Paper short abstract:

This paper accounts for the presence of religious healing agencies and agents in the State of Bahia, Brazil, and explores how their reputation is constructed through agencying processes constituted by mediators from various religious and healing traditions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper supports the idea that religious healing practice and performance is seldom random or arbitrary. By using the theoretical concept of agencying (agencement) by Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour, we look into religious healing as part of a long historical tradition in Brazil which is at present found both in urban and rural milieus and encompasses various forms of agencying. Our argument is further developed by an analysis of the manner in which the reputation of a man having extraordinary and supernatural powers is enacted through an elaborate ritual aesthetics and rhetoric performance. To support our argument, we have taken into account both the ethnographic field notes of the anthropologist Carlo Castaldi (1953-54), and the recent field study that we have conducted in the island of Itaparica, where this holy man lived and performed medical acts from the mid forties to the early sixties, when he "passionately" died upon being displaced from the sacred grounds that bestowed and granted him the recognized healing powers.