"A well-researched and well-written account of Spiritism among
contemporary Brazilians. Theoretically, Hess is remaking the traditional
concept of syncretism in the anthropological study of religions,
particularly of folk religious where world religions are adapted
over long periods of time to local systems of belief. Certainly
in English there is nothing in the literature quite like this treatment
of Spiritism among literate, and presumably modern, secular people
in Brazil." —George Marcus, Rice University
Brazilian Spiritism (espiritismo, kardecismo) is an important
middle-class religious movement whose followers believe in communication
with the dead via spirit mediums and in healing illnesses by means
of spiritual therapies. Unlike Anglo-Saxon Spiritualists, Brazilian
Spiritualists count among their number a well-developed and institutionalized
intellectual elite that has reinterpreted northern hemisphere parapsychology
and developed its own alternative medicine and sociology of religion.
As a result, the mediation between popular religion (especially Afro-Brazilian
religious practices) and the orthodoxies of the universities, the
state, and the medical profession.
Situating Spiritist intellectual thought in what he calls a broader
ideological arena, Hess examines Spiritism in the context of religion,
science, political ideology, medicine, and even the social sciences.
Hess challenges the legacy of French sociologist Roger Bastide,
who saw in Spiritism an elitist, middle-class ideology. In the process, Spirits and Scientists provides a new approach to middle-class
religious movements in Latin America.
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