Title: Uncanniness in the tropics  

By Rodrigo Gonsalves

Introduction

Imagine you are taking some time off and you have decided to visit the countryside. Then, you have decided to hike into the woods. You would eventually find yourself calmly walking through the trees and branches through easier pathways. But now, imagine if out of distraction you've completely missed the familiar pathway you were used to and you simply couldn't find the way back. Or maybe, because of a sudden fog overtaking these woods, a growing sense of unfamiliarity would start to settle in, misshaping and reorganizing your senses, which could lead you to not recognize where you once were. What was once a cool and relaxing walk through the woods, could all of the sudden turn into something radically different. Perhaps the previous confidence you had over the pathway would start to crumble, your sense of direction would feel impaired and your attempts to get back on track would be proven ineffective. And what you thought was an impossibility, starts to become more like a percentual improbability, and the possibility of getting lost in the woods, would reveal itself actually as a hidden probability. You would try to find your way to a familiar spot, but if all attempts fail you  would end up in that unfamiliar route… the unknown would enlarge its dimensions and perhaps, a rather specific sense of hopelessness could invade, one which is not fear per se, but actually a certain uncanniness.

Whatever it is that haunts us, whatever fear is at stake here, it is a fear which reveals something about ourselves and we need to evoke symbolic conditions in order to address it. And to put it in a more provocative way: we still lack better alternatives to comprehend and to face the contradictions which haunt us. This scene could be taken out of any horror film from the 80s and 90s, and it reveals a certain immanent element of our societies and sensibilities. The mass production of horror films in our culture is telling in this sense, there is something traumatic which has not been fully subsumed, thus producing more and more films could be interpreted as a repetition that demands a work of elaboration of symptoms which are not yet resolved. Perhaps, there are ghosts in the forest. 

Freud's Uncanny

This imaginary example is an extrapolation from one of Sigmund Freud's hypotheses in his text The Uncanny of 1919. In this text, the psychoanalyst endeavors on an argument concerning the specificities of the uncanniness as an affect. And although it belongs “to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread” (p.299), he investigates its nuances and particularities, in order to better understand its unique traits. Freud understands that something new or unfamiliar can be frightening, but also that not every single new experience will be deemed uncanny. Thus, something else must take place in order to provoke uncanniness. Freud will defend that the uncanny surfaces whenever something familiar turns unfamiliar, whenever something that should have been kept secret comes to light (relying on Friedrich Schelling's definition).

Basically, Freud establishes that the uncanny concerns the arising of an emotional impulse which is converted to fear if repressed. And the nature of this emotional impulse concerns animistic elements that were long familiar to the psyche, elements which have been estranged inside ourselves because of repression (pp. 340-1). One can see how uncaniness concerns the resurfacing of anismistic beliefs from our pasts, like moments of our childhood which were deemed to have been sublated but once faced with specific moments seem not to have been fully sublated: like the creepy feeling of walking along in the night, that nods to our fears of the unknown which can get the best of us. An usual misinterpretation of Freud's definition of the uncanny is that it concerns a child-like trait of the person who experiences it, but this is not Freud's key argument on the uncanny. The psychoanalyst defends how our animistic perspectives (and everything which compose are pasts) are still unconsciously shaping our daily lives without us realizing. It is only when we notice such animistic reminders clashing against our consciousness that such affect surfaces. Freud argues that the uncanniness surfaces from the return of a repressed content from our past. And since our most primitive convictions and our childhood complexes are closely linked to each other (p.354), the uncanniness may appear from when repressed childhood complexes are revived or when our surmounted primitive beliefs seem to be confirmed.

Now, examining our previous example from the standpoint of Freud's definition of the uncanny, we can better formulate an understanding of how getting lost in the woods could get the best of our consciousness and also, how it can spark this specific angst, how it could provoke such uncaniness. The fabrication of imaginary solutions to unexplainable random chance derives from animistic tendencies to fulfill reality with our narcissistic tendencies. So, when faced with an unexpected fog in the woods or when we get lost trying to find our path only to end up in the same place - we will use the subjective resources we have in hand in order to explain what seems unexplainable. The creepiness we may feel when we do not know where we are heading, the overwhelming sensation of tinyness against the oppressive fog that overdetermines the trees which almost completely deprive our senses could provoke uncaniness if it sparks our animistic subjective organization. Now, let's take this discussion to another direction, could the uncanniness we deposit over the forest reveal an aspect of our own oppressive past over nature? Perhaps, the ghostly apparitions which a foggy forest plays our tricks with, are actually more telling about ourselves. Maybe we are the ghosts that haunt us in the woods… perhaps what we encounter roaming and lurking in the woods are nothing but a reminder of our past, a reminder that other collectivities once marched and organized reality.

