Dr Ashley Lebner (Laurier University)
Law’s enmity and the mystic of friendship in an Amazonian camp
The popular saying “for my friends everything, for my enemies the law,” has recently gained new visibility in Latin American public life. In the last five years, politicians and commentators in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, and Uruguay among others, have claimed it as part of their cultural and political heritage. Yet discussions of this adage—perhaps originally Brazilian—have been a staple in Brazilian political anthropology since Roberto DaMatta wrote about it in the 1970s. I revisit the Brazilian discussion in this paper and show that the secular presumptions of the scholarship has likely obscured the ethnographic and historical record. Indeed, through ethnography of a land occupation led by settlers in Brazil’s Southeastern Amazon, I show that the sense of “law’s enmity” not only continues today, but that it intersects with what I call the mystic of friendship. That is, law’s enmity is both animated by common Catholic relations and resounds with a distinguished theological pedigree.