Blessed Anastacia is the first detailed ethnographic account in English of Brazilian black women's encounter with racism within the context of popular religion. Revealing the many-layered reality of black consciousness in urban Brazil, John Burdick teases out the ways that popular Christianity confronts everyday racism and contributes to the formation of black identity.

Through life histories, cultural analysis of media and television, in-depth participant observation, and over a hundred interviews with working-class black women, Blessed Anastacia offers a complex, searching examination of the role of anthropology in movements for social change.

"...a brilliant, passionate study of the realities of race and injustice in Brazil...represents the very best in new thinking from anthropology and cultural studies about Latin America."
--Orin Starn, author of Nightwatch: The Making of a Movement in the Peruvian Andes

"...charts out new territory by examining racism in the context of Afro-Brazilian activism, popular religion, and the cultural politics of gender and desire. Avoiding simple formulas and always attentive to complexity, Burdick has produced both a nuanced ethnography and a contribution to theories of social movements and activist scholarship."
--David J. Hess, author of Samba in the Night: Spiritism in Brazil

Introduction

1. The Everyday Wounds of Color

Negras in Love, Family, and Work

2. Spirited Languages

The Field of Popular Christianity in Rio de Janeiro

3. The Politics of Mystical Substance

Black Women and the Catholic Inculturated Mass

4. What is the Color of the Holy Spirit?

Racial/Color Meanings in Pentecostalism

5. The Eyes of Anastacia

Political Readings of a Popular Catholic Devotion

6. The Politics of Ethnography

Translating Knowledge Claims into Practice

Conclusion
An Agenda for the Ethnography of Social Movements