of alluding. to this you know some priests are said to have um sensitivity right so that this sort of uh coda of the sensitive priest is it is might be shade into this idea of the
a good listener, the priest who's able to listen, to witness, to be present. So these are priestly qualities, but they are qualities. And I should add here, they're not qualities that all priests have. People are very discerning and discriminating. They'll say, well, this priest has these qualities, that priest doesn't. So it's not just all priests, right? It's particular priests.
good priests have these qualities and these are qualities that also aren't part of the machista matrix, right? So priests... then provide alternative experiences of masculine power for women, not based on sexual ownership, violence or jealousy. um and people you know women especially but anyone um in
could potentially find refuge here in this model of masculine leadership and authority. So when I talk about the desire that women have for priests, for the church, and even for priest politicians, I'm not necessarily talking about a desire that is sexual. It may indeed be a desire for a world in which men don't seek to control, rape or kill them, right? And that desire, that longing for something different. French translates directly, often into political support for good priests.
Fascinating. Thank you for this discussion about the brew of masculinity and also the phenomenon of silent homosexuality in the politics of mayor press in northeastern Brazil. In the book, you also introduce the provocative and seemingly, I think, paradoxical concept of varial celebrity to describe the delicate performance.
performative balance navigated by these priest politicians projecting a heterosexual publicly celibate masculinity, like you already mentioned. So can we elaborate more on this concept and how it functions to allow these figures to succeed within both religious and political spheres, embodying what he referred to as Catholicism's capacity to triumph through a set of opposites. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So the notion of virile celibacy is a really important one for the book.
You know, I suppose what it's saying is that if celibacy is coded as sensitive, effeminate, potentially homosexual. This actually presents a problem for priests wanting to enter the very masculine world of politics because political success fundamentally depends on demonstrating a certain degree of macho sovereignty, right? So this is a culture in which politics is...
It's premised very much on a set of values that are far less utopian and sensitive than the Catholic ideal, right? To be good at politics, you have to be dominant, competitive. You have to have what people call forza, which is sort of like...
like force or strength, and is implicitly gendered as male, as a masculine trait. And so one of the ways, and another way that this is, you know, masculine prowess is... demonstrated is through the performance of sort of sexual potency right and this is achieved through through kinds of behavior the way you hold yourself in public but also through rumor does a very important
The rumour about who the politician, how many lovers he has. So he must have a wife and children. That shows he's a good provider, a strong man. But he should, you know, he should also... have several lovers and potentially second families that he's also supporting. And even if kind of, you know, in official terms, this makes him immoral, right, because he's being adulterous, implicitly, this is the man you trust.
to be your politicians so um this does actually put the celibate priest at a massive disadvantage but this but here's where virile celibacy comes in right because the priest political success doesn't actually have to depend on whether he's been celibate in practice or not. What it depends on in the end is his ability to embody celibacy while simultaneously signalling a sort of heteronormative.
masculine vigour. So the book sort of looks at this and tries to detail how it is performed. And it can be very subtle ways. You know, priests might make aesthetic choices like... wear certain watches and shoes you know that suggest a certain kind of masculine sophistication or they may make playful remarks that hint at their sexual heterosexual disposition um you know for example
For example, one priest responds to a group of women asking him what colour flowers to decorate the church in, you know, and he's quipping back, how would I know, ladies? I'm not that sort of padre, you know, I'm not that sort of priest. Like, that's all he has to say. exactly what he means. And they also know what he intends to convey with that little playful comment. And of course, another really...
common element I found amongst all the mayor priests was that they all had what I call shadow partners. And this is really what you might think of as an ambiguous working relationship with a particular woman. Usually a campaign aide or parish officer, somebody who's working in either his religious or political orbit, about the same age as him, you know, usually a single woman. And these relationships...
are and remain ambiguous. The whole point is that they should spark public speculation about their true nature. And this speculation is what helps to reinforce... force the priest's image as discreetly but unmistakably virile right so So that's virile celibacy encapsulated. And of course, it has all sorts of effects and is riddled with contradictions. And I think one of the things I'm trying to do is just get away from the kind of the obvious.
charge of hypocrisy, right? That's one way of reading all of this. And I have tried to sort of... write about this idea of hypocrisy with a bit more nuance in the past and in other places and in the book what I'm trying to do is is sort of allow it to exist within this idea of the complexo oppositorum, right, you know, Catholicism's capacity, supposed capacity to hold opposites in productive tension. So, you know, this being both.
otherworldly politically savvy celibate virile all these things when they're done when they're held successfully in in in tension that's what allows the priest to access the political legitimacy that comes from celibacy while still operating within the masculine codes that dominate local politics.
