R L Blanes
Biographic Data
| ID | 8977 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R L Blanes |
| GIVEN NAMES | R L |
| FAMILY NAME | Blanes |
| SIGNATURE | BLANES R L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lisbon |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7547-8920 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 139 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 65 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Forensic heritage. A research agenda on the material and expressive processes of the public memorialisation of violence in post-authoritarian contexts
In this article, we propose a research agenda towards the critical assessment of processes of memorialisation and heritagization of histories of violence in post-violence and post-authoritarian contexts. Working from the perspective of postcolonial Guinea-Bissau, and based on an interdisciplinary collective brainstorm experiment held between sociologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, museum specialists and historians in Guinea-Bissau, some of…
Doppëlgangers, degenerations and revolutionary feedbacks in Angola
In this article I describe the emergence of the so-called Revolutionary Movement ('Revú') in Angola, which appeared in 2011 in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork with this movement since 2015, I will debate how this revolutionary emergence is an epistemological feedback against a previous revolutionary process in the country - that of the liberationist and independence movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking c…
Processos revolucionários em discurso
as memrias de eventos polticos extremos, tais como as "revolues" (ver tambm Blanes 2023).Para tal, vou recuperar algumas perspetivas e memrias suscitadas em torno do perodo que redundou na independncia de Angola, o que permitir desconstruir dois clichs, um do lado portugus (o 25 de Abril na gnese do processo das independncias africanas), e outro do lado angolano (o protagonismo nico de Agostinho Neto e
The Multiple Paths of Extraction, Dispossession, and Conflict in Mozambique
When it comes to extractive processes, conflict, and peacebuilding, the case of Mozambique has recently taken center stage due to the emergence of an Islamic insurgency movement in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in its northern province of Cabo Delgado. This is but one part of a complex process of highly conflictual extractivist projects unfolding in the country. In this article, we argue that, beyond the specific case of LNG, there is a…
The Ministry of Injustice and No Human Rights in Angola
Angola is one of the few countries in the world that boasts a dedicated Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. But does this translate into a wider implementation of these rights? This article provides a historical overview of the trajectory of Human Rights in Angola through the analysis of different moments and iterations of the performance of (in)justice since the country’s independence in November 1975 – from the political trials of the mercena…
Fatal architectures and death by design
This article addresses how African states respond to climate crisis, arguing that, beyond the agency and impact of climate phenomena such as drought and cyclones, they are active participants in the production of climate disasters and emergencies, mostly through infrastructural processes that affect land and resource use, and subsequently livelihoods. To demonstrate this, it uses the cases of the drought in southwestern Angola and cyclones in nor…
In the Skin of the City
Afro-Autarky
This dispatch examines contemporary activist movements in Angola and their political utopias, namely their relevance to citizenship and governance, and their increasing importance in the political landscape. The authors describe the civic mobilization toward the implementation of a municipal electoral system (autarquia) and argue that it poses an Afro-utopian challenge: the issue of autarky, or the recognition of self-organization and self-suffic…
Uncomfortable Knowledge
Reflexivity is a hallmark of good ethnography and many consider it a defining characteristic of anthropology. It is thus surprising that anthropologists have not paid more attention to how we teach students to be reflexive. Many of us learn reflexivity by making mistakes in the field, yet discussions of anthropological faux pas and their potential contributions to reflexive learning are typically limited to informal settings and occluded or heavi…
Drought Terroirs
The term 'terroir' is traditionally used in wine making; in this article, we perform an analytical intervention on the concept of 'terroir,' as a potentially useful category to think through issues of territoriality in the framework of environmental disaster from an anthropological perspective.Incorporating ethnographic fieldwork on the extreme drought that has been unfolding in Southwestern Angola since 2009, we explore the analytical potential …
