University of London Latin American Seminar Series_ Alternating Essences, Producing Structures: Soliciting Kinship Relations in Maranhão, Northeast Brazil

25th October 2011 – Matan Shapiro

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Latin American Seminar Series

Alternating Essences, Producing Structures:

Soliciting Kinship Relations in Maranhão, Northeast Brazil

Intro: Setting out the problem - to what extent we can speak about affects, emotions and

the microanalysis of face-to-face encounters in terms of social structure, or in other words,

without reducing the analysis to phenomenological, existentialist or behaviourist claims

about human nature? The case of Maranhão might serve as a particular case-study precisely

because the apparent fragmentation and constant dynamics of dominant kinship structures

in the area. Show Map. Relate to why Statistics doesn’t help me and explain I leave out of

this the relevant historical analysis.

Part 1: The logics of connectedness of affective phenomena – how people in Maranhão

organize notions of essence/substance, emotional reciprocity and gift transactions as

homologues. This brings about the double-edge conclusion that (1) relations has already

happened by virtue of affective linkage, and (2) ‘concrete’ transactions sustain or abrogate

these relations rather than initially elicit them.

Part 2: The Metonymic proportions of relations – every linkage highlighted by the mutual

recognition of fluid immanence is by definition metonymic since it constitutes accessibility to

other transactions that are analogous of it. If these relations intersect bodies and are

primarily defined in affective, emotional or biological idioms they might suggest that first

and foremost alterity is located in the body. Bodies encapsulate the overall ratio of affective

phenomena/linkages that cross through a particular person and hence the body becomes

the empirical site of social relations at large. As opposed to perceptual notions of bodily

embodiment – there is no evident in Maranhao for any clear-cut separation between bodies

and persons, or, for that matter, it is not about how people inhabit their bodies in an inter-

subjective world but rather how people allocate particular social connections to affective

phenomena that crosses through their bodies. Hence, the phenomenality of affective

phenomena, to follow Handelman, happens simultaneously within and without bodies. It is

fundamentally a conceptual rather perceptual or grounded process.

Part 3: This is exemplified by ethnographic notions of alternations, both within kinship and

religious realms. I will relate it to the story of Boto and a main case study.

Part 4: Conclusion. The conclusion from this is that in Maranhao the logics of connectedness

of the universe – which must relate also to morality and the rules of classification – include

affective flows and emotional transactions. These are not primary nor secondary – as the

embodiment/structure debate would have it – but simply an intra-relation of one and the

same thing. It is a crucial part of the way sociality is organized and it conveys its own local

problems – how and when to stop intimate aggregations, where does structure becomes

fully intelligible and what is the interchange between structure and agency in that regard. I

cannot come into all this here but will suffice with 3 theoretical elaborations: (1) with this

theory it becomes possible to think of structures in dynamic rather than fixated terms; (2) it

also sheds a different light on classical historical analyses of the Brazilian society as a Racial-

Democracy while putting into question much of the recent work done on agency, sensuality

and sexuality in Brazil (such as Parker); (3) It can serve a new visualization of sociality as

holography. Relate to Wagner.


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1. Intro

Throughout Maranhão, enacting-out carnal and emotional dispositions (e.g. desire, fear,

rage, longing, sadness, love) is a crucial source of agency for both men and women, who commonly

enhance a political merit from the performance of affective bodily states in everyday gendered

situations (e.g. passion, jealousy, violence, mockery, seduction). Intriguingly, this is accompanied by

conventional fastidious judgments concerning consaguineal responsibilities and ‘proper’ sexual

conduct, which alert against the essentially uncontrollable - potentially destructive consequences -

of audacious affective interchange, heedless emotional attachments or sexual libertinism. In effect,

Maranhenses of the popular classes habitually foster family-oriented careers (as husbands, wives, in-

laws, etc.) aimed at anchoring the contagious free-flow of affect (cf. Thrift 2008) onto fixed networks

of distinctive relations; while they simultaneously pursue effervescent, emotionally- or sexually-

charged seductive adventures, which persistently attenuate the moral demarcations of these same

distinctions. The strikingly heterogeneous kinship formations characteristic of the region, which cut

across a multiplicity of complex household living-arrangements, are predicated upon that double-

edged pragmatism.