The repression of animism in capitalist societies

We are all beings constituted by and through language. Our (in)humanity derives from the fact that we are bodies traversed and immersed in language. To be within language and to become within it, means that we are constantly collectively modeling and shaping our ways of existence in reality. Thus, we still owe to ancient societal organizations as much as we do to ancient languages. The animistic tendencies that once provided fruitful explanations about our existence still survive in the symbolic foundations lying within all of us. On a more personal level, repression defines the unconscious mechanism which prevents us from experiencing our own primordial explanations about our past; but on a societal level, the continuous efforts of suppressing alternative sensibilities from our originary societies to arise or to be remembered for the sake of a dominating one is an ideological imposition. The dominant Eurocentric Enlightened tendencies which imposed itself through economical exploitation throughout the world, have also shaped our sensibilities and sense of collectivity (or to better put it, our lack thereof), usually forcing us to forget that other forms of collectivity and social organizations once ruled reality.

Freud pointed out that nature is experienced as a fundamental source of malaise. Indeed, nature can force upon us a sense of weakness and smallness, because we inadvertently know it can obliterate us at any point. But it mostly provokes this feeling from the crystalized memories we carry as a species, shaped by millions of years and through past civilizations to diminish our fragility against it. We might not think about it, but it lies unconscious in all of us. This is not the only way to experience nature, but there are other ways to live with nature. The knowledge from the tropics may have something to inform our sensibilities against this predatory posture over nature. It can tell us something about not relating to nature over fear, but to teach us a Freudian lesson: understanding this malaise means to establish new relations with nature, it means to go against domination through destruction and to conceive a viable coexistence with it. Basically, we can’t still justify our predatory relationship with nature based on our unconscious fears, we cannot still “normalize” this exploitative relation as the only possible relation to our planet's environment.   

When Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2013, p.382) made the point that the white men destroy the forest because they don't actually know it. They are telling us that from the standpoint of the white men's knowledgeable sensibilities, the forest is rather quickly misunderstood as a self driving force without purpose or reason. And perhaps this explains how a certain mentality has ideologically taken over reality perceiving the forest as a dead entity, a dead space or a territory which lacks life for the white men's standpoint. In short, the white men “know” the forest only through the scope of commodification and exploitation, from the dead to the deadliest. Therefore a certain deadness spreads throughout the world, not only devastating nature, but also reproducing a deadly logic for profit through this understanding.

This invites us to consider how different knowledge approaches to nature allows us to further speculate our understanding of it. How it can inform us of other sources of negativity and contradiction challenging and broadening our perspective of universality. But only if we ought to learn from otherness by respecting its radical alterity, instead of only persisting in imposing sameness onto it. We can make room for the Levi-Straussian approach of elementary traits of kinship which lead to the patriarchal structures in some cultures, but also recognizing that there are other approaches to myths and subsequently other forms of collective organizations. There is the totemic approach, but there is also the animistic approach. For instance, Viveiro de Castro's (2014) anthropological remarks in Cannibal Metaphysics reminds us that the myths which sustain the Old World don't necessarily share the same characteristics as the Ameridian ones. As he argues: “in the Old World, humans had to steal fire from a divine father, while Amerindians either had to take it from a father-in-law or receive it as a gift from a brother-in-law, both of whom were animals.” (ibid., 177) Thus, the role of gift-giving and other substitutive roles can shape affinity and exchange leading to different collective possibilities and also, to other approaches to nature itself. More accurately, if we consider that “...the content of Amerindian mythology consists in a negation of the generative impulse of myth itself, insofar as this mythology thinks in an active fashion, and nostalgically contemplates, a continuum whose negation is in Levi-Strauss' view the fundamental condition of thought.” (Castro 2014, 213) The proper recognition of all living beings which derive from originary knowledge sets another approach to nature, because it forces the dialectical interplay of consciousness out of its exceptionalist comfort zone and invites other ontological potentialities.