Cracks in the System and Anthropology
We begin by thanking our colleague Eldar Bråten for taking the time to read and comment on our article with such thoroughness. We continue right away with a response. A key aspect of Bråten's critique is his claim that it is difficult to understand how we reason and, therefore, 'how to discern substantial arguments in texts that overflow with evocative and metaphoric prose?' In order to reply to such a concern, we choose to, first, take a step ba…
Thanks for Your Visit But You Can Go Now
The optimistic utopia
In this paper, I propose an anthropological discussion of the correlation of utopia and optimism, in relation with ideas of personal and collective sacrifice. To do so, I will invoke my ethnographic research on political activism in Angola, particularly the so-called Revolutionary Movement – a group of young activists challenging Angola’s authoritarian regime. During recent Luanda fieldwork, I observed how most of the ‘Revús’ engaged in self-sacr…
Utopian confluences
In this introductory essay, we introduce the possibility of an anthropology of generative politics, focusing in particular on its utopian unfoldings. We depart from the recognition that the current global political landscape is exposing new forms of collective mobilisation that challenge prevailing understandings of ‘the human’, collective agency and chronotopical experiences. Through a critical review of anthropological and other scholarship on,…
Achieving peaceful climate change adaptation through transformative governance
Which form of governance is required to bridge tensions that stem from the urgent need of climate change adaptation (CCA) on the one hand, and the imperative of upholding peace and social stability in vulnerable areas on the other? This article proposes transformative governance as a framework and methodology for addressing this question. It recognizes that the increased pace of climate change requires urgent and thorough adjustments to actual or…
The Pentecostal Antirevolution
This article discusses the so-called 'revolutionary' character of Evangelical and Pentecostal movements, as has been proposed in mainstream sociological and anthropological literature. Through a historical and ethnographic account of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in Angola, we suggest that in this country Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism is defined by exclusionary tactics that render most churches compliant with the current political …
Places of No History in Angola
Estética Para Quem? Sobre O Público Da Persuasão Pentecostal
Neste texto abordo a noção de "estética da persuasão" formulada por Birgit Meyer. Explorando a dimensão distributiva da estética presente na sua tese, argumento que o "lugar" da religião é um espaço de relacionalidades exteriorizações que deverá incluir tanto crentes como não crentes, os espaços de culto e as suas vizinhanças seculares, configurando um "público" que excede o religioso. Para tal, Utilizo como termo de comparação empírico o meu tra…
Austerity en route, from Lisbon to Luanda
In this article, through a set of ethnographic vignettes from fieldwork conducted in Angola since 2015, I discuss the political semantics of crisis and austerity, and simultaneously outline an itinerary of a "traveling austerity" between Portugal and Angola, exposing the interconnectedness and mutual binding of both political and economic contexts. Invoking stories of migrant workers in Luanda and the work of local "financial activists" protestin…
The good and the bad of the same
In this article I discuss processes of investment in historicity as an ideological, political and moral problem. Focusing on the study of religious and political movements in Angola, I address the problem of historical repetition as a form of ‘acting upon time’ which, in similar terms to Walter Benjamin’s citation a l’ordre du jour, contests the idea of temporal irreversibility. I propose that this contestation is multiplex and can produce ‘good’…
The Ndoki Index
In this text I propose to discuss local conceptions of spiritual power in the city of Luanda, Angola. More specifically, I explore how the spiritual field in this city is configured through the markers of a plural ethnicity and Christian practice. In this framework, sorcery (ndoki) has become the practical element that connects Christian and traditional spirituality politics within the same discursive regime, addressing problems of urban life and…
Introduction to Pentecostal Witchcraft and Spiritual Politics in Africa and Melanesia