In this paper I focus on one preoccupation that locally repeats in various degrees and

formulations as regards the soliciting of ‘fixed’ social relations – if the phenomenality of affective

phenomena is so crucial for eliciting intimacy, how can you sustain that intimacy without regularizing

and restricting the pervasiveness of affective transactions? If the underlying emphasis on affective

bodily transformation locally suggests that by playing the game one also necessarily changes the

rules (cf. Gleick 1987, 4; or at the very least bends them) how come those same ‘fundamental’ rules

recursively reappear as stable variables within the loci of affective connectivity? I suggest that rather

than dichotomize affective phenomena with ‘rules’ and ‘structures’, the logics of connectedness of

cosmos in Maranhão are contingent on both these metaphysical abstractions simultaneously. Rather

than always try and guarantee stability, persons solicit relations in ways that maintain the flow and

traffic in affects.


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2. Logics of Connectedness: The Transfer of Essences as Fluid Immanence

The spiritual entity Dona Maria Pagira – a Pomba-Gira of the Linha Ngera (Black Line) - is the

entity responsible for enacting black magic behalf of her ‘filho’, Pai de Santo Carlos. I arrived at

Carlos’ terreiro one night to speak with Dona Maria about love-magic, which is one of the common

witchcrafts (trabalhos) Mina sorcerers are paid to perform in Maranhão. In the dark smoky room I

asked Dona Maria, who was ‘on top’ (em cima) of Carlos dressed in a skirt and a Lady’s straw hat, if

there is any connection between ‘abstract’ emotions and ‘substantial’ human fluids such as blood,

tears and semen. She whispered:

As you said - love, passion, hate are abstract things and really these are things you cannot see - but

you can feel (sentir) them. I will compare the love, the hate and all these things to the air you breathe. This is a

substance (too-MS). You cannot see air… you cannot touch it. In the same way that people need air to survive -

love, hate and passion also flow (flui) through persons…

Such notions of emotional fluidity build on the conceptual possibility of sensational transfer

between and through bodies. An Evangelical friend, for example, once described immersion with the

Holy Spirit by which he speaks in tongues as a beam of emotional force that grows from within the

body and simultaneously grasps his head from without until both these currents meet and inspire an

awesome religious experience. Or, to this day in the interior of Maranhão the elderly identify a

pregnant moça (a young girl) by the singing of a particular woodpecker, which is known to chase

pregnant women and sing for them even before they themselves know they are pregnant. Or, even

in the capital São Luis babies are frequently affected by the evil-eye (mau olhado, quebrante), which

is transferred merely by spoken words or greedy gazes. Babies who have been ‘admired’

consequently wake up the next day ‘soft’ (mole), crying, or feverish (Cf. Mayblin 2010). This is cured

by ritual blessing from a benzedeira, who is often an experienced parteira (midwife). Mothers also

tie a red string around the baby’s wrist and locate in their trolley a figa - a figure of a clenched fist

whose thumb is held between the two main fingers - so to obstruct menacing flow. One way to

activate such benevolent or malevolent flows is magic, as Dona Maria further indicated:


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…When you use a soc, underwear, a piece of clothing, you leave a certain essence in that piece of

clothing. Your sweat sticks to it, some of your essence stays there, and it is this that opens the passage (for

love/passion to flow-MS). When you take a photograph, that photograph has your essence. This is taken in

order to make certain types of witchcraft (trabalhos)… We take that and open the path (caminho) until it gets

to you… But in order for this to happen you have to have some kind of (prior-MS) linkage/relation (ligação)

with her, only a linkage – even if you were namorados for one day, one night that you liked one another, an

eye-sight (o olhar)… I will never be able to make love trablaho for you and her if she does not know you, if you

did not have any type of relation (relação)…

Since ‘the thought that ‘magical’ operations create the innate is antithetical to the successful

undertaking of the magic’ (Wagner 1981, 90, original emphasis) it is possible to think of essence

fusion as analogous to other common practices used in Maranhão to consciously enhance prior

relations. Tomar Benção - the receiving of blessing from the elderly that is enacted exclusively

through physical touch – immediately comes to mind. In principle, a younger or subordinate should

voluntarily approach elders of the extended family and ask for their blessing (Cf. Eduardo 1966, 38).