The uncanny in the tropics

The suppressed knowledge of alternative ecologies and hybrid ontologies lies in the cracks of our everyday life. When we engage with points of rupture against the ideological normalcy imposed by the meat-grinder of our economical constraints and turn the uncanniness into a pathway, a passage or perhaps, a portal towards another reality opens up. The ghosts that live in the forest may have a different meaning under another perspective, if we perceive these ghosts that haunt us as passages or portals, invitations to time-pockets to another way of imagining our futures. The British philosopher Mark Fisher examined Freud’s uncanny in a rather unique fashion; he was enthusiastic of Freud's proposals but somewhat disappointed about its outcomes. The first time Fisher engages with Freud's uncanny discussion was in his Ph.D thesis Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (1999) where he takes Freud's the animistic potential between the animated and inanimate in order to consider how gothic dimension to present fictions to imagine different processes of subjectivization and other ontologies. It is only in his last book The Weird and the Eerie (2017) that Fisher settles the score with Freud, explaining how “Freud’s unheimlich concerns the strange within the familiar” (11), while the weird and the eerie present another perspective, “they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside.” (12) 

Fisher's specific desambiguation of the weird and eerie, allows us to approach the uncanniness of getting lost in the woods under eerier tones. It invites different aesthetic sensibilities approaching the forest as a proper unpolished, inconceivable propelling impulse, multiple with the animistic lives which generate its compelling force. The ghostly forces that reside in the woods can only haunt our narcissistic preconceived notion of strangeness, because these eerie ghosts are there only to remind us that other alternatives to imagine our future can be conceived (if we are not blinded by our past…). The animistic spectres of forest are a reminder that other collectives once inhabited reality and they were once aligned with all living things in the woods. Thus, we must first deconstruct our understanding of nature as a commodity and the forest as a product. Or as Žižek points out, we need to remind ourselves that nature itself is not nature: that it is actually naturalized. And that an ecology in different terms means an ecology oriented towards the inevitable catastrophe imposed by financialized capitalism.

The spectral presence of other animistic potentialities in the tropical forest are an invitation for our recognition of all living things. Such an invitation expands our own ability of recognition which makes room for strangeness and recognizes the dignity of images of beings which aren't matching with our own. To be affected by a territory is to be open to the multiplicity of all living beings, which spreads the conception of our own (in)humanity. Especially, because it pushes recognition beyond embracing similarity and sameness towards making (in)humanity something else.

The tropical forest actualizes the eerie. More than driving our sensibilities beyond the brutality of the physical terror caused by the uncontrollable trait of nature or our solitude of being shelterless outside, its eeriness derives from the nod of the disintegration of structural authorities and the hole of a pretense of safety in knowledges we are used to. Such recognition of strangeness drives another sense of autonomy, which propels more open ontologies, weirder, eerie and radically strange. Territories such as the Amazon forest as well as other territories which should be protected at all costs harbinger species and lives which we still know too little about. And instead of being governed by our fears, we should be ethically engaged by a non-predatory posture over the land. This gesture translates a different coexistence with the territory based on another experience with the uncanny.

Finally, as Žižek (2015) points out reading McKenzie Wark's Molecular Red, Marx had already anticipated the reasons why ecology is a major battlefield: the “metabolic rift” caused by expanding capitalist productivity is under constant ideological dispute. Once capitalist societies organized themselves through the industrial revolution they became a geological factor and a clash with ecology was only a matter of time. Following Žižek, we must stop indulging the narrative that there is a balance in nature, because nature will always be unbalanced. Or as he argues: “the idea of Nature as a big Mother is just another image of the divine big Other.” We must reject the imaginary balance which is ideologically pushed towards nature, because it prevents us from realizing how we “denaturalize” nature from within. Instead of thinking about the world, there is a possibility of conceiving worlds from within by pursuing this understanding. 

The uncanny in the tropics: a brief bestiary

Walking through the heavy and dense South American forests of the Amazons is also to enter the realms of a very specific bestiary (Simas 2024). Creatures which were orally transmitted by the originary civilizations of the Tupis (the Tupiniquins and the Tupinambas), Sateré-Mawé, Timbiras, Guarani, Ticuna, Caingangue, Macuxi, Terena, Guajajara, Ianomâmi, Xavante amongst so many others. For instance, the anhangá as depicted by the Sateré-Mawé which is a shapeshifting spirit that can turn into a white deer with flaming eyes (but who can also assume the form of an armadillo, an ox, a fish pirarucu and even people) to pursue and haunt all of those who are cruel and vile to other animals (Simas 2024, p.17). For the Tupis, the anhangá haunts and brings misfortune to anyone who walks the forests hunting not for their survival but to dominate and exploit it.

