Antropologia da “praga”

A genre of speech used by the speaker to access an essentially therapeutic power, but also traditionally to invoke a magical or divine power to destroy an opponent, the curse (in Portuguese “praga”, from the Latin “plaga”: “blow,” “wound,” “calamity,” in the proper and figurative sense) is at the same time a discourse of threat and satire, a discourse of merciless predation by an adversary who employs the force of words and gestures invested with supernatural power. In this article, based mainly on the many dozens of curses spoken by characters in the works of the Portuguese novelist Aquilino Ribeiro, I propose to build a theory (literary, cultural and anthropological) of the curse.

Pointing, Rainbows, and the Archaeology of Mind

For over a century anthropologists and folklorists have sporadically recorded a belief that one should not point at a rainbow, lest the offending finger become permanently bent, rot, be supernaturally severed, fall off, etc. In each case the belief was reported for a particular geographical region without apparent awareness of its presence elsewhere, and in no case was an explanation for this curious idea proposed. This paper documents what is called the “Rainbow Taboo” as a global phenomenon, found among peoples of quite varied cultural backgrounds, and it argues that the universality of the belief is a product of the interaction of two independent cognitive elements: an apparently innate sense that the rainbow is associated with the “other world,” and, secondly, a similar sense that pointing with the index finger is aggressive, and should not be used either in normal human interactions or more particularly against the supernatural.

Apropiación, Not Kinship

This article discusses how resignifications of the human rights NGO Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo contributed to transformations of post-dictatorial culture. For decades hegemonic media and perpetrators engaged state terror’s reasoning to confront Abuelas’ call for “restitution” of the children who “disappeared” during the last dictatorship in Argentina. Drawing on both the junta’s self-appointed role of saviors and the benevolence of nurture, Catholic couples had thus rescued children from irresponsible “subversive” parents. In their struggle against state terror Abuelas’ metaphor apropiación resignified nurture as violence, pushing politico-cultural change towards a universal right to identity.