The person who is giving the blessing would then take the younger’s palm in hers, kiss it on the back

side and allow the blessed to kiss her own palm. Between persons that are linked more intimately,

the blessing person might touch the top of the blessed head. Then the elder would bless out loud

‘may you stay with God’ (fica com Deus) or other similar appraisals. This goes both for flesh and

blood people and spiritual entities, as Carlos affirms:

Many people think that tomar benção is just a commitment that you have, but it is not – when you go

and ask blessing from orixá, from caboclo, from vodúm, or from anybody else – that which he has got with

him, that energy, that positive thing, that good thing, some of it also passes on to you.

Flowing essences thus enhance the intimate reciprocity between categories of persons

previously interconnected. Yet, such relational transfers also occur unwittingly as the following case

portends. One day my friend Clodomir received an urgent call from a friend, who had taken her

husband to the Pentecostal Church Igreja Universal after she caught him trying to strangle their


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baby-girl. In church the man refused to let people come near him until Clodomir arrived. He

approached and pressed the man’s right hand while making an oraçao (a communication with the

divine). The man’s body suddenly twisted uncontrollably, fell to the ground and passed out.

Clodomir investigated and discovered that a woman who tried to commit suicide that

morning had thrown a knife full of blood into the couple's garden. The man saw the knife, picked it

up and threw it to the street. Soon after he got a headache and the possession crisis emanated. That

night Clodomir could not fall asleep and when he did he had nightmares. Wallison, his younger,

walked at 5 am out to the garden and suddenly collapsed. Their mother saw what had happened and

cried out to Clodomir, who rushed to the garden, performed CPR to Wallisson and rushed him to

hospital. The explanation given was that the entities wanted to receive oração from Clodomir and

hence accompanied him to the house. They ultimately achieved access to his oratory capabilities,

which here is analogical to bençaõ, by possessing his brother.

Whereas contact in love-magic and benção opens or closes paths (i.e. predisposed relations)

as a form of intentional influence, Clodomir’s case attests that mere contact could also facilitate the

passage of essences inadvertently. In all instances the image of fusion of innate essences

promulgates bodily, spiritual or even eschatological transformation that manifests in shifting

affective states of mind and body, most radically here manifesting in Clodomir’s friend’s possession.

Biological substances (e.g. blood) and emotional dispositions (e.g. love, anguish) appear as

conceptually interchangeable since both equally achieve the ends of visible transformation.

Moreover, their ‘passage’ does not materialize things in the world ex nihilo but merely enhance,

divert or redirect the regular motion of pre-exiting immanence. All these forms of transfer are

therefore homologous since they interconnect persons into permissible relations of transfer.

Following Vivieros de Castro (2008, xxx) I call this homologue fluid immanence, by which bodily,

emotional or otherwise indwelling essences spin into motion and infuse to generate reciprocal

affective transactions.


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3. Alterations of Essences Through Bodies: The Aesthetics of Intimate Transfer

Passage of fluid immanence makes possible the proliferation of intimate relations in the

world since it always presumes that fusion of innate body parts and personal ‘essences’ had already

happened. Effective activation of intimate relations in Maranhão requires aesthetic recognition of

some affective transfer as the vector of interconnectedness (cf. Holbraad 2008).

Take the aesthetic thrust of smelling, which throughout Maranhão is a common practice

associated with a scale of positive appraisals ranging from desire/temptation to love. “Dar um

cheiro” or “botar um cheiro” (‘give smell’ or ‘put smell’) are idioms used to suggest already-

established affection for the person who is being smelt and it may sometimes entail erotic

connotation. For example, jokes about the rotten smell of vaginas - which is compared to dry

shrimps and other such scents - are commonly told by both men and women. Affectionate smelling

is usually enacted on the neck but with children smelling includes the body as a whole, particularly

the genitals among boys. Infants are considered to have a distinctive body smell (cheiro de

bebê/neném), which is admitted to be pristine, somewhat pre-social. Smelling young children’s

genitals is seen as genuine manifestation of intimate familiarity between mothers, co-mothers or

substitute-mother to their children. My friend Eva, whose son is 10 years old, still smells his penis

and has already asked him if he will let her do that when he grows pubic hair. She said that when she

is angry at him he approaches her, takes his pants off and says – ‘look who’s here…’

The principle of aesthetic recognition as a vector of intimate interconnectedness also

underscores the fluid immanence of tesão – an ambiguous intertwining of pain and pleasure in

sexual activity. My friend Jackson holds tesão to be a moment beyond rationalizing, ‘a situation in

which you forget who you are and who she is and do not think of anything; you are that velocity’, as

he puts it, ‘that sexual potency, that pleasure’. It may ultimately interconnect bodies within a vibrant

sensation of oneness. In poetic terms, tesão overcomes alterity and it can only do that by enacting

transformation through bodies.


