THE PEOPLE AND THE LAW OF THE HOUND AT CANUDOS

Paul Christopher Johnson

Backed up by the law,
Those evil ones abound,
We keep the law of God,
They keep the law of the hound!

Text recovered in the ruins of Canudos

In Brazil as elsewhere, many citizens now see the state as a fragile shell. The republic seems hollowed out; there is no "there" there. In September 2015 the lawyer and professor Janaína Paschoal submitted a motion to launch impeachment proceedings against Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff. On April 4, 2016, in a video that went viral, she took the podium at a rally to describe the government in diabolical terms. "When we succeed at impeaching Dilma," she shouted into the microphone, "We will destroy the Republic of the Serpent!" Two weeks later Brazil's lower house in congress voted to begin impeachment proceedings against the president. Fifty-nine deputies prominently invoked God in the televised process of declaring their vote, including the (then) president of congress, Eduardo da Cunha. God was rolled into verbal screeds against corruption, and not without justification. The country was in economic turmoil, with many federal and state employees long unpaid. Yet as one congressional deputy after another found themselves accused of corruption and bribery or were discovered to hold secret offshore bank accounts or rely on illegal "box number two" (caixa dois) campaign funds, the political and economic impasse mutated into a moral crisis of trust.

On the feast day of Santo Antonio, June 13, the Convent of Saint Anthony in the center of Rio de Janeiro was filled to overflowing. Usually the faithful petition Saint Anthony for marriage, lasting love, and children. That year, said Cardinal Orani Tempesta, "people's biggest worry is the question of their getting paid at the end of the month. Obviously we ask for intercession so the state will have jobs and be able to pay people." The cardinal implied that even divine aid needs the state for its administration and distribution, while the state, for its part, needs some transcendent guarantee. But if the congress that impeached the president is itself packed with thieves, where is the solid body around which justice settles and gathers force? What guarantees the wages of those who work for the state? Where is stateness at all and, given its elusiveness, how will the church help to broker its benefits?

Fears that the republic was a fragile mirage caused concern not least because in August the Olympics would begin, and the bright lights of international media would be turned on Rio. The former capital city required at least the look and infrastructure, the "metaphysical effect" of a republican state. It needed to pop on television screens with the sounds and colors of national unity, security, tradition, and competence, with foundation. Instead the state appeared febrile and thin, a trompe l'oeil propped up by the army now called in to protect arriving tourists on normal city streets. On the eve of the games, the unfinished husks of apartments at the Olympic village and the still-idle new metro line testified more to the obscurity than the presence of stateness.

When the games were done, the political clouds massed and stacked again. On August 30, 2016, the yearlong felling of a regime was a fait accompli when the senate voted to confirm the president's dismissal. Dilma, criticized from the right as an atheist, even sought last-minute help from God, or at least the godly. Yet, far from settling matters, the impeachment launched new debates and marches on the fate of democracy in Brazil and, tangentially, the place of religion and religious discourse in that future. The jurist Janaína Paschoal, who had helped to launch the charge, weighed in again as she summarized and sealed the case before the senate on the eve of the last vote: "It was God who made various people perceive, all at once, what was happening to our country, and who gave them courage to get up and do something about it." Paschoal clarified that she was a not an evangelical but a spiritist: "I'm devoted to St. George, St. Michael the Archangel, and Iemanjá [the Yoruba and Afro-Brazilian goddess of the sea and maternity] ... If I was a Pastor or a Mãe de Santo [priestess of Candomblé], would my request for impeachment be less legitimate? ... I think it's necessary to talk about God, because materialism, intrigue, indifference, falsity and dissimulation have taken over the country."

Some senators echoed the need for religion to repair the republic. They too hoped to play Saint George slaying the serpent. Despite Paschoal's presentation of a stereotypically Brazilian-style ecumenism, many of those echoing her position in bringing God into Brazilian politics hail from the so-called bloco evangélico (evangelical block), a cross-party alliance of evangelical congresspersons who mostly vote in chorus and who had aggressively rallied for the "leftist" Dilma's demise.

In the press appeared familiar wry laments: given the anemic condition of the nation's futebol, usually the favored totem (it was never the church or the republic), only the long-running telenovelas would be left to convene collective civil life. Once upon a time a backlands town named Canudos was the subject of such a telenovela, in 1997. It flickered on screens in almost every home. A century before that, in 1897, the real Canudos and its destruction served as a narrative pivot of the nation, through the medium of newspapers. In that moment, the new republic was similarly suspected of being possessed of a demonic quality manifested by the serpent or, as the people of Canudos called it, the Law of the Hound.

Here I take up a question raised in the introduction on the techniques of making and unmaking social orders that install new renditions of the People. The essay takes the reader to Brazil and the first decade after a confluence of key events: the abolition of slavery (1888), the founding of the republic (1889), the exile (1889) and then death (1891) of the emperor, Pedro II, and the separation of church and state (1890). The paradoxical event I explore is the appearance of a powerfully weaponized churchstate alliance that emerged just a few years after the official separation of church and state. In fact, the separation of church and state helped to generate a more forceful and aggressive edition of the church than had existed before.

Looking at churchstateness through the window afforded by Brazil's first republican decade and, within it, the ekklesia of Canudos and the astonishing war waged against it by the new government, offers a rare opportunity. In just a few years unfolded a radical national reimagination of the people in relation to church and state. The reporter Euclides da Cunha called it a "revoltation" (revoltação) — more than a revolt but not quite a...