Department of Religion and Culture

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Browsing Department of Religion and Culture by Author "Ansell, Aaron"

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    Auctioning Patronage in Northeast Brazil: The Political Value of Money in a Ritual Market
    Ansell, Aaron (2010-06)
    Fundraising auctions help people in a small rural town in Northeast Brazil reckon with the effects that currency stabilization and democratization have had on municipal politics. These simultaneous processes have made politics confusing for the people of Passerinho by creating multiple modalities of electoral reciprocity. In this article, I argue that the ritual procedures of the auctions commensurate these modalities of reciprocity through a semiotic procedure in which money signifies both exchange value and more personal forms of value. I consider the auction's impact on municipal politics by looking at its effect on the narrative of democratic progress and on the prestige of grassroots politicians, traditional elites, and voluntary associations.
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    “But the winds will turn against you”: An analysis of wealth forms and the discursive space of development in northeast Brazil
    Ansell, Aaron (2009-02)
    In this article, I explain the unfolding of a participatory development project in northeast Brazil by exploring how local genres of public speech articulate with categories of wealth. Although development resources cannot be easily categorized into local classes of wealth, they nonetheless evoke some of the anxieties cultivators feel when dealing with wealth forms susceptible to the evil eye. Beliefs surrounding the evil eye shape cultivators’ relations to material objects, and they also define the contours of safe and acceptable speech within the village development association. As a result, during association meetings, the villagers speak in ways that frustrate development agents seeking to generate “open” and “transparent” managerial discourse felicitous to project success—at least, external notions of project success. Appreciating the link between wealth and speech forms sheds light on both the local implementation challenges that participants in such projects face and the reason development agents frequently blame ostensive project failures on beneficiary backwardness.
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    Clientelism, Elections, and the Dialectic of Numerical People in Northeast Brazil
    Ansell, Aaron (University of Chicago Press, 2018-04-01)
    This paper explores rural Brazilians’ interpretations of and ethical reflections on political clientelism. Brazilian elites often regard the people of the dry hinterland (sertanejos) as lazy, politically apathetic, and prone to corruptingdemocratic elections through the sale of their votes. Here I argue that the sertanejos living in the northeastern state of Piau런ractice a form of clientelism that entails an ethical distinction between degraded vote buying and morally upright electoral transactions with politicians. For the sertanejos of Piauí‘s interior, ethical electoral transactions do not corrupt democratic elections; they reverse the moral damage that elections themselves cause. Elections refigure socially embedded persons as numerical individuals destined to be added together as equal quanta of generic value. Ethical transactions reconstitute the voter’s socially embedded personhood after the election has passed. However, rather than vindicating clientelism, this analysis draws attention to the social inequalities that prevent some people from practicing the ethical forms of political exchange. It therefore builds toward a standpoint for critiquing political clientelism that does not reproduce liberal idealizations of democratic citizenship.
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    Impeaching Dilma Rousseff: the double life of corruption allegations on Brazil’s political right
    Ansell, Aaron (2018-08)
    This essay analyses the 2016 congressional impeachment of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, for alleged budgetary misconduct, as well as the related right-wing, ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations calling for her ouster. I argue that Rousseff’s impeachment was facilitated by a conflation of two models of ‘corruption’ operating in Brazil, one legal-behavioural and the other religious-ontological. What happened in 2016 was a tacit conflation of these two models, along with their associated regimes for construing evidence of guilt. More specifically, congressional deliberations on Rousseff’s guilt allowed jurisprudential standards of evidence to be influenced by the evidential regime of the right-wing Fora Dilma (‘Out Dilma’) demonstrators. The demonstrators evinced Rousseff’s corruption through a semiotic process I term ‘cross-domain homology’, a process that I claim is intrinsically dangerous for democracy because it invites a state of exception to the norms girding representative institutions.
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    Models of Clientelism and Policy Change: The Case of Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes in Mexico and Brazil
    Ansell, Aaron; Mitchell, Ken (2011-07)
    Clientelist systems vary, and this variation influences the adoption and evolution of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. We find that vertically integrated, corporatist clientelism in Mexico and more locally oriented, bossist clientelism in Brazil differentially shape the choices of governments to turn piecemeal, discretionary CCTs into more expansive and secure benefits.
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    On Calling Donald Trump 'Corrupt'
    Ansell, Aaron (Routledge, 2022-05-31)
    This chapter advances an eccentric model of corruption both to understand various disturbing features of Donald Trump’s political career, and to explore the risks of using the term “corrupt” as a pejorative label for Trump. Here corruption refers to the transfer of value from higher to lower positions along a moral gradient through a violation of the sacred. Curiously, Trump himself celebrates his own sacrilegious transfer of value from the "elite" to those ordinary (coded white) people positioned at the bottom (the so-called “Deplorables”) of a moral gradient identified with "The Establishment." Therefore, adversarial assertions of Trump’s corruption risk mimetically affirming the modes of agency he arrogates to himself. More specifically, they risk testifying to his successful transfer of (mostly symbolic) value through a set of three tactics-- excitation, transduction, and shunting-- explored throughout the chapter.
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    Virtual and Augmented Reality: Four Case Studies
    Ansell, Aaron (2021-08)
    The following four case studies are fictional thought experiments designed for college students at Virginia Tech. They are mainly intended for use in undergraduates the novel “Tech for Humanity Minor” focused on the intersection of technology and cultural processes, group diversity, ethics, knowledge systems, democracy and social justice.” The minor is an interdepartmental effort spearheaded by The Center for Humanities and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These four cases center on the related technologies of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) and their role in new forms of policing, marriage, incarceration, and interpersonal violence. They are set sometime in the near future and are premised on recent or imminent technological achievements.