Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the poetic construction of "affective attunement" between a political speaker - Mãe Beata de Yemonjá, a religious activist from the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion - and her audience. It shows that political affect is not only intersubjectively but also textually constituted.

Paper long abstract:

The analysis of affect as a politically constitutive force has tended to remain outside the scope of linguistic anthropologically oriented research on political communication. Nevertheless, if political affect is understood as intersubjectively, and thus also interactionally constituted, linguistic anthropological modes of analysis have much to offer to our understandings of it. This paper demonstrates this point through an analysis of the poetic construction of "affective attunement" between a political speaker - Mãe Beata de Yemonjá, a religious activist from the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion - and her audience.

The paper's analysis is divided into two parts. First, it examines the overlapping discursive devices that composed Mãe Beata's speech's affect-inducing poetic structure (explicit semantic argument and affectively evocative narrative imagery, a reliance on first-person plural pronouns to hail audience members to a collective we, and repetition and parallelism that operated on both linguistic and paralinguistic levels). Second, it describes how the speech itself acted as a metapragmatic diagram of the kinds of affective attunement between humans and the co-present deities cultivated in Afro-Brazilian religions, and between practitioners and other humans, that Mãe Beata and her fellow religious activists envisioned to form the core of their religious political project.