Michael Amoruso, "Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil" (UNC Press, 2025)

Jul 6, 2025

Michael Amoruso, an assistant professor of religious studies at Occidental College, delves into the deeply layered practice of devotion to souls in São Paulo. He discusses how this ritual intertwines with urban life, allowing the living to connect with the dead across diverse cultural landscapes. Amoruso explores the shift from focusing on ayahuasca to this collective mourning, emphasizing its role in memory and social identity. Listeners are eager to learn about the syncretism between various faiths and the vibrant social movements shaping Brazil’s spiritual tapestry.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Amoruso's Serendipitous Discovery

Michael Amoruso discovered the practice of devotion to souls while walking through São Paulo's Liberdade neighborhood on a tour led by historian Jeff Lesser.
The name "Church of the Holy Cross of the Souls of the Hanged" and nearby Afro-Brazilian ritual practices sparked his decade-long research journey.

INSIGHT

Complexity of Devotion to Souls

Devotion to souls is a Catholic-rooted practice centered on praying for the suffering dead, especially on Mondays.
The souls are indefinite, plural, and ambiguous, making the devotion accessible and emotionally potent for the living.

INSIGHT

Devotion as Mnemonic Repair

Amoruso reframed devotion as "mnemonic repair," a practice sustaining memory against forgetting, especially regarding São Paulo's Afro-Brazilian history.
This devotional practice simultaneously processes collective suffering and challenges urban erasure of marginalized histories.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemporary devotion to souls is not confined to Catholic adherents or fixed to specific locations. The practice is also linked to popular tours of haunted sites in the city, and it moves within an urban environment routinely marked by violence and death. While based in Catholic traditions, devotion to souls is as complex and multifaceted as religion itself in Brazil, where African, Portuguese, and other cultural forms have blended and evolved over centuries.

Michael Amoruso's insightful work, Moved By The Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) uses the methods of ethnography, religious studies, and urban studies to consider how devotion to souls embodies, adapts, and challenges conventional ideas of religion as tethered to specific sites and practices. Examining devotees' varied ways of ascribing meaning to their actions, Amoruso argues that devotion to souls acts as a form of what he calls "mnemonic repair," tying the living to the dead in a struggle against the forces of forgetting.

Michael Amoruso is assistant professor of religious studies at Occidental College.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network