Thank you. I think it's a very useful and also insightful phenomena and analytical framework for our audience to understand this, how gender politics simultaneously operates in both... religion and also politics in brazil and beyond desire the very title of your book vote of faith signals the importance of faith at the key analytic you write and i want to quote here
If faith is already present in everything and therefore inherent in every vote, we must understand the Church as a political actor that feeds on the faith that is already there, rather than one that introduces it into political proceedings. Could you elaborate on this for us? How does this understanding of fears help us to see the interplay between the religious and the political spheres in Brazil, particularly in the lives of this mayor priest? Thank you. Yeah.
So what I'm trying to do in that chapter is bring an emic perspective to bear on how causation works. So it's a sort of, I suppose I'm interested in folk theories of power. And I'm interested in giving this sort of epistemic equality to local understandings of power and one of the ways in which... I think people are talking about power, right? And the way academics are always talking about power, they're using Foucault, Gambon, all kinds of people.
In my field site, people are also talking about power. And they're using a slightly different set of terms. And one of them is faith or fair, as it is in Brazil. Now, this kind of word is... used in diverse linguistic ways. I'm in no sense trying to claim that this is the only way in which the term is a sort of...
polysemous term. It can appear in different guises in different registers and be used by different types of people in Brazil. And of course, it has many of the same valences that the term carries when we use it in English. But in this particular context, and particularly in the political time, what Brazilians call a época política, which is the political period, the period leading up to elections, which takes on its own kind of...
ritual quality and sort of temporality. Faith is on everybody's lips. It is just constantly being invoked. But the faith they're talking about isn't specifically religious, right? They're not using it in a religious. And we talked earlier a bit about hope, right? And I suppose it is almost like a kind of... a synonym for hope. In some ways, you could see people are talking about the work of hope, the action of hope on the disposition. But they're using the term faith and...
And they're using it almost in a biological way. And that's an intro. That's something that grabbed me as well. You could think of it as a kind of folk biopolitics of force, right? So they're using it to talk about power, but a power that's already inherent in the human. condition, right? Anyone can have it.
it's already inherent in everything. It's a kind of vitalism, you could say. But what's interesting about the election is that the election causes it to thicken up in people, right? And it's that thickening up. That gives people this courage and, I don't know, this effervescence or sense of suspended disbelief that they require to put all their scepticism behind them and to just vote for a leader. to get behind someone right and to deal with the kind of the intensity of that um
When I say intensity, these are contexts in which local elections are a bitter war of two sides. Very, very, very intense. Carnivalesque. very visceral, sensorial. They're like a kind of, I mean, the ritual and the sensorium of the election is very marked. They're very noisy.
very provocative fights break out people end up in hospital sometimes people die so they're kind of that there is a sort of a very very strong intensity intensity that people are getting brought up in a kind of fervour, if you like. And it's draining and it's taxing. And then people are also voting in a context in which the vast majority of people are never going to see any great, have never seen great changes in their lifetimes.
frankly, unlikely to see huge changes because everyone knows ultimately that politics is in the blood. It's already part of the sinful human condition. Every leader will eventually prove himself to be corrupt. or herself corrupt. You get female mayors as well. So this is the context in which people hang themselves on their faith, right? So what I'm trying to...
The void here is any idea that faith is essentially religious or that the church alone generates faith, right? And that this faith it generates is then something that it goes and injects into politics through. the mayor priest, right? Rather, what I'm trying to say is that faith is, this is, you know, according to the folk taxonomy, right? Faith is already imminent in political life in the human condition.
It's what makes people believe change is possible. It's what drives them to vote despite despair and cynicism. So the church and these mayor priests are basically co-opting and channeling this vital resource that's already there. And I suppose that's what I'm trying to get at. the mayor priest succeeds, not because he's bringing religion into politics, but in a sense, he's harnessing something that's already flowing through political life.
He's becoming a conduit for certain kinds of power that already transcend that religious political divide entirely. So... Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm trying to do with that. And I was just sort of very struck how I couldn't get away from faith and I could have analysed. everything in terms of using other language. I could have used the term hope. I could have used the term affect.
But in the end, you know, this is a sort of ethnographic theory. And so it's the ethnographic term that I'm going with. And one of the things people get very upset about is, you know, the potential, the only place where the mayor priest can really go wrong is if he seemed to be exploiting faith, the faith that is already there, like the life force, right? The willingness, the goodwill.
That's already there. It's the one thing that you can never lose so long as you're alive, right? Your faith. It can be managed, curated. controlled or co-opted, but you should never have it stolen from you or you should never have it exploited. And people do worry that the mayor priest could... could be in a position to exploit. their faith, right? And that language and discourse of potential exploitation is an interesting one. And I think just proves really that, you know, it's not the...
