Ecstasy-Belonging in Madagascar and Brazil
Oxford Scholarship Online December 21, 2017 Kélina Gotman
Anti-colonial uprisings in Madagascar and Brazil were diagnosed as choreomania by missionary physicians and neuroscientists, who framed trance-like demonstrations—involving shaking, frothing, falling, and visions—as pathological movement disorders. Unlike earlier cases, these large-scale protests entered government administration, with physicians arguing that choreomania spread by pathological sympathy. In Madagascar, demonstrators angered at missionaries' black hats gathered at sacred sites, convulsing, and unseated a pro-European king, representing a form of ecstasy-belonging and a choreopolitics of revolt. In Brazil, revolutionary underclasses were dismissed as suffering a choreomaniacal epidemic of religious psychosis.