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Notions of tesão indeed pertain to more generalized ‘erotic ideology’ in Brazil (Parker 1993,

104-111). Yet, whereas Parker conceives of tesão as essentially transgressive and thus as opposed to

the dominion of familial hierarchies and moral respectability, empirical evidence from Maranhão

suggest that tesão is intrinsic to sexual relations even within the domestic orbit. For example, a

research participant called Falcão pronounced that he has not yet ‘lost’ tesão to his wife after 10

years of marriage. Tesão is not automatically associated with impurity or transgression from

ideational righteous sexuality; it is the proper way to ‘do’ sex and intimacy simultaneously. It is the

aesthetic attributes of tesão – velocity, pressure, please and heat – which reinstate you as intimate

partner, rather than particular hierarchies unilaterally defining how you ‘do’ the aesthetics.

Blood also transmits ‘intimacy’ in ways that are contingent with aesthetic configurations,

namely its trajectory and smooth flow. For example, blood ‘relatedness’ signifies an already-

established relational obligation between kinsmen to protect one another. Probably on this ground

Seu Azarias told me at his 81st birthday party that he is the progenitor of 14 children and that in the

veins of all of them runs his O+ blood type. Familial ‘intimacy’ here potentiates itself as viscerally

conjunctive since it precipitates a predisposed, unmediated, connection between kin. Likewise, in a

‘Biblical Geography’ lesson I attended in an evangelical college in São Luis, teacher Saul said that the

government of Israel had discovered that some Ethiopians have Jewish Blood – and therefore

resolved in bringing them to the land of Israel. Incorrect blood flow – such as that emanating within

incestuous unions and second-grade relatives marriage – is condemned as the cause of necessary

genetic contamination that would result in the birth of retarded children.

The aesthetics of interchangeable essences that viscerally intersect bodies in Maranhão thus

unfold as the locus of dynamic differentiation, rather than that being an extrinsic economic or

political attribution of alterity by which bodies are ordained (contra Parker 1991, Besse 1996,

McCallum 1998). It is the morphology of ‘flow’ and contour of ‘substance’ that conjure relational

engagements before ‘rights’ ramified by symbolic exchange can be gauged (cf. Strathern 1988, 176).


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4. Fluid Immanence as Metonym: Proliferation and Exchange Patterns

Evidently, fluid immanence functions as metonym for larger conceptual structures. Smell

and tesão operate both as distinct elements with their own ‘agency’ side-by-side encapsulating prior

‘relationships’ marked by the exchange of affection or desire. Blood postulates emotional emanation

– as with the suicide-anguish marking Colodomir’s friend’s possession– as well as the relational

visceral efflux of genealogical relatedness. Touch and spoken words in benção epitomize the passage

of wisdom and experience between generations as well as structured familial interconnectedness.

Within ritual context in Tambor de Mina, the possession of a medium’s body by a particular entity

literally compels overlap between the social relations that intersect the medium in everyday life with

the structured relations intersecting the possessing entity in the invisible world of Encantaria. It is

said that once a particular entity has passed through a particular medium, all member of that

entity’s family are entitled to pass through that medium whenever they wish. In all instances the

fusion of imbued essences potentially engenders transactions across sets of relations existing

beyond the isolated encounter at hand.

This implies that affective linkages of intimate connectivity in Maranhão are almost limitless

in their capacity to reform the conceptual boundaries of relatedness. For example, in that

Geography lesson teacher Saul sought to ‘prove’ in the scriptures that 3000 years ago the South

American continent was only several dozen kilometers away from Africa. Hence, he suggested, the

legendary biblical site of Ophir – to which King Solomon had sent ships that returned abundant with

gold – was actually Brazil. This not only proves, he exclaimed, that Brazil is mentioned in the bible as

integral part of the prophetic divine plan for the history of mankind, but also that since antiquity

different peoples migrated into Brazil. According to Saul, this explains why ‘there is not one Brazilian

race and we are all genetically mixed’. Genetics here stands as metonym for biological connectivity

predicated on the conflation of essences (such as blood) and the transaction of wealth, which

assures that miscegenation in Brazil is ingrained quality of the divine plan towards Rupture.