It's not the priest that gives the people faith. It's the faith is there. And that's also very... Christian, very theological. That's exactly what I'm sure the priests themselves would say, right? Faith is the gift of God. Although people in this part of Brazil will... go beyond Christian doctrine and theologies of faith to ideas of life force and flow, which kind of blend, I suppose, to shade into kind of Afro...
Brazilian types of thinking, tradition and philosophy of thinking about power and force. And so that was something that interested me as well. You know, some people I talked to said, well, you know, faith is in a stick. It's in a stone. it's wherever you look, it's there, right? And that wouldn't, not all the Catholics in my field would have entirely agreed with that, but there were Catholics.
very Catholic people who were saying that kind of thing, you know. She goes against sort of formal doctrinal ideas of what faith is. Exactly. I think your analysis and this discussion of faith provides us a very valuable opportunity to think about faith beyond the religious affair. to think about it as a more, I think it's a more fluid and dynamic social phenomena in social life.
Talking about this, a recurring and quite central theme in your book is the Catholic churches and by extension is... its agents and navigation of two seemingly oppositional forces the mundane and the miraculous the secular and the divine this discussion follows one of the most important debates in the sociology of religion studied by Max Weber I think we can say this all these tensions are not just conflicts but it can be socially and politically
productive, even driving forces for the church and its individual agents. So from the experiences of Mayor Price in Brazil, what broader insights can we glean from how the church and its agents manage this inherent tension? and perhaps even strikes on them in today's Brazil? Okay, so thank you. No, that's a great question. It's a broad question. I'm not quite sure how I can tackle it in a way that doesn't become too abstract. I'm interested that you say, so...
This idea that the church manages inherent tensions and perhaps even thrives on them, right? And I think you've picked up on something that's important that I was trying to do in this book. And that was actually work against... certain more obvious tropes or pathways of thinking, which might relate perhaps more to the kind of the way... Somebody who's religious might be thinking about this whole complex and what's going on.
They might read in the turbulence of the priest politician's life in his story, in all his transgressions, something quite dangerous for the church, right? The priest politician is potentially transgressive. potentially a scandal for the church. And indeed, he often does fail. He seems to fail socially, publicly, particularly if his administration is considered to be a failure, and particularly if there are accompanying sexual...
indiscretions or scandals, this might be seen as very bad for the church as an institution. It's exactly this. This is the reason why canon law prohibits priests from, you know...
public office. In a sense, it's not just because this is part of a church-state concordat about secular, you know, it's not just a secular accord. It's also about the danger that the church perceives in priests going out into the world and mingling with the masses, right, in that sense, you know, sort of immersing themselves in the profane.
And these are very, you know, people in anthropology, people often say, well, you know, we shouldn't think in dualisms. These are sort of very classic Christian ways of thinking. I would simply say that they're very relevant here. We're talking about a very, very Christian context in which these... categories of the sacred and profane, this sort of dualistic mode of thinking is an ethnographic one. It is how people perceive things. So, yes, I mean...
These oppositions are present throughout the book. And I suppose the job of being someone who works with Catholicism is trying to say, what can you do with them? I mean, when you pose that question to me, one thing that struck me is that I guess I come from a tradition of anthropology that's interested in thresholds and in the surprising...
involutions that make up life on that fault line, right, or that threshold between the sacred and profane. I've always been very interested in that. And, you know, in Morris... block's very famous work on ritual um one of the things he he strives to show is how
Temporal authority, profane authority, if you like, although he doesn't use those terms, he uses temporal and transcendent. Temporal authority must conquer the vitality of the transcendent or the sacred world in order to prove itself in the... temporal world, i.e. in the world of politics. Interesting things happen in that process, you know, in the ritual. Some temporal vitality must be lost. The initians from the temporal order must be symbolically die, right?
in order to be reborn stronger. So then you get into kind of theories of sacrifice and the kind of violence and the loss of vitality and stuff that's going on. But it's never a loss. It's always just a sort of a movement, a transition, a moving of vitality. And I think, you know, this sort of, this has always reminded me of the transgressive priest, you know, moving away from sacred centres, crossing over. And I try to talk about this in this idea of this.
secular passage right he's on a journey he's on a passage and it's in the process of passage that boundaries are constructed right the boundary doesn't exist if there weren't some kind of passage So, yes, I think of the transgressive priest as on a passage and move away from a sacred center in a way that's potentially...
dangerous, a bit like it's like a missionary act to put it in religious language of the church. You know, he's like a missionary going out into the world. His success in the world of politics may indeed conquer new souls for the church. But it might not, you know. But nevertheless... he allows in that process of passage for some necessary mixing between these different realms to happen. And I think that that mixing is about, you know, a sort of exchange of vitality from the different domains.
