Spiritual tourism : Brazilian faith healing goes global

![CDATA[In my first morning in Abadiânia, a little town in central Brazil, I walked the short distance from my pousada (guest house) to Casa de Dom Inácio (House of Dom Ignatius), the healing center headed by the faith healer João de Deus. While I was walking and enjoying the soft seven o’clock sun, I glanced over my shoulder and was startled by the sight of a crowd of people dressed all in white (as recommended by the healing center), pouring from other pousadas and walking the same dirt road toward the Casa. As they passed by, I could hear languages from all over the world: German, French, English, Russian, but I heard no Portuguese. On our way to the Casa, we passed by an Internet café advertising broadband connection, a juice bar (with the latest detox juices, organic dishes, and a menu written in English), and a shop for crystals, Spiritist books and candles. I was later to find out that most of these businesses were owned by foreigners who had arrived as patients or healers and ended up staying. We also walked past little Brazilian children too poor to wear anything but a pair of old shorts, stray dogs, carts and horses, and unpainted cement block houses. The contrast was shocking: on the one hand we were in a poor village in central Brazil; on the other hand there was a mix of New Age chatter, organic food, and high technology typical of cosmopolitan cities. It was as if two very different worlds had collided. The town of Abadiânia seemed to have embodied the compression of time and space known as globalization. Indeed, as Néstor García Canclini argued in Hybrid Cultures, modernization does not end traditional forms of production, beliefs and goods, but creates hybrid cultures that encompass a complex, multi-temporal articulation of traditions and modernities (1995: 47). What is interesting in this case is that this hybrid culture that encompassed modernity and tradition hinged upon traditional faith healing in the of João de Deus. This chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted in Brazil in September 2005 and interviews with Australians in Sydney after they had been to this healing center. I argue that ‘spiritual tourism’ (i.e., the interconnection of sacred and secular tourism) is an important aspect in the cultural traffic between Brazil and Australia and adds to the construction of a ‘transnational imaginary’ of Brazil in Australia. Rather than being unidirectional, this spiritual network evinces the ‘rhizomatic’ quality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) of these flows. In a rhizome, ‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’ have relational locations; centers can become peripheries and vice versa. Whereas Australia may be a center for Brazilian migrants, Brazil is becoming a center of spiritual tourism for Australians.]]