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Precisely because it assumes that ‘relation’ has already happened, the fluid immanence of

substances and emotions also becomes the backdrop for intimation between persons previously

unrelated. My friend Chico from Guanabara, for example, once told me that he ‘considers’ Seu

Aladson’s sons as if they were his primos (cousins) although they have no ‘blood relation’. Chico’s

analogy is framed upon the affinal kinship ties existing between Chico’s father Seu Joaquim and Seu

Aladson, who are compadres; but these relations do not automatically project reciprocity among

other family members1. Consideration here is used to indicate intimate connectivity between given

sets of external relations otherwise not directly interconnected by ‘blood’ idioms (cf. Marcelin 1999).

Transactions of money, gifts, favors and bestowals accompany ‘consideration’ and sustain it. For

example, during my fieldwork both Chico and Seu Joaquim were hired by Seu Aladson as the

exclusive builders of his retirement house, although all of Seu Aladson’s wife’s brothers and

nephews who live in the village are professional builders too. This introduced a diachronic element

into relations that otherwise would have remained synchronic (cf. Kelly 1977, 280-284).

It follows that the absence of systematic exchange (or the existence of unilateral

transaction) implies the failure or unwillingness to enhance the metonymic flow of ‘essence’; and

hence relations remain in equity. Clodomir, for example, is said to have a milk-sister (irmã de leite) in

the interior because as a baby he was breastfed by his MBW, who gave birth some months

beforehand to a baby girl. Clodomir’s milk-sister is also his ‘blood’ prima and yet they are not

entangled in reciprocal exchange. The symbolic recognition of common substantiality (through kin

idioms) merely implies synchronic connectivity that is distinguished from bodily transformation

achieved by reciprocity. Unilateral flow of substance (i.e. which is not enhanced by exchange) is

analogical to unstructured exchange (i.e. not formally recognized as kinship) in the sense that both

imply the lack of framed commitments that manifest in transactions. Consequently they denote a

different class/grade of intimate relationality.

1 In 1984, when the one before last of Seu Joaquim’s ten children was born, he asked Seu Aladson to be her Padrinho (godfather). He thus formalized their long term friendship as official compadres.


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Idioms of shared bodily/emotional essences instrumentally designate such relations as co-

father/motherhood, ‘co-nurture’ siblings (irmão/irmã de criação) or ‘child by nurture’ (filho de

criação) as essentially corporeal (Fonseca 1986, 2003). The perceived flow of particular essences

locally crimsons minute differentiations that align with the grades of corporeal or otherwise intimate

connectivity that fluid immanence is imagined to amalgamate. The recognition of fluid immanence

thus denotes metonymic proportions that enable structured accessibility to analogical sets of

modeled` relations and at the same time classifies these sets into grades, levels, cartographic

distances, topographies, etc. Since such structured grades of intimate ‘relations’ are primarily

defined by affective, emotional or biological idioms - rather than exclusively by symbolic exchange or

economic reciprocity - bodies locally encapsulate the overall ratio of affective linkages that cross

through persons. Hence no clear-cut distinction between body and person can be discerned. ‘Bodily

essences’ become the conceptual site to imagine the scope of social relations at large.

5. Motion and Reproductive Alternations

This suggests that full-bodies become the fluid immanence of its aggregated structures. Take

one of Maranhão's numerous popular legends, which tells the story of Boto; a sympathetic fish

that saves people from drowning in the rough seas surrounding the island of São Luis. On full

moon nights Boto becomes a handsome young man. Dressed in a white suit, all perfumed, his

black hair combed and neatly divided with a side parting, he appears in the festas (parties) of

humans. Boto captures attention with his delicacy, fine gestures and witty remarks. No woman

can resist this young man, who promises the moon and proposes a stunning wedding in church

with a veil and garland, a padre and the full décor. By the time a moça figures what is going on

she has already been seduced. After intercourse Boto nevertheless disappears, turning himself

into the sympathetic fish he truly is. When a moça gets pregnant but does not know who the

child’s father is, her comadres affirm – this is the son of Boto!


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The incarnation of Boto as sympathetic-fish/handsome-father mediates between the

legitimate containment of sexual moral transparency (marriage in church) to the risky fulfillment of

covert erotic desires. Boto’s bipolar capacity to fluctuate suggests that the cosmological organization

of courting in Maranhão concerns the visceral rapture of erotic temptation just as much as it

concerns the moral encompassment of child bearing. Just like Boto – who is always other to himself

– Maranhenses too must mediate external sets of relations by the alternation of their own person

along the given morphology of fluid immanence; while branching out new intimate relations

independently of that meta-flow.