In this introduction we give a comparative overview of the situation of Pentecostalism, witchcraft and spiritual politics in Africa and Melanesia. Our comparison between Africa and Melanesia starts off from the cultural specificity of witchcraft and sorcery, but simultaneously highlights how Christian evangelism “pentecostalizes” witchcraft and sorcery by making them universal concerns of life and death, good and evil
The Current State of Anomie in Angola
In this article I explore the contemporary relevance of Émile Durkheim’s classic theory of anomie with respect to both the discipline of social anthropology and the study of politics in Africa. I take as a case study present-day, post-war Angola, where an activist mobilisation (the Revolutionary Movement) has engaged in what I call ‘anomic diagnostics’ in opposing the country’s current regime. Through a political reading of Durkheim’s theory, I s…
Religions, Histories, and Comparisons
New Perspectives on Angola
The Social Life of Spirits
Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else - symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more divers…
Unstable Biographies. The Ethnography of Memory and Historicity in an Angolan Prophetic Movement
In this article I discuss issues of memory and historicity in a contemporary African prophetic movement, the Tokoist church. I do so by focusing on the multiple processes of "biographization" of the prophet's (Simão Toko) life from the different allegiances within the movement. I suggest that, despite recent critiques on the biographical method, the ethnography of those (unstable and heterogeneous) processes can be very helpful to understand the …
Prophetic Diasporas Moving Religion Across the Lusophone Atlantic
This article examines the concept of a religious Lusophone Atlantic, highlighting historical and contemporary exchanges within this framework. It situates the research within recent scholarship on the Atlantic, religious diasporas, and contemporary Christianity, focusing particularly on the role of prophetic movements (specifically the Kimbanguist and Tokoist churches) within the Portuguese and Angolan religious landscapes. The authors explore ho…
La guerre dans la paix. Ethnicité et angolanité dans l'Église kimbanguiste de Luanda
Au moment où l'Angola savoure ses premières années de paix depuis des décennies, l'un des plus importants mouvements religieux du pays vit une importante crise interne. Ce conflit qui déchire l'église kimbanguiste, un mouvement d'origine congolaise dont la plupart des fidèles sont des Bakongo, est né d'un problème de succession après la mort, en 2001, de son leader spirituel Dialungana Kiantani, vivant au Bas-Congo. Comme l'analyse cet article, l…
Micro-utopias
rationale and Contexthe editors began discussing this special issue in 2014 through a serendipitous encounter.Ruy and Maïté were interested in the possibility of promoting an anthropology of utopia, and simultaneously an anthropology as utopia.Alex and Jonas, working on anthropological approaches to contemporary artistic practices, were seeking to develop the theorising potential of relational art. he immanent space of connection was, precisely, …
Achieving peaceful climate change adaptation through transformative governance
Which form of governance is required to bridge tensions that stem from the urgent need of climate change adaptation (CCA) on the one hand, and the imperative of upholding peace and social stability in vulnerable areas on the other? This article proposes transformative governance as a framework and methodology for addressing this question. It recognizes that the increased pace of climate change requires urgent and thorough adjustments to actual or…
Remembering and Suffering
In this article I offer a historical and ethnographic account of the Angolan 'Tokoist church'. I start by underlining the reasons behind its 'forgotten history' in terms of academic debates on African Christianity, and then discuss its place within the 'Congo prophet paradigm'. This historical approach opens ground for the discussion between the different doctrinal and ideological tensions (the place of Bakongo ethnicity and Angolan nationality) …
Austerity en route, from Lisbon to Luanda
In this article, through a set of ethnographic vignettes from fieldwork conducted in Angola since 2015, I discuss the political semantics of crisis and austerity, and simultaneously outline an itinerary of a "traveling austerity" between Portugal and Angola, exposing the interconnectedness and mutual binding of both political and economic contexts. Invoking stories of migrant workers in Luanda and the work of local "financial activists" protestin…
Don Quixote's choice
In this article we propose to engage anthropology as a romanticist discipline. Revisiting particular histories, we depict the anthropological discipline and its core method (ethnography) as imbued with sensibilities and militancies that define it as a "romantic subversion," an against-the-grain attitude against intellectual hegemonies and conformisms. We do so by focusing on three points: the charting of a romanticist conceptual agenda in anthrop…
