Michael Amoruso's "Moved by the Dead"

Michael Amoruso is assistant professor of religion at Occidental College. His research examines race, memory, and urbanism in the Americas, with a focus on the United States and Brazil. His first book, Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil, explores these themes through an ethnography of a devotion to the souls of the suffering dead.

Amoruso applied the “Page 99 Test” to Moved by the Dead and reported the following:

Page 99 lands near the end of Moved by the Dead's fourth chapter, "Sympathy for the Dead." The chapter extends recent scholarship on maintenance, care, and repair to the study of religion. On this page, I argue that as devotees move between religions (one sense of "moved" in the title), they maintain affective ties to the souls and spirits with whom they'd previously cultivated relations. This can precipitate change, such as when Umbanda practitioners who move to Candomblé bring caboclo spirits with them.

This explanation of movement, maintenance, and repair is a major step in the book's overall argument, though I wouldn't say that it gets to the heart of the book. That's partly because the page primarily summarizes some relatively recent scholarship on Black Atlantic religion. That said, page 99 does reflect something of my earlier thinking about the practice that is the book's central focus, the devotion to souls (devoção às almas) or cult of the souls (culto das almas). Initially, as a doctoral student, I set out to rethink religious syncretism. As I talked to devotees, I came to understand that what others understood in terms of mixture or hybridity might be better understood as movement—namely, the movement of religious actors between different spaces.

As I revised the book for publication, my initial focus on religious movement broadened to include affective and political movement. In time, I honed my argument to frame the devotion to souls as a practice of "mnemonic repair." As I relate in the Introduction, "In sustaining a relationship of altruistic reciprocity between the living and the dead, the practice has engendered political movement, motivating devotees and activists to advocate for official recognition of historical injustice—especially, though not exclusively, as related to slavery and its afterlives—through interventions in São Paulo's built landscape" (15).

Visit Michael Amoruso's website.

--Marshal Zeringue