On secularity: Marxism, reality, and the Messiah in Brazil

Abstract

AbstractOn 17 April 1996, police opened fire on more than 1,500 unarmed protesters of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Southeast Pará, Brazil, killing nineteen and wounding seventy‐nine. Two years later, Osias, one of the wounded survivors, awoke to find that he had written a messianic prophecy, which he decided to share because it contained ‘a lot of reality’. This article explores what conditioned Osias's expectation that his text could provoke public reflections on reality. As such, it engages with a question unexplored by current scholarship: why the will to publicity might be inextricable from secularity, which I define as the condition of living with secularization, understood in turn not as the rise of unbelief, but as the expansion of a domain of thought and practice distinguished from religion. The ethnography ultimately inspires a rereading of Asad's Formations of the secular, interrogates assumptions about the determining reality of ‘secularism’ and ‘politics’, and makes more visible how anthropological writing is shaped by secularity. With a postscript on the October 2018 presidential elections.