Blessed Anastacia 1st Edition

Read this book for my Brazilian Ethnography class at UCSC. The class was informative and amazing. The book however left something to be desired. I would suggest reading if it is supplemented with lecture, but not on your own. My professor Dan Linger is great.

I had to take an Anthropology Ethnology class and Anastacia was a subject that we discussed.. Her story is heart- wrenching/passionate and relays the struggle for women of color in Brazil. A must read!!

John Burdick's examination of race and gender in Brazil is insightful and innovative. Blessed Anastacia looks at several different movements in Brazil, notably, the inculturated mass, evangelist religion, and the devotion to Anastacia, Brazil's slave saint. Burdick focuses his analysis of these movements through a lens of exclusion, talking to many different women who feel excluded from these movements which are supposed to benefit them. This multi-layered perspective provides an in-depth understanding of beauty standards, racism, and gender inequality in a very racially blended (if not racially equal) society.Although I enjoyed Burdick's approach to analyzing these problems, I would have liked more discussion of why certain movements are excluding women who "don't fit". However, overall this book is a complex analysis of a complex problem, and I recommend it to anyone interested in learning about race in Brazil.

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