Maria José de Abreu

Religion and Political Theory, Media and Technology, Materiality, Governance, Personhood, Political Economy, Political Philosophy

Brazil, Portugal, and other Lusophone regions.

My work engages with a range of anthropological, philosophical, and literary debates about religion, personhood, the human senses and their technological extensions. In my work I often explore relations between body, media and territory less in view of a comprehension of these individual aspects, as a way to focus on the nature of the relationality as such. Recently, I have published a series of articles and short essays on authoritarian communication, and/or linguistic and media communication in the context of right-wing authoritarianism in the contexts of Brazil, Portugal and the United States.

My first book project The Charismatic Gymnasium: breath, media and religious revivalism in contemporary Brazil (Duke University Press, 2021) centers on the role of pneuma (the Greek term for air, breath or spirit) in linking religious revivalism to neoliberal logics in contemporary Brazil. The book explores versatile intersections between media technologies, breath-induced bodily elasticity, and charismatic spirituality as a template to address larger questions concerning the somewhat paradoxical yet fluid notion of neoliberal authoritarianism in contemporary religious and political life-worlds.

A second project tentatively titled Portugal is Sea: continental extensions and maritimization of the land investigates Portugal’s newly imagined costal state in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It analyses maritime politics with respect to claims submitted to the UN for an outer continental-shelf that would allow Portugal to extend its sovereign rights far beyond its already large EEZ-Exclusive Economic Zone. By “maritimization of the land” I mean to say how a certain oceanic and cartographic imaginary is impacting governance on and of the land. Moving across distinctions such as private and public, family and nation, inheritance and meritocracy, empire and the postcolonial, the book theorizes ethnographically-informed spaces of tension, paradox and semantic fog, in ways that make old style sovereign decision—though not governance—difficult or impossible. Such tensions, faults and frictions justify and legitimate new state-market policies of reconnecting to the Atlantic sea and the coastline toward the formation of new surfing citizens equipped to navigate faults, striation and lateralization of currents in the sea and on the land.

A parallel, and smaller, project is dedicated to thinking the articulation between the history of women and coloniality during the Estado Novo authoritarianism in Portugal. I am interested in how a problematic en/gendering of the land as “colonizable” in theAtlantic Luso-phone world created the possibility for a particular kind of fictional writing in the 1970’s. The project uses its literary universes as windows into histories of colonial occupation and domestication of the Archipelagos of Madeira and Azores and its historical connections to Cape Vert and St. Tomé-e-Principe, through its specific geo-topographi features.

My ethnographic work has been supported by Fundação para Ciência e a Tecnologia, Lisbon, University of Amsterdam, Forum for Transregional Studies, Berlin, ICI-Berlin, and Rework: Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History, at Humboldt University in Berlin. 

Co-director for Center for Comparative Media (2022/23)

Director of Undergraduate Studies Spring/2023.

Editorial board of Journal of Public Culture.

University of Amsterdam, PhD in Anthropology, 2009