Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T14:50:16.144Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Religious Sectarianism in the Sertão of Northeast Brazil 1815-1966

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Sue Anderson Gross
Sue Anderson Gross*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Northern Illinois University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Sectarian religious groups in Brazil, not of Afro-Brazilian origin, have been formed primarily in the backlands of the Northeast. There they have flourished during two approximate time periods, 1815 to 1840 and 1870 to the present. This paper will examine the religious groups of the Brazilian backlands as social phenomena.

The locale of the sects, the backlands sertão, is both a geographical and cultural subregion of the Northeast. The latter area is generally defined as comprising the states of Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Sergipe, Alagôas, and northern Bahia. Geographically the sertão is an area subject to recurrent drought, lying back of fertile coastal plains from Salvador in Bahia to Natal in Rio Grande do Norte, touching the coast in Ceará, and again retreating inland in Piauí.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Inter-American Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 1968 , pp. 369 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1968

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 There is a short account of Serra do Rodeador in Francisco Augusto Pereira da Costa, Folk-lore pernambucana (n.p., n.d.), pp. 33-35. The Brazilian sociologist Rene Ribeiro has unearthed a lengthy manuscript account in the Brazilian archives, which he has summarized in his article, “Brazilian Messianic Movements” in Millennial Dreams in Action, edited by Sylvia Thrupp, Supp. II to the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History (The Hague: Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 1962).

2 Most of the authors who have written about Pedra Bonita have summarized Pereira de Costa, pp. 35-44. See also Antônio Attico de Souza Leite, Fanatismo religioso. Memoria sobre o reino encantado na comarca de Villa Bella (2nd ed., Juiz de Fora, Brazil, 1898). Two English travelers who were in Pernambuco at the time that the Pedra Bonita group was dispersed, or shortly thereafter, have left accounts of the sect. Daniel P. Kidder gives a somewhat garbled account in his Sketches of Residence and Travels in Brazil (Philadelphia: Sorin and Ball, 1845), I, 149-151. George Gardner transcribes a letter addressed to the president of Pernambuco concerning Pedra Bonita written on May 25, 1838; see his Travels in the Interior of Brazil (2nd ed., London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1849), pp. 166-167.

3 The classic work on Canudos is Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands, trans. Samuel Putnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).

4 The literature on Padre Cicero is extensive and often polemic. The most objective account is probably M. Bergström Lourenço Filho, Juàzeiro do Padre Cícero (3rd. ed., São Paulo: Edições Melhoramentos, 1963).

5 Menezes, Djacir, O outro Nordeste (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio, 1937), pp. 78–80 Google Scholar; de Oliveira Vianna, F. J., Populações meridionães do Brasil (4th ed., São Paulo: Companhia Editôra Nacional, 1938), pp. 117–203 Google Scholar; Júnior, Caio Prado, Formação do Brasil contemporâneo, colônia (6th ed., São Paulo: Editôra Brasiliense, 1961), pp. 279–284.Google Scholar

6 Smith, Herbert H., Brazil: The Amazons and the Coast (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879), pp. 398–435 Google Scholar.

7 Braga, Cincinato, Séccas do Nordeste e reorganização economica (Rio de Janeiro, 1919), p. 4 Google Scholar. Quoted in Lynn Smith, T., Brazil—People and Institutions (rev. ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954), p. 266 Google Scholar.

8 T. L. Smith, pp. 266-267; Facó, Rui, Cangaceiros e fanáticos (Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Civilização Brasileira, 1963), pp. 30–31 Google Scholar.

9 Faris, Ellsworth, The Nature of Human Nature (New York: McGraw Hill, 1937), pp. 48, 55.Google Scholar

10 Wallace, Anthony F., “Revitalization Movements,” American Anthropologist, LVIII (April, 1956), 265–281 Google Scholar.

11 Braz da Costa Rubim, “Memoria sobre a revolução do Ceará em 1821,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, XXXLX, Pt. 2 (3rd trimester, 1866), 206.

12 Gardner, Travels in the interior of Brazil, p. 119.

13 de Carvalho, Austricliano, Brasil colonia e Brasil imperio (Rio de Janeiro: Rodrigues e C, 1927), II, 260-61.Google Scholar

14 Gardner, op. cit., p. 207; J. M. Pereira de Alencastre, “Notas diarias sobre a revolta civil que teve lugar ñas provincias do Maranháo, Piauhy e Ceará,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileño, XXXV, Pt. 2 (3rd trimester, 1872), 427.

15 Williams, Mary Wilhelmine, Dom Pedro the Magnanimous (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), pp. 173–185.Google Scholar

18 Calogeras, João Pandiá, A History of Brazil, trans. Martin, Percy Alvin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), p. 240.Google Scholar

17 Facó, Cangaceiros e fanáticos, pp. 129-131; R. Magalhães Júnior, O império em chinelos (Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Civilização Brasileira, 1957), pp. 160-170.

18 Da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands, p. 134.

19 Ibid., p. 137.

20 Ibid., p. 136.

21 Djacir Menezes, O outro Nordeste, pp. 177-78.

22 Macedo, Nertam, O padre e a beata (Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Leitura, 1961), pp. 53–54, 60-62Google Scholar.

23 Wach, Joachim, Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 203 Google Scholar.

24 Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, “O movimento messiânico do Contestado,” Revista Brasileira de Estudos Políticos, No. 9 (July, 1960), pp. 118-139.

25 Da Cunha. Rebellion in the Backlands, pp. 129-142.

26 Ibid., p. 117.

27 Cesar, Getúlio, Crendices do Nordeste (Rio de Janeiro: Irmãos Pongetti Editores, 1941), pp. 133–134 Google Scholar; Lourenço Filho, p. 172.

28 Lourenco Filho, Juàzeiro do Padre Cícero, pp. 93-97.

29 Cesar, Crendices do Nordeste, pp. 147-167.

30 Ibid., pp. 196-97.

31 Cidade, Hernani, A literatura autonomista sob os Filipes (Lisboa: Livraria Sa da Costa, [19—]), pp. 175-77Google Scholar.

32 Robock, Stefan H., Brazil's Developing Northeast (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1963), p. 48 Google Scholar.

33 James, Preston, Latin America (3rd ed., New York: Odyssey Press, 1959), p. 428 Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., p. 408.

35 Gardner, Travels in the Interior of Brazil, pp. 166-167.

39 Menezes, O outro Nordeste, pp. 184-186; Facó, Cangaceiros e fanáticos, pp. 205-207.

37 Ibid., pp. 209-210.

38 Wagley, Charles, An Introduction to Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 145-46Google Scholar.