Through deep attention to sense and feeling, Go with God grapples with the centrality of Evangelical faith in Rio de Janeiro's subúrbios, the city's expansive and sprawling peripheral communities. Based on sensory ethnographic fieldwork and attuned to religious desire and manipulation, this book shows how Evangelical belief has changed the way people understand their lives in relation to Brazil's history of violent racial differentiation and inequality. From expressions of otherworldly hope to political exhaustion, Go with God depicts Evangelical life as it is lived and explores where people turn to find grace, possibility, and a future.
Laurie Denyer Willis is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
"With its ethnographic sensibility, critical positionality, and sharp intellectual critique, Go with God makes us pause to reflect on the complicated terrain of domination and political agency in the dystopian urban margins of Rio de Janeiro's global city. In this meticulously crafted work, precarity, disenchantment, and frustration give room for 'graceful elaborations' of hope and collective care. Ethnography at its best!"—Jaime Alves, University of California, Santa Barbara
"In Go with God, Laurie Denyer Willis takes us deep into the lifeworlds and grace-fueled dreams of Evangelicals in Brazil's subúrbios. With both ethnographic sensitivity and critical acumen, she helps us understand how believers forge something political out of what otherwise looks so personal and precarious. This is a bracing book, one that brings the literatures on faith, politics, and the state into distinctive configuration."—Matthew Engelke, Columbia University
174 pp.6 x 9
9780520394797$29.95|£25.00Paper
Sep 2023