Maria José de Abreu

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

Brazil, Portugal, and other Lusophone regions.

I am a cultural anthropologist whose 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 explore versatile relations between territory, body, and media, not in view of a comprehension of these individual aspects but as a way of focusing on the political worlds such relations enact. I have published a series of articles and short essays on linguistic and media communication in the context of authoritarianism in Brazil, the United States and Portugal. My first book project The Charismatic Gymnasium: breath, media and religious revivalism in contemporary Brazil (Duke University Press, 2021) was about the rise of the religious right in contemporary Brazil. The book’s analysis centered on the role of the theological notion of pneuma(the Greek term for air, breath or spirit) in linking the breathing body, to pneumatic architectures, to mass media technologies and to neoliberal logics within a form of Catholic evangelical revivalism. 

A second project tentatively titled Blue Portugal: 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 by Portugal to the UN for an outer continental-shelf that would allow extend its sovereign rights far beyond its already large EEZ-Exclusive Economic Zone. By “maritimization of the land” I mean 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 and lateralization of currents in the sea and on the land.

A third and smaller project is about illiteracy among women in Portugal. The 1970's is a turning point in Portuguese history. The Carnation Revolution of 1974 brought about both the independence of the colonies in Africa under Portuguese colonial rule and democracy to Portugal after decades of existence under right-wing authoritarianism (1930-1974). But while the coming of democracy reprobated an extremely high rate of illiterate women in Portugal, it also alienated those who had to cope with a fast shifting society where people strove to cut with the past. The book explores various instances where this contradiction became evident such as changes in governmental and business contractual paperwork; how the impressing of the right thumb as a mark of consent became obsolete and vexing for women who wished to professionalize themselves under the new era of democratic freedoms; it also revisits debates about the divulgation of the book "New Portuguese Letters" written by the so-named “Three Marias”, which, as a form of feminist writing, found its public in France and the US, even before it did in Portugal, and whose existence as a polemic cowriting triumvirate was meant to be recognized even before being read; or, still, the Portuguese traditional "sweetheart handkerchief" (lenços dos namorados) where poems were copied and embroidered by woman who could not write by using pen and paper yet could do so with needle and thread.

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 2024.

Editorial board of Journal of Public Culture.

University of Amsterdam, PhD in Anthropology, 2009