The atheist anthropologist
Time for Self-Sacrifice
In this article I propose an approach to sacrifice through notions of time, memory and expectation, moving away from classical formalist definitions that highlight the 'nature and function' of sacrifice, and into ideas of meaning and experience and their insertion in particular ideologies of time. I will argue that sacrifice entails particular temporalities, participating in political and experiential realms of memory and expectation. For this, I…
O que é que se passa no tabernáculo? Oração e espacialização na igreja tokoista angolana
Este artigo revisita o texto clássico de Marcel Mauss sobre a oração (1909), invocando um dos seus principais argumentos - o da "centralidade epistemológica" do ato de prece no fenômeno religioso - como pretexto para a análise de processos rituais e doutrinais na chamada Igreja Tokoista, um movimento cristão profético de origem angolana. Fá-lo-ei através da análise da relação entre as categorias a priori desconexas de "oração" e "espaço
The Pentecostal Antirevolution
This article discusses the so-called 'revolutionary' character of Evangelical and Pentecostal movements, as has been proposed in mainstream sociological and anthropological literature. Through a historical and ethnographic account of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in Angola, we suggest that in this country Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism is defined by exclusionary tactics that render most churches compliant with the current political …
The good and the bad of the same
In this article I discuss processes of investment in historicity as an ideological, political and moral problem. Focusing on the study of religious and political movements in Angola, I address the problem of historical repetition as a form of ‘acting upon time’ which, in similar terms to Walter Benjamin’s citation a l’ordre du jour, contests the idea of temporal irreversibility. I propose that this contestation is multiplex and can produce ‘good’…
The Angolan Apocalypse
In this article I explore some convergences between religious and political apocalyptic thinking, taking as case study the inauguration of the cathedral of the ‘Tokoist Church’ in Luanda, Angola, in August 2012. Describing the marginal contestation to the otherwise triumphant current church leadership, I argue that it is part of a movement of social fracture and political contestation that is also part of contemporary, post-war Angolan society, a…
O Messias Entretanto Já Chegou. Relendo Balandier e o Profetismo Africano na Pós-Colónia
Uma das teorias mais marcantes na antropologia africanista das últimas décadas foi a proposta de Georges Balandier sobre a 'situação colonial' e, nomeadamente, o seu retrato do surgimento de movimentos religiosos de carácter messiânico ou profético na região do Congo no contexto de reivindicações anti-coloniais mais ou menos politizadas. Neste artigo pretendo revisitar as principais teorias de Balandier a partir do estudo de caso de duas igrejas …
Satan, agent musical
À partir d'une enquête de terrain au sein d'un mouvement évangélique, l'Iglesia filadelfia, implantée depuis les années 1960 chez les Tsiganes du Portugal et d'Espagne, on discute ici du rôle du Diable dans les doctrines et les rhétoriques des croyants et des musiciens qui en font partie. On cherche à démontrer comment l'invocation du Diable - en tant que promoteur de territoires d'ambiguïté et d'ambivalence - permet de débattre et de négocier si…
Fatal architectures and death by design
This article addresses how African states respond to climate crisis, arguing that, beyond the agency and impact of climate phenomena such as drought and cyclones, they are active participants in the production of climate disasters and emergencies, mostly through infrastructural processes that affect land and resource use, and subsequently livelihoods. To demonstrate this, it uses the cases of the drought in southwestern Angola and cyclones in nor…
Uncomfortable Knowledge
Reflexivity is a hallmark of good ethnography and many consider it a defining characteristic of anthropology. It is thus surprising that anthropologists have not paid more attention to how we teach students to be reflexive. Many of us learn reflexivity by making mistakes in the field, yet discussions of anthropological faux pas and their potential contributions to reflexive learning are typically limited to informal settings and occluded or heavi…
The Current State of Anomie in Angola
In this article I explore the contemporary relevance of Émile Durkheim’s classic theory of anomie with respect to both the discipline of social anthropology and the study of politics in Africa. I take as a case study present-day, post-war Angola, where an activist mobilisation (the Revolutionary Movement) has engaged in what I call ‘anomic diagnostics’ in opposing the country’s current regime. Through a political reading of Durkheim’s theory, I s…