Take the case of Talitha from Santo-Amaro. Tallitha became pregnant when she was 16. She

moved into her boyfriend’s parents’ household after she had had the child although their

relationship (namoro) has already officially ended. In parallel, Talitha’s father registered the

newborn as his to entitle the child access to private health insurance that makes part of his

employment condition. When her child was 20 months old, Tallitha ‘gave’ him to her mother-in-law

(sogra) and came back to her father’s house. A while later she had met a new guy with whom she

began having plenty of unprotected sex and got pregnant again. She told me she ‘could not care lass’

for the consequences (‘eu não estava nem aí’) since she was mostly preoccupied with ‘having fun’.

As the word in the neighborhood goes, Tallitha actually wanted to become pregnant again since she

thought she would thus oblige her new boyfriend to marry her. Tallitha’s boyfriend still comes to

visit her and the baby, but nevertheless dates other women. Tallitha now lives with her 3 year old

second son at her father’s house and have only occasional contact with her first born child.

Here, the fluid immanence of essence/substance serves as the backdrop of diachronic

investment of wealth/money. The combination of these transactions results in the

institutionalization of complex contractual obligations, by which all transactions accompany the

redundant alternation of full-bodied social persons within and across given sets of intimate relations.

This enables to differentiate grades of familiarity while still incorporating fragmented (or


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abandoned) linkages into the guise and idioms of kinship (contra Scheper-Hughes 1992). Tallitha’s

babies’ bodies thus interrelate external sets of relations as the visceral locus of alterity (cf. Leach

2009). The respective loci of the babies within the motion will determine the ways they embody

their own relational proximity or distance to kin along the network (cf. Strathern 1996).

The events marking the birth of Mâmi in Gunabara in 2006 further elucidate this dynamic2.

For several years Juanice dated (namorou) Marcio against the approval of her older sister, Duda,

who was the dominant figure in their household after both their parents died at the early 2000s.

‘After the death of their father, control over the family has been lost’ told me Dona Fatima, Marcio’s

nurturing-mother (mãe de criação). The namoro continued and Juanice became pregnant so that

three months into pregnancy she moved into Marcio’s family household against Duda’s approval.

Although Marcio publically ‘assumed responsibility’ (assumiu) over the pregnancy – and

even confronted Duda for her reservations - he was also having an affair with his neighbor Arlinda.

Marcio said – ‘I began this case with Arlinda before Juanice moved into our house and when I woke

up (acordei) I was already involved… the woman that I liked was Juanice but you know how it is, the

flesh is weak (a carne é fraca)… I knew I was wrong (but continued anyways-MS)’. The word spread

out and Juanice challenged Marcio, who denied rigorously. Once she even left for her family

household in protest, but returned the next day. Meanwhile her pregnancy advanced well. In fact, it

was so smooth that Juanice went through her entire pregnancy without having an ultrasound scan.

Marcio says she thought that the purpose of the scan was merely to tell the sex of the child, but

since she did not want to know she did not ask. The only doctor of the small rural clinic located in

the nearby field town Grajaú did not prescribe it either. Juanice finally had labor (dor de parto) on

the eve of Father’s Day (Dia dos Pais), which in Guanabara is commemorated by one of the biggest

yearly festas of the region. Since Juanice refused to go to the health clinic in Grajaú Dona Fatima

called the local parteira Dona Formosa, who told me of what had happened next:

2 I recorded this story in Guanabara throughout three interviews with Mâmi’s father Marcio, her grandmother Dona Fatima and her parteira (midwife), Dona Formosa.


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At 7 in the morning arrived comadre Fatima to call me, saying that the girl is in labor. I went this way

so nobody sees me, not to ‘alarm’ (não dá o alarme) people that she is in labor… So I shook (sacudir) the belly,

I checked, it was not the time yet… When she was born it was 7 in the morning of Dia dos Pais (the following

morning-MS). When the placenta arrived, her uterus went out with it too. At this stage she hasn’t yet had

hemorrhage. So they sent to call to comadre Tereza, who is a nurse (enfermeira), and she said - ‘this is her

uterus, you must take her to Grajaú’.