We could also talk about the boitatá or “baetata”, which is a creature present amongst many different originary people, it is a spectral, ghostly force embodied in the shape of an enormous flaming snake. Following Simas (ibid., p.54), the boitatá crawls through the jungle attacking anyone who harms the forest. It has the power of driving people mad and to blind those who stare at its eyes. The Tupis also talk about the curupira, they describe it as a short statured creature which resembles a child, which has fire for hair and backward feet. The curupira is a trickster-like creature, which fools the hunters who walk into the forest without leaving treats in his honor. The curupira is a protector of the trees and the animals, he can assume the form of animals to trap hunters inside the jungle by leading them astray. These three examples compose the oldest portrayals of the bestiary of South American originary people, tracing back to 1560 when the first reports from Jesuit priests (José de Anchieta) during the Portuguese colonization were written.

There are numerous other creatures amongst the originary people that compose this bestiary like the caipora, the headless mule, the jaci jaterê, the saci-pererê, viara, and so on. But the three bestial proponents highlighted here assume a cautionary tale in its narrative. The anhangá, the boitatá and the curupira avenge the exploitative advances against the forest. The Tupinambas, the Tupiniquins, the Sateré-Mawéa name the vengeful spirit embodied in these specific creatures against the advances of exploitative destruction, but not aiming at the exclusion of alterity in this process, as Castro explains (2011). This brief bestiary displays how such creatures are actually the embodiment and the protectors of multiplicity which live through the amerindian oral traditions.

The animistic condition behind these beasts could provide us with a clue that echoes the anthropological research of Castro (2011), when he asks: what do the originary people from South America fear? Especially when the anthropologist reminds us that “the real fear others have of their imaginary monsters proliferate amongst us with the imaginary fear of real monsters” (2011, p.888)The animistic condition behind these beasts could provide us with a clue that echoes the anthropological research of Castro (2011), when he asks: what do the originary people from South America fear? Especially when the anthropologist reminds us that “the real fear others have of their imaginary monsters proliferate amongst us with the imaginary fear of real monsters” (2011, p.888) In short, the Amazonic societies live and breathe the difference all around them, consuming such difference in order to be. This animistic feast fulfills the destiny of multiplicity through imaginative openness against the European and North Americanized rational sensibilities of sameness. From Castro, we can speculate how this powerful engine of negativity found in otherness is an influx of forces and which sustains a “good living” for Amerindian sensibilities. Under the Deleuzian and Guatarrian inspired perspectivism defended by Castro, who summarizes that “the indigenous cogito, instead of the solipsist formula “I think therefore I am,” under animistic terms could be articulated as “this exists, therefore it thinks”” (p.911) pushing the “I” towards radical alterity and favoring a re-orientation of our own anismistic symbolic traits: our relationship with what exists can be radically different. This is (dis)orientation towards object par excellence (Zupančič 2017).    

  

The uncanny in the tropics: Brazilian modernism as a study case

The land now known as Brazil is a haunted space. Its 8.51 km2 is composed of historic violence, colonization and struggles. There is a constant haunting informing the anthropophagic pact which composes the symbolic and imaginary animistic traits of its people. The Portuguese genocidal colonization of its originary people and slavery process imposed a real violence which monopolized the fears against their own presence in the land. The spirits, spectres and ghosts were always present in the anismistic pacts of the originary populations and the anthropophagic feast that formed the local culture, but the horrors of colonization started to dispute that. The question surrounding which ghosts we fear can shape a communal sense to people. The imaginary that composes people can come from the fears which are kept hidden, from which ghosts are suppressed and omitted from the collective symbolic surface. But the psychoanalytic lesson is that what is repressed always finds a way to return… and in mind that the very moment in history when the philosophical project of modernity was established, Europe was colonizing the rest of the entire world, repressing and excluding ontologies from its universality. This is a wound against reason itself, since it carries a fundamental contradiction within. The beings of reason, fruits of the cogito born from the modern subject, determines the foundations of dignity through recognition, but it has done so by condemning racialized bodies and dominating genres, which contradicts any worthy dignity. The ghosts which haunt the tropical forests in Brazil, detain a powerful negativity that disturbs the positive project of modernity.      