Nostalgies impérialisées
Nous nous proposons ici d'explorer certains exemples de mémoire nostalgique concernant la violence et la répression qui prirent place à la fin de la colonisation portugaise en Angola. Nous examinons le cas de Vale do Loge, un ancien camp de travail forcé situé dans le nord de l'Angola où l'on observe une version (ou une inversion) de la « nostalgie impérialiste ». En décrivant l'histoire et les mémoires liées à Vale do Loge, nous avançons la poss…
Teresa Fradique. Fixar o movimento
Um dos principais desafios da antropologia contemporânea, enquanto analista e interpretadora de fenómenos sociais e culturais, será provavelmente o reenquadramento espacial e temporal dos “objectos” que estuda. Noutras palavras, perante aquilo que costumamos sintetizar na palavra “globalização” e seus efeitos, isto é, perante o cada vez mais frequente e facilitado acesso e circulação da diversidade de realidades, representações e produtos, torna-…
Fixar o movimento
Leiva Maria Blass, José Machado Pais (Orgs.). Tribos Urbanas
Tribos Urbanas é o resultado de um diálogo atlântico desenvolvido no seio das ciências sociais entre antropólogos e sociólogos portugueses e brasileiros, num projecto realizado entre 2001 e 2004 no Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa e na Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Como ponto de partida, tem como problemática a actualidade e mediaticidade da noção de "tribos urbanas", referida a propósito dos discursos sobr…
The atheist anthropologist
Following a reflection triggered by a fieldwork episode, this paper discusses issues of faith, belief, and personal conviction within anthropological fieldwork and specifically within research carried out in contexts of belief and religious practice. Incorporating fieldwork and biographical accounts taken from research within the (Gypsy) Filadelfia Evangelical Church, I discuss the involvement of personal beliefs and attitudes in anthropological …
The atheist anthropologist
Contacto, conhecimento e conflito
Este texto propõe uma análise dos cultos evangélicos da Igreja Filadélfia, um movimento cristão protestante de forte implantação entre os ciganos de Portugal e Espanha. Procurando compreender a importância da prática ritual na experiência religiosa e identitária dos crentes, proponho os conceitos de “contacto”, “conhecimento” e “conflito” como mecanismos para explicar como os cultos são local e socialmente implantados na contemporaneidade cigana…
European Christianities at the turn of the millennium
Despite the recent theses on the “southernisation” of global Christianity (Jenkins 2002), the secularisation of our age (Taylor 2007) or the media fears towards “political Islam”, Christianity is still a major definer or European identity in both historical and demographical terms. The recent discussions on the Europe’s “Christian heritage” (regarding the content of the common treaty text) are but one example of the public and political recogniti…
La guerre dans la paix. Ethnicité et angolanité dans l'Église kimbanguiste de Luanda
Au moment où l'Angola savoure ses premières années de paix depuis des décennies, l'un des plus importants mouvements religieux du pays vit une importante crise interne. Ce conflit qui déchire l'église kimbanguiste, un mouvement d'origine congolaise dont la plupart des fidèles sont des Bakongo, est né d'un problème de succession après la mort, en 2001, de son leader spirituel Dialungana Kiantani, vivant au Bas-Congo. Comme l'analyse cet article, l…
Satan, agent musical
À partir d'une enquête de terrain au sein d'un mouvement évangélique, l'Iglesia filadelfia, implantée depuis les années 1960 chez les Tsiganes du Portugal et d'Espagne, on discute ici du rôle du Diable dans les doctrines et les rhétoriques des croyants et des musiciens qui en font partie. On cherche à démontrer comment l'invocation du Diable - en tant que promoteur de territoires d'ambiguïté et d'ambivalence - permet de débattre et de négocier si…
Remembering and Suffering
In this article I offer a historical and ethnographic account of the Angolan 'Tokoist church'. I start by underlining the reasons behind its 'forgotten history' in terms of academic debates on African Christianity, and then discuss its place within the 'Congo prophet paradigm'. This historical approach opens ground for the discussion between the different doctrinal and ideological tensions (the place of Bakongo ethnicity and Angolan nationality) …
O que é que se passa no tabernáculo? Oração e espacialização na igreja tokoista angolana