So, you know, take the virile celibate, the priest, priests become less sterile in the process of making themselves out to be virile. But by that, by a similar charge, politicians become less violently machista. Right. Each one moves a bit towards the other. And so I that's why I'm claiming that transgression isn't necessarily bad for the church from this kind of.
I suppose, metatheoretical perspective, we can see it over the long durée as something that's always happened. And in actual fact, the evidence is that it doesn't damage the church. It's just part of a kind of a continual, maybe a healthy exchange, right? So, yes, I apologise. I don't know how to put it any less abstractedly than that. But, yeah.
I don't know if that answers the question or not. Yeah, I think it's a perfect answer. And if our audience can combine this to our previous discussion and also maybe they can read the book themselves so they can know this. own the better so finally dr maybelline as we draw our conversation to a close can you give us our listener a glimpse into what you are currently working on in brazil or in scotland or what future research directions your work on vote or face might be inspiring sure well um
As usual, I've always got far too much on. I need probably several lifetimes. to work through all the different half-baked projects that I've started over the years. But there is one that I'm more focused on at the moment and for which I actually have a grant to do. And that is a project which does build very direct. on my work on political Catholicism, I suppose you could say. And that's on the question of Catholic environmentalism.
And my new project is looking at how issues of gender, politics, authority intersect with environmental destruction, particularly in the region of the Amazon. And one of the things I'm really interested in looking at is how the Catholic Church is positioning itself. in Brazilian Amazonia, particularly in light of the Amazon Synod that's just recently, well, I say recently, 2019, but also in the legacy of Pope Francis's theological contract.
of integral ecology, which really put the Catholic Church on the map of secular environmentalists in the region, but equally put... you know, secular forms of sort of environmental discourse in the mouths of Catholics, you know, that there was a kind of incredible mixing going on there. So I'm very interested in this interface. And one of the things that...
fascinates me about this is how the church is operating again at so many different levels. So if in my last book, I was looking at priests becoming, you know, state bureaus. bureaucratics but operating very much at this kind of interesting mid-level of the municipal region. In the question of Amazonia and the environment, we're really looking at the church as a geopolitical actor.
Right. It's operating not only at the very kind of sort of grassroots level of the parish, but it's operating, you know, transnationally and in its own writing.
things universally right there's some very very interesting ways in which catholic theology of the environment attempts to deal with all these different scales so i suppose you could say i'm continuing to to look at that um but one of the things that i from the viral celibacy is a sort of a kind of really sharpened sense for what I've come to think of as the procreative fault line in politics. And this manifests obviously, you know, in everything from pro-life anti-abortion movements.
you know, very strong in the Catholic Church, of course, to environmental campaigns to protect God's creation, right, in the form of the forest. I'm very interested in this idea of the sanctity of life, you know. life as animating force in the idea of virility, but the kind of Catholic doctrine of the sanctity of life and how it's being marshaled at these different levels. And of course...
This brings me back, you know, of course, inevitably to my feminist interest, you know, as a sort of as a thinker and a writer. Because one of the things we see really strongly in this field at the moment is this curious clash between eco-feminist... There's an anti-feminist movements, which are sort of gaining traction at the same time. And Catholicism is really at the forefront of both these things in Brazil at the moment. It has produced some of the world's...
top eco-feminists. You wouldn't think so, but it has. It's come out of the Catholic Church in Latin America. The Catholic feminists have been at the vanguard of thinking about ecology for decades. Of course, the Catholic Church is also where some of the most virulent forms of anti-feminist discourse are now starting to emerge from. It's an institution which is somehow able to contain. both these these positions so um yeah that's what i'm working on or hope to be in the next few years
Thank you very much. It's such amazing to see how Catholicism plays such a complex role in Brazilian politics, also in environmentalism, in feminism. And it's also very happy to see your focus on... gender, politics, and religion continues in your future and ongoing projects. And very interesting to see your future work. And Dr. Maybelline, thank you very much for sharing this insights from your current research and your new book.
Thank you very much, Yadong. It's been a pleasure talking to you. The pleasure is all mine. So in this episode, I had a conversation with Dr. Maya Mibling on her new book, Vote or Face, which is published by Faltham University Press earlier this year. This book is a rich and thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of religion, politics, and the complexities of desire and faith in contemporary Brazil.
If you are interested in the intersection of religion, politics and South American studies, this book will be a must-read for you. I'm Yadong Li, thank you for listening to the New Books Network, and we hope to see you next time.