In recent years, the attempt of implementing a “modernist” project in Brazil furthered this historic contradiction. By doing so, it showed that dealing with ghosts is a necessary element to any social composition. And in this particular moment of Brazil's history there was an opportunity to either exorcise structural wounds which harmed the collective composition of its society or to worsen it through the intensification of these hauntings. The “modernist” project in Brazil, as Vladimir Safatle (2023) defends, meant it could shake off “the material reproduction of symbolic tradition and our foundational myths [and] enable different aesthetical experiences as the foundation for creating new social forms”. Following Safatle, revolutions can hook “the popular belief towards new dynamics of constructing people [that] can emerge and enable structural transformation and imagination” (ibid., p.6). Thus, the aesthetic-political capabilities of engaging with sensibilities can interrogate given contradictions and lead towards a reflective practice that guides transformation, building a bridge between local change and the large-scale structures in our societies.

In the 1930s through the process of Brazilian “modernism”, the political background behind the rise of this aesthetic movement was composed by regional oligarchs who had the support of the military. They were aiming at benefiting from the utopic dimension of modernism in order to implement a modern conservative nation-state (ibid., p.6): a monopolization of the fear to reinforce the ghost of oppression against other relations with past ghosts. Thus, preventing the symbolic traversals required in order to make amends and healing structural wounds. “Modernism” in Brazil is an “ambiguous heritage” of violence resulting directly from this concoction between modernism and populist state. Brazilian “modernity” is branded with a fascistic root: the aesthetic emancipatory capabilities are tainted by this heritage (ibid., p.9). Nonetheless, modernism was also an aesthetic disruptive attempt, an attempt at opening a breach and challenging given sensibilities of its time. This ambiguity opened a possibility for a new configuration of the Brazilian identity which did challenge local oligarchic interests, leaving the promise of aesthetics towards emancipation; but all too quickly, the conservative project took over suppressing any radical alternative. And the normalized violence of the status quo was intensified in order to suppress any attempt to dispute the ghosts from the past, revealing the need for a local specificity of dialectics in order to sustain emancipatory transformation. 

The key argument from Safatle, one which we can certainly subscribe to, is that a “ghost can do a lot” (ibid., p.13). Indeed, ghosts are too close to nothing, they haunt us with the imposition of ideals and they haunt us with the menace from the past… Ghosts represent the disturbance of the present in its presence. The monopoly of State violence oppresses and prevents that other symbolic treatments of such ghosts may take place. But, as Safatle states, a ghost can introduce us to other dialectics. One which is singular to the process of colonization that took place in places like Brazil. Since the dialectical process behind our singular historic structure:

…starts from non-being and moves towards something which is not its opposite, it does not become being, it actually turns into otherness. The being-other appears, in reality, as another figure of non-being, which explains why, in this perspective, the only consequent position would be to recognize the excruciating construction of ourselves that could only be actualized at the moment when it recognizes its impossibility to be actualized, because there is no possible construction which can be done from the passage of non-being to otherness (ibid, p.17).          

We can understand how this singular haunting movement shapes another ontology, one which does not completely obey the Hegelian logic (demanding it to go further) from being towards nothing and opening the concept of becoming towards another actualization. Because it starts from non-being towards being-other. As Safatle explains, “it leads towards an always disavowalled expectation that being-other would be something different than alienation or… a developmental “myth”.” (ibid., p.18) But the acceptance of the non-being as a dialectical starting point makes room for other fundamental questions to arise, for example: which beginning a national dialectic recognizes and which one it neglects? Could common mean more than it does?

By acknowledging these reflections, one can interrogate the very structure of colonization that moves the ghostly ideal Brazilians had historically set for themselves: in order to be recognized one must be under the terms dictated by the master. Forcing the ghostly ideal of pursuing intangible European standards of recognition to its own people, has obliterated the past violences which shaped its own history. Interrogating the “starting point” of Brazil away from the Portuguese colonization, can push the contradiction of this very own ghost forward. And display how this ghost is actually the ghost of disavowal (Zupančič 2024), the ghost that names the efforts to deny the genocidal history of the originary people and the slavery in consolidating the capitalist wealth of colonization, one that still persist in the social disparity amongst people today. But when we set this particular dialectics as the driving force of this ghost, it forces its haunting contradictions over the living in their everyday lives. It prevents the mechanisms of normalization which softens the violences from the past to operate, thus pushing solidarity towards emancipatory capabilities. It reminds us that our past is much closer to us than we tend to think. There is no possible popular sovereignty through the persistence in the logic that produces further exclusion. The only possible politics comes through the voices that echoes these ghosts in their struggle. 

