The Mystic of Friendship

A vivid portrait of how divine and human intimacies sustain colonisation in the Amazon.

On Brazil's Amazonian frontier, settlers pursue land and opportunity, but they also gather for prayer and pilgrimage, yearning for a deep relationship with God and one another. In The Mystic of Friendship, anthropologist Ashley Lebner examines how everyday religious practices and feelings, what she calls a mystic of friendship, shape and sustain colonisation in the Amazon.

Lebner invites us to a stretch of highway in Pará, Brazil, where violent colonisation coexists with prophetic dreams, Afro-Brazilian prayers, and emerging evangelicalism. She shows how, amidst political tensions and physical hardship, settlers believe that the violence they experience and enact derives from the bestial nature of earthly life that must be overcome.

In exposing a desire for divinely-infused friendship that animates colonisation, Lebner offers a powerful new perspective on the forces driving colonialism as much as religious and political expression.