Ecstasy-Belonging in Madagascar and Brazil

Summary

Choreomania was politicized during revolutionary uprisings in Madagascar and Brazil, where large-scale anti-colonial demonstrations featured trance-like behaviors such as shaking and visions. Physicians linked these movements to a spread of 'choreomania' driven by emotional contagion, fearing similar uprisings in other colonies. The events were characterized by spirit possession and reflected a struggle for cultural identity and autonomy against colonial powers.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Choreomania became distinctly political. Missionary physicians and neuroscientists stationed in Madagascar and Brazil compared trance-like revolutionary uprisings to the literature on choreomania. Unlike earlier cases, however, these ‘movement disorders’, large-scale anti-colonial demonstrations characterized by shaking, frothing, falling, and visions—as well as, in Madagascar, ancestor worship—tipped ‘choreomania’ (and ‘epidemic chorea’) into the realm of government administration. Worried that uprisings could take place in other colonies, physicians argued that choreomania spread by pathological sympathy; it migrated. Demonstrators angered at the missionaries’ black hats, gathering at sacred sites, convulsing, and ultimately unseating a pro-European king represent, following Giorgio Agamben, a form of ecstasy-belonging: a state of exception characterized by spirit possession and repossession, through which they take back what is rightly theirs. The disorder of ‘choreomania’ represents a choreopolitics of revolt. Similarly, in Brazil, revolutionary underclasses gathered together in what was dismissed as a ‘choreomaniacal’ epidemic of delusion—a religious psychosis.