It is only through the realization of this non-being that a more gothic uncanny dimension reaches an anthropophagic dimension that rescues the ghosts that once ruled these lands. It is only through the cracks of ontological indoctrination, that a weirder, eerier, spookier grammar can arise and rearrange our symbolic commitment to the past (Gonsalves 2025). The expansion of the uncanny towards a more gothic dimension, one which translates its tropical potentialities, means to remember and unblock our memories that another sense of collectivity once ruled the land. The haunting of ghosts represents the repetition of the repressed content, but it only does so because it hasn't been symbolically and collectively subsumed. There is a structure of dessensibilization of our sensibilities that forces us to “normalize” all violences we experience. But our social bonds and forms of exchange predate capitalism, our capacity to communality was formulated under completely different terms: this is something that we tend to forget. Other emancipatory modes of existence once prevailed in the land but these were met with violence, oppression and death. This ghost that haunts the local tropics should belong to our local bestiary as a reminder of how another animistic pact with reality can set our ontological capacities free and this understanding could also push emancipatory universality in this process. 

Animism in dispute

Animism has always been in dispute. Our linguistic capabilities, our organizational capacities, which shaped our cognitions and our collectivities has always been a process of dealing with our animistic bearings. The fabric which composes our sociability is knitted by the animistic fibre of the collectivities from our past, which symbolically sustain our treatises. The imaginary guarantees act like knots which are only as tight as the strength of this very own symbolic fabric. But there is animistic elements all over our social composition, especially in how we tied these threads. There is animism present in our exchanges, in the way we delegate our satisfactions, in the way we find satisfaction through delegating, in the interpassivity that composes our everyday illusions and so on… And, even today, the beliefs which support our discourses aren't above animism, they mind as well be shaped by it.  Here, another crucial aspect of the Brazilian process of colonization should be addressed: the Christian catechization.

The Bandeirantes (name given to the participants of the expeditions which expanded the Portuguese domain over the previously agreed Tordesillas Treaty of 1494 with Spain) along with Christian priests had both nefarious, and yet, different purposes for their expeditions. While the bandeirantes wanted to explore mineral riches from the land (mostly gold and silver), reinforce slavery of originary people and of the enslaved Africans brought to do forced labor and obliterate the quilombos (communities of slaves who had escaped and the local force of resistance against Portuguese colonization); the Christian priests had also another “economy” in mind: the increase of new souls converted to Christianism. The Christian legacy in Brazil is ingrained by the engulfment of all other animistic figurations through the brutal process of catechization which violently suppressed all other animistic potentialities. Christian catechization had enforced an ontological project of existence, which bases recognition through intolerance. Thus, providing dignity only to those who sustain shared faith, missing the multiplicity of belief. Throughout the structural project of establishing Christianity as the only faith that can exist in the territory, all other beliefs or belief systems were persecuted almost to the point of obliteration.

The last official religious census in Brazil (IBGE 2022) reveals a picture painted by this past. The largest religion in Brazil is the Catholics (56,7%), seconded by Evangelicals (26,9%) and the African based religions, i.e., Umbanda and Candomblé are 1,05% of the population. Of course, we are not approaching or comparing structured faiths with the originary peoples belief systems. The encapsulation of animism under the structure of faith is the key providing power to such discourse, the dogmatic system only tries to control such animistic tendencies. Nonetheless, our point here is a much simpler one, it concerns a more Marxist argument (1970). Given the harsh and impoverished conditions of the proletariat, workers always had very little free time and free options for socialization and collectivization. Under this precarious scenario, religious discourse expands and conquers the hearts of the people providing meaning to this impoverishment. But the meaning provided by such discourse - and fundamental issue here - it ends up hyperprivatizing the commons, misleading their collectiveness in order to keep up with reality instead of inviting transformative change. It reinvents conservatism, leading to neoreactionary tendencies, which prevents collective alternatives beyond those sustained under capitalism. It reinforces a world told by one truth instead of opening up to truths, as Badiou (2020) puts it. Thus, the hyperprivatization of suffering prevents a structural consciousness towards creative transformation opening the common to other ontological potentialities.