Dona Fatima was in the room. She said:

…In the moments before parturition one of Juanice’s sisters, Peteca, ran in. She was very frightened,

because a cup broke in her hand. She panicked (apavorada) because she thought this is a (bad) sign. The same

thing happened almost at the same time at the house of Comadre Sandra, a tea-cup (xicara) broke. It was the

festa dos pais, and all of a sudden from nowhere (do nada) one of the walls of the portable speakers (paredão)

collapsed. This has never happened before or after… Dona Formosa is not a child anymore, but she was very

worried. (When the placenta came out-MS) she got up and put her hands on her head and said she has never

seen anything like that. What happened was that when the placenta came it arrived like a stone, like a dry

root, very big.

They sent to call Marcio from the festa and borrowed a car to rush Juanice, who probably at

that stage already suffered from internal bleeding, to Grajaú. Dona Formosa summarized this – ‘from

the shaking of the car her blood was flowing... then from Grajaú arrived the notice that they will

send her to São Luis in an airplane, but when this notice arrived she was already dead’. When this

notice arrived to Guanabra deep fluster swept through the village. The Festa dos Pais was called off,

Marcio’s household filled of visitors, and people were crying in public. During the wake (velório)

before Juanice’s burial (enterro) heavy suspicions and overt tension broke out between Juanice’s

siblings to Marcio and Dona Fatima, who were seen as responsible to Juanice’s death. Juanice’s

siblings thus demanded to examine the newborn Mâmi - whose name Juanice picked antecedently

‘in case it is a girl’ - in a clinic in São Luis to guarantee that no misappropriate birthing techniques

were applied by either Dona Fatima or Dona Formosa. Marcio recalls:


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I was totally out of balance (transtornado), I wasn’t even stepping on the ground, it was a profound

shock. It seems as if I was not even living in this world at that time… Before I went to register the baby, two

days after she was born, one of her brothers came to me and said they will take away the child. I said – ‘no. I

do not give my permission to this’… So the first thing I did was to register her identity as my daughter. I arrived

with the certificate and I said – ‘now if you want I make an agreement with you’. They proposed an accord

(acordo) by which they take the child to make exams and bring her back to me when she is three months old...

So I agreed to their accord since they committed to bring the child back. There were witnesses, my mother was

there and my sister.

Fatima:

They gave the child to that aunt (tia) of Juanice who wanted to raise her up. But when she saw that

the baby arrived already registered (as Marcio’s child), she didn’t want to take her by no means (de jeito

nenhum). So those of her family that took the child didn’t know what to do with the baby and gave her to

another aunt (tia)… Those who took the baby didn’t help that tia financially at all so she had to buy alone the

diapers and all the rest… We didn’t even know that the baby was with her, we thought she was with the

brothers who took her in the first place… They always said that the girl is in good shape and that everything is

okay but never that they actually gave her away. So, she (the tia) came (to Guanabara) by her own will (da sua

propria vontade) and told us about the situation.

Following this visit, which took place when Mâmi was two and a half months old, Marcio

decided to break his contract with Juanice’s siblings. He embarked an eight hour boat ride to São

Luis and the next day came back with the baby to Guanabara. They have been raising her ever since.

Suspicions against Marcio and Dona Fatima subsided over the years after both families were assured

by medical practitioners that Juanice’s condition of placenta-previa was untreatable and that it

meant that either she survived or the child3. Yet, most of Juanice’s siblings distanced away, with the

exception of three of Juanice’s ten brother and sisters who keep in regular contact. Due to her

involvement with Pajelança rituals (cf. M, Ferretti 2001, Pacheco 2004, and chapter X) Arlinda was

3 Although a rare condition, Placenta Previa is actually easily treated with proper medical attention. See

chapter X for a broader analysis of health-care services, affect and historicity in Maranhão.


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accused of enacting witchcraft to cause Juanice’s death. In recent time this is mentioned only

seldom by Arlinda’s rivals in the village rather than by Marcio or his family. Marcio is still tormented

by the emotional misgivings he feels he had caused Juanice, and therefore he avoids all forms of

contact with Arlinda. Contrarily, Marcio, Mâmi and Dona Fatima maintain reciprocal transactions

with Juanice. This focuses on annual commemorations taking place after Mâmi’s birthday party and

on Mothers’ Day (Dia das Mães), when they go to the graveyard to say Pai Nosso and Ave Maria, put

flowers and light a candle on Juanice’s grave. Remembering presents a tangible relation that is no

longer attainable, as Marcio conveys:

When Mâmi celebrated 3 I took her to the cemetery on my motorcycle. When we came back she

suddenly looked back and laughed a lot and waved and said ‘tchau’. I stopped the bike and asked her what she

saw and to whom she was waving. She didn’t know what to say so I asked her if it was for her mother that she

said goodbye and she said yes. So I stayed there for a while, staring, maybe all of a sudden I also see her. I

couldn’t see anything so I started the bike and we drove home.

