Oustinova-Stjepanovic asks why ‘we are admonished against assuming futility or succumbing to despair in politics’? The question, to me, is both a welcome critique of the anthropological compunction to read intention, or at the very least, coherence into social life, and an (Aristotelian) plea that we return tragedy and failure to their rightful place in human experience. As Magnus Course (2013) once cautioned, we should be careful not to attribute agency to every facet of life, ensuring that conceptual space remains for our interlocutors’ own discourses of failure and loss. Similar cautions have been issued within the anthropology of religion. In Oustinova-Stjepanovic’s (2017) research on Macedonian Islamic practice, for example, the failure of Sufi ritual is presented to us through the unflinching lens of her Roma subjects as ‘incapacity’ and ‘intrinsic ineptitude’. In like vein, I have argued for more attention to be paid to concepts of ‘lapsedess’ and absence in religious identity, via religious practices that, from the perspective of their disinvested performers at least, achieve nothing (Mayblin, 2017).

Perceptions of futility (frustrated goals, impossible desires) are central to human experience. This is not in question. What is in question is when they exist, for whom they exist, and how they exist. As several authors here comment, judgements of futility may be ethnographically insensitive, imposing an ‘instrumental’ reading of politics where a more ‘gestural’ reading is required (Agamben, 1999). Whose political frustration are we dealing with in such cases – our interlocutors or our own? But political futility is also an ethnographic category: failure, despair, ennui, apathy may be recognisable states to political actors, existential hazards which compel various modes or methods of redress. How then, in this more ethnographic sense, is futility experienced in any given moment? Does it co-exist with the positivity of individual agency, or is it extinguished by the slightest invocation to act out, to thrust oneself toward the world in whatever small way? Does it withstand that ‘rush of energy’ present in ritual (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]), and crowds (Mazzarella, 2017) or do such events inevitably transform futility into something altogether more redemptive? To answer such questions anthropologically we must pay attention to native understandings of success and failure, agency and power across differing temporal frames.

During the 2012 municipal election, in a small town of rural Northeast Brazil, I spent a a good deal of time with Paulinho, a 37-year-old unemployed town inhabitant, active in the electoral campaign of Jorge Oliveira, the incumbent mayor’s rival.  Paulinho’s hopes were sky high. ‘When I become manager of the hospital…’ he said, packing fireworks into a plastic carrier for that evening’s political rally, ‘I’ll put that place in order. I’ll fire that bitch who turned me out, and order new drugs for the stock cupboard’. ‘Jorge Oliveira is a good man’ he said of his chosen candidate for mayor ‘I don’t trust politicians, none of them. But he’s a good man. My vote for him is a vote of faith’.

Paulinho’s self-declared faith (fé) in the election fascinated me. I tried to go along with it, but there were moments of doubt when I wondered what on earth was really going through Paulinho’s head. Did he really believe that Oliveira would reverse the world for him? And what, I wondered, was going through Oliveira’s head? Did he really intend to put Paulinho, a poor, black, openly gay, cross-dressing prostitute in charge of the hospital in this most conservative of towns? Something did not add up.

Paulinho’s faith was, to my mind, just plain foolish. And this was puzzling because Paulinho was in no way stupid. He was a highly intelligent and self-starting individual. It made no sense to me how someone as sharp and habitually cynical about the world could express such passion for a small-town politician. In the time I had known him, Paulinho had produced some of the most searing political critiques I had ever heard. Impressed, I once tried to persuade him to run for office but he shook his head, as if he had already considered the idea quite carefully and discarded it. Municipal politics, he explained, was an impossible activity. Even entering with the best of intentions, it wouldn’t work out. The demands of clientelism would tie him up in knots. To get anywhere he would need to keep the rich on his side: the rich were ultimately interested in remaining rich, which meant letting down the poor. No, party politics was a futile enterprise.

For some reason it seemed to Paulinho that whereas his own idealism would never survive the onslaught of clientelist logics, his chosen candidate’s would. His certainty that things would fundamentally change this time around was, he said, a matter of fé. The faith he and others described in such contexts had an interesting taxonomy. It was not exclusively religious or connected to God. Whereas God powered the world through other-than-human energies such as grace (graça), and love (amor), fé was an energy somewhere between the human and the other-than-human; an in-dwelling reflex, inalienable, like breath. A person’s faith could atrophy, but so long as they lived it would never disappear. In times of need it could be drawn upon, nourished, encouraged to grow. To ‘vote with faith’ could signify to vote with passion and great intention, or to coast along on one’s last engine when the other three engines had failed.

For a long time, I put the capacity of those around me to swing from realism to fantasy down to a lack of knowledge about how neoliberal social structures worked. With hindsight I see that it was I who lacked knowledge. Or rather, that knowledge was hindering my quest for understanding. As a Western academic raised and schooled in ‘cynical reason’ the knowledge I possessed was invariably filtered through an unhappy lens. Cynical reason – the term coined by German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk – describes a pervasive modern mindset emptied of political hope. The modern cynic is a borderline melancholic who does not believe in radical change. Modern cynics are ‘well-off and miserable at the same time’, they suffer from a consciousness that ‘no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 5). Knowing what I know today about Paulinho’s unchanged life since Oliveira’s victory; knowing, too, something of the turmoil that befell the country in the wake of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, I reflect on Paulinho’s optimism and ask myself, why all that fé? For some kind of answer, we need to recognise that the run-up to Brazilian elections constitutes a unique context for experiencing the world. Paulinho’s fé that he would one day run the hospital was not a reflection of what he knew based on a lifetime of social and economic marginalisation, it came from fé itself. Fé as Paulinho would understand it, is an enchanted psychology; a substance-like force that attunes a person to the magical indeterminacy of the moment. Electoral periods are, after all, extended subjunctive moments where power is up for grabs and where, for a brief theoretical period, the world can be remade. Paulinho’s fé that he would one day run the hospital was the product of this already present potential of the world to rear up and reverse itself.

Fé in the probably-corrupt-politician reminds us of Jacques Ranciere’s (2010) proposition that democracy must be thought of not as an individual quest for happiness nor as a form of governing the social body, but as a contingent, constant force, an ‘anarchic element’ that disrupts the oligarchy that persists. In small town Brazil, electoral fé is premised upon this ‘anarchic element’ and in many ways is not consciously chosen. It is coerced into existence through a mixture of ritual events and affective dynamics that obscure, temporarily, the ‘view from afar’ which allows cynicism to thrive.

The notion of a ‘method of hope,’ elaborated by Hirokazu Miyazaki (2004), is fruitful for thinking through what might be going on in this case. The idea that hope could be a method seems strange at first, for it diverts our attention away from hope’s natural object: a particular outcome, or state of being, or – in the case of the Brazilian municipal election – a change in patterns of economic distribution. But it is apt here inasmuch as it orients us away from the idea of outcomes or knowledge. As Miyazaki reminds us, hope isn’t something one acquires once one has accumulated enough knowledge; it is a method of disregarding knowledge. Paulinho’s fé needs to be understood in similar terms: by bracketing out the noisiness of prior experiences it facilitates radical presence-in-the-moment. But unlike the hope of the Fijian Suvavou people described by Miyazaki, fé is not primarily a method, it is a vital energy, which is to say that it has a baseline presence in every person regardless of ritual structure or political events. It is the energy that gives rise to hopeful action; and when hope is lost, to politics itself.

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