Christianity was an integral part of the exploitative logic of colonization that took over Brazil. But the truth of the matter is that it still is. The specific negativity of non-being resultant from the ontological struggle that marks this territory has always been a struggle to face the imaginaries of being under identitarianism and symbolic insufficiencies to sustain it, which leads to the condition of being-other. The promise of Christianity is fully being (“in Christ”) as a sacred fulfillment that can put an end to this particular struggle. But given the ghosts which roam the land and given the structural contradictions which such ghosts reveal: this promise rather quickly reveals its insufficiencies as well.

In more recent years, we’ve witnessed the birth of neo-pentecostalists in Brazil (Gonsalves, Dunker, Estevão 2021). It is a religious branch of Evangelicals that have learned from North American tele-evangelists from the 70's that all efforts to adapt and dominate the media language is necessary to multiplying their numbers. They defend the theology of prosperity instead of liberation, aiming at self-improvement instead of collectivity. They became a powerful political force in Brazil, by electing deputies, mayors, governors, senators and shaping the future of the country. This only happened because of the failure of the government and State to sustain structural transformations against the current discontent, but there are brutal implications from these changes. There is a reactionary response born out of misery and in the name of survival, that only makes the local hauntings from the past get stronger. It is a capitalist realist (Fisher 2009) symptom, where the oppressed only desires to turn into the oppressor. They believe and preach that there is no other alternative.

  There is recently an increasing number of cases of violence related to religious hatred and intolerance against Afro-descendant religious branches in Brazil (Jornal da USP 2024). This is intrinsically related to a passion of being, which repeats sameness and the colonial logic of the past against any local sensibility towards emancipation. It goes against inviting multiplicity that could symbolically arise and give a different future to the hauntings of the past. What these acts of violence tell us, is that the hijacking of animism under the controlled narrative of Christianism is beneficial for capitalism and also, that any difference will be met with brutality and violence. To those who commit such acts, we can infer they unconsciously see it as a step towards becoming the oppressor under the false prerogative of escaping oppression. For them, any alterity that challenges the imaginary of oneness aligned with the Christian project must be obliterated. But now, it is not the Portuguese sustaining the violent oppression against the original people or the African descendants slaved, it is Brazilians that want to be more Brazilians than their fellow Brazilians by perpetrating these brutalities. The symbolic inability of facing negativity is met with a brute passion for imaginary patches placed to prevent any lack to appear. When difference points to lack, it pokes a hole in the imaginary unity sustained by the subject and the reaction is usually a violent one, either against himself or others.

Perhaps, a better way of framing this issue is that there is a contemporary struggle to free animistic tendencies in order to make peace with the ghosts which haunt the territory. The symbolic acceptance to face these ghosts, means to understand that the end of the world has already happened to the originary people from the forests of Brazil, as Ailton Krenak defends (2020). Following Krenak, the end of the world is not a recent project, it has already happened centuries ago. This general feeling of urgency about the world's demise can be now to white people, but the end of the world is nothing new to originary people. And they have been fighting it for much longer than the rest of us. To learn from them is to release the animistic capacities for different ontologies, allowing openness towards difference, sustaining multiplicity, embracing uncanniness, a weirder and eerier collectivity and perhaps, finding ways to re-establish our sensibilities to invent other worlds (to this world).    

Final Considerations   

The investigation of the uncanny can lead us to a clarity concerning our angst of facing alterity. To conceive the uncaniness as a hint to a portal, to a passage or a pathway, means to understand its eerie capabilities as a nod to another temporality which is spectrally placed within the chronologically oppression of reality. But also, as an affect of the fractures and gaps nodding to a real within reality, pushing us beyond our ideological limitations. The Brazilian forests and woods evoke the territorial specificity of an uncanniness from the tropics which sets the animistic directions towards a radical openness to alterity; one which bears the capacity of opening our recognition beyond the fear of all living things and our oppression over them, subsequently stirring our potentiality towards other ontologies.

   

References: 

Badiou, Alain.Lacan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

Castro, Viveiro. 2011. Medo dos Outros [The Fear of Others] in Revista de Antropologia, São Paulo, USP, 2011, V. 54 No 2.

Castro, Viveiro. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics. New York: Univocal

Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism. London: Repeater

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