Este artigo revisita o texto clássico de Marcel Mauss sobre a oração (1909), invocando um dos seus principais argumentos - o da "centralidade epistemológica" do ato de prece no fenômeno religioso - como pretexto para a análise de processos rituais e doutrinais na chamada Igreja Tokoista, um movimento cristão profético de origem angolana. Fá-lo-ei através da análise da relação entre as categorias a priori desconexas de "oração" e "espaço
Prophetic Diasporas Moving Religion Across the Lusophone Atlantic
This article examines the concept of a religious Lusophone Atlantic, highlighting historical and contemporary exchanges within this framework. It situates the research within recent scholarship on the Atlantic, religious diasporas, and contemporary Christianity, focusing particularly on the role of prophetic movements (specifically the Kimbanguist and Tokoist churches) within the Portuguese and Angolan religious landscapes. The authors explore ho…
O Messias Entretanto Já Chegou. Relendo Balandier e o Profetismo Africano na Pós-Colónia
Uma das teorias mais marcantes na antropologia africanista das últimas décadas foi a proposta de Georges Balandier sobre a 'situação colonial' e, nomeadamente, o seu retrato do surgimento de movimentos religiosos de carácter messiânico ou profético na região do Congo no contexto de reivindicações anti-coloniais mais ou menos politizadas. Neste artigo pretendo revisitar as principais teorias de Balandier a partir do estudo de caso de duas igrejas …
Double Presence
This article discusses the issue of proselytism and belonging among Angolan Christians in Europe, namely those belonging to the Tokoist Church, a propheticbased movement originated in Angola in the 1940s and later transnationalized into other African countries and Europe. Invoking fieldwork performed with the church in Lisbon and Luanda, I suggest that religious proselytism in diasporic contexts, as an expression of transnational religiosity, can…
Les conceptions du corps et de la personne dans un contexte amérindien
Unstable Biographies. The Ethnography of Memory and Historicity in an Angolan Prophetic Movement
In this article I discuss issues of memory and historicity in a contemporary African prophetic movement, the Tokoist church. I do so by focusing on the multiple processes of "biographization" of the prophet's (Simão Toko) life from the different allegiances within the movement. I suggest that, despite recent critiques on the biographical method, the ethnography of those (unstable and heterogeneous) processes can be very helpful to understand the …
Book and Film Reviews
published
One Hundred Years of Anthropology of Religion
O tempo dos inimigos
Neste artigo pretendo indagar sobre uma 'antropologia da repressão'. Retomando antigas propostas do antropólogo francês Marc Augé, reflito sobre a pertinência de uma antropologia da repressão para o estudo de dimensões políticas e experienciais da vida social. Para tal, elaboro um itinerário conceptual da repressão do ponto de vista antropológico, para depois propor um exercício de demarcação sobre dois aspectos que lhe são (a priori) inerentes: …
Dreams That Matter
Moral circumscriptions
This article proposes to debate the relationship between mobility, faith and belonging, exploring the idea of “moral circumscriptions” to describe how one particular African Christian movement, the Tokoist church, experienced a historical process of territorial transcendence, from a regional, ethnic movement to a global venture, responding with a complex set of ideologies attached to ideas of place. The article highlights the – often tense and co…
The making of the Pentecostal melodrama. Religion, media, and gender in Kinshasa , by Pype, Katrien
Holy hustlers, schism, and prophecy. Apostolic reformation in Botswana by Werbner, Richard
Extraordinary Times
Charismatic qualities, spiritual gifts, and agencies are embodied in memory, hope, and certainty. This temporality is implicit in Max Weber's classic formulation of charisma as a "removal from the sphere of the ordinary" during which certain individuals were "treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities" (1947:358–359). Through that exceptionality and extraordinary attribution, the cha…
Sites and Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe
In recent years, the Southern borders of Europe have become landmarks for the mediatic and academic verve regarding the migration and diasporas towards and beyond ‘Schengen Europe’. In these debates, religion is acknowledged as playing a central role in the recognition of major societal changes in the continent, being object of political concern and attention: from the recognition of plural forms of Christianity to the debates on a ‘European Isla…
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (33 works) · Philosophy (31 works) · Law (27 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · History (21 works) · Art (20 works) · Anthropology (16 works) · Humanities (16 works)