6. Conclusion

In Maranhão the alternations of essences and full bodies stretch beyond the limits of

containment whether this is moral, biological or historical (but see Mayblin 2010). Intentional or not,

trajectories of fluid immanence reshape the form of structured aggregations as they flow. Since this

propagates the proliferation of metonymic relations it means that alternations recursively turn back

into ‘structure’ to provide the foundations for further motion. Here is a universe that recognizes its

own otherness to itself as it changes. Don Handelman (1990, 64) claims this regard:

Cosmologies that embed forces of flux at a high level of abstraction in their ontologies seem to keep

an ongoing accounting of, and a relationship to, the conditions that are thought to precede, or that participate

in, cosmo-genesis. Within these cosmologies stability tends not to be the natural order of things, not

necessarily self-perpetuating… this perspective echoes the dialectical view that any social arrangement carried

to its logical conclusion liquidates itself… Stability and uncertainty are not remote from one another: each is

the immanent shadow-side of the other.


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Under these terms Mâmi’s case discloses a ‘3d image’ to the story of Boto. If Boto’s slick

performance reveals a grid on which mothers, fathers, children and co-parents are fixated as

persons that are always something other to themselves; Juanice’s tragedy discloses the

multidimensionality and volume of interconnected networks whereby the very definition of self and

other is fluid. Alternating bodies back and forth rather than fixation of roles characterizes the

dynamic obviation of intimate relations across these networks. Here Mâmi’s body publically displays

the total of possible linkages that intersect her person as well as those possible linkages that are

provisionally deterred. Noticeably, Mâmi calls Marcio ‘father’ (pai), Dona Fatima and Juanice

‘mother(s)’ (mãe) and Zé-Boi (Fatima’s husband and Marcio’s biological father) ‘grandfather’ (avô).

She thus deploys accurately her relational differentiation on the attributed passage of fluid

immanence as well as the redundant dislocation of structured obligations achieved through

pragmatic alternation.

The proliferation of intimate linkages evinces remarkable plasticity to kin structures since it

suggests that motion could always be diverted unexpectedly. Permissible alternations across defined

sets of modeled relations therefore selectively distinguish the reproductive combination of

‘inalienable things – body parts and substances… but also memories, narratives, connection to land –

which create persons who thereby belong in a state of reciprocal dependence’ (Vivieros de Castro

2009, XX). Only by following the patterned motion characterizing these recurrent associations

(rather than focus on the milestones by which they find rest) that local ‘kinship relations’ and their

constant bifurcations become visible. It follows that fluid immanence is not only about the

conceptual ability of certain essences to reside simultaneously within and without body-matter, thus

facilitating pure analogical relationality between persons (Wagner 1981); but also about the

ingrained potentiality to operate (and manipulate) felt intimacies in ways that continuously

undermine the foundations of suspended relations. Intimate relations literally ‘flow’ within and

through substantial parts of persons that are themselves parts of interconnected kinship clusters

that continue to change formations.


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Last word about uncertainty and anthropological methodology is required here. Published

by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the uncertainty principle in Quantum Mechanics implies that it is

impossible to simultaneously measure the present position of a particle in an atom while also

determining its vector. The more you know about one, the less you know about the other. This

applies to social systems on several levels but I wish to emphasize one concerning the analysis here

presented: the more I focus on ‘flow’ the less I know about sedimentation. On the other hand, a

close examination of all those cases that exhibit containment and halt rather than alternations (see

Mayblin 2010, Sanabria 2011) would take me further away from understanding recuresivity. As a

critical reflection on this presentation I am therefore left with an open question: how, in fact, should

I deal methodologically with all those cases of moral visibility in Maranhão, by which persons claim

to solicit structured linkages within well-defined calculations of their current position as well as their

future momentum? Is it possible to incorporate such local heuristics into the formulation of

anthropological theory of affective interconnectedness?

Thank you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg

University of London Latin American Seminar Series_ Alternating Essences, Producing Structures: Soliciting Kinship Relations in Maranhão, Northeast Brazil

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