rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Automatic religion
    sub title: nearhuman agents of Brazil and France
  name:
    name part: Johnson, Paul C. (Paul Christopher)
    name part: 1964-
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: ilu
    date issued: 2021
    copyright date: 2021
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: x, 322 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
  abstract: Paul C. Johnson begins his new work, Automatic Religion, with the observation that two of the capacities commonly taken to distinguish humans from nonhumans, free will and religion, are fundamentally opposed. Free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity, authorship and the conscious weighing of alternatives. Meanwhile, religion is less a quest for agency than a series of practices, possession rituals being the most spectacular though by no means the only examples, that temporarily relieve individuals of their will. What, then, is agency and why has it occupied such a central place in theories of the human? Based on a dozen years of archival and ethnographic research in Brazil and France, this book tests the boundaries between humans and non-humans in an unlikely series of episodes from the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when ideas related to automatism lurched into motion on multiple tracks and, not incidentally, "religion" as a topic of study was being born. Brazil provided a particularly fertile place for reflection as the nearest site of what Europeans and Euro-Americans too often, too naïvely, and too imperially saw as raw nature, and thus also a laboratory of the human. In this context, the French would call Brazil's people monkeys, its slaves were called automatons and Afro-Brazilian spirit possession priests were classed in the terms of French psychiatry's newly minted terms, dissociation and hysteria. Johnson shows not just how automatons can take on unexpectedly human-like lives when animated but also traces how certain groups have been excluded as less-than-human. In so doing, Johnson reanimates one of the most mysterious and yet foundational questions of transatlantic thought. What is agency?
  table of contents: Introduction: Religion-Like Situations -- Rosalie: Psychiatric Nearhuman -- Juca Rosa: Photographic Nearhuman -- Anastácia: Saintly Nearhuman -- Ajeeb: Automaton Nearhuman -- Chico X: Legal Nearhuman -- Conclusion: Agency and Automatic Freedom.
  note: Paul Christopher Johnson.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    geographic code: s-bl---
  subject:
    topic: Philosophical anthropology
  subject:
    topic: Human beings
  subject:
    topic: Agent (Philosophy)
  subject:
    topic: Act (Philosophy)
  subject:
    topic: Free will and determinism
  subject:
    topic: Religion
    topic: Philosophy
  subject:
    topic: Automatism
  subject:
    geographic: Brazil
    topic: Religion
    temporal: 19th century
    genre: Case studies
  classification: BD450 .J57 2021
  classification: 128/.4
  identifier: 9780226749693
  identifier: 022674969X
  identifier: 9780226749723
  identifier: 022674972X
  identifier: 9780226749860
  identifier: 2020026470
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 200609
    record change date: 20210422112758.0
    record identifier: in00004413922