João Biehl just published the historical and visual ethnography Jammerthal, the Valley of Lamentation: My Mucker War

Jan. 27, 2025

The book Jammerthal, the Valley of Lamentation, unearths the Mucker War, the first messianic uprising in modern Brazil, which took place among German-Brazilians in 1874 and was left to impunity and relegated to the dustbin of history. The fratricidal conflict unfolded against a backdrop of neocolonial expansionism linking Europe to the country's southern frontier, reflecting the dynamics of racialization and the necropolitics of the ruling classes, as well as a silenced grassroots anticolonial insurgency: space-times, and entanglements of which anthropologist João Biehl is an accidental descendant. 

Biehl completed the Portuguese-language manuscript while on sabbatical in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last fall. Published by Oikos Press, the book was launched to great acclaim at the Porto Alegre Book Fair on November 17th. Two weeks later, Biehl launched the book in his southern Brazilian hometown of Picada Café, where the Jammerthal colony is located. For both events, Biehl co-curated with Marco Antonio Filho an art exhibition featuring photographs by Torben Eskerod. The book, designed by Lula Rocha, is interspersed with Eskerod's striking photographic essays on everyday life in this out-of-the-way place, part of the region where the Mucker War took place.

In his praise of the book, Professor Luís Augusto Fischer of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul writes that, “Stories from 150 years ago are told from the perspective of an acute attunement to our time, in an evocative mosaic of images, intuitions, desires, sublime moments and barbaric events, in a unique prose that combines historical research and poetry in a deeply moving account.”

Drawing on family memories and engaging community and official archives, Biehl shows that, though cursed, a certain communal way of caring for oneself and one's loved ones remained alive in this southern landscape as a wandering non-knowledge, manifesting the plastic power of internally colonized people. By paying ethnographic attention to this ahistorical dimension, the book delineates another place that displaces the known and makes possible different capacities for attunement and storytelling, and, for the Mucker (literally, those who dig muck and who are false saints) and their descendants, alternative ways of conceiving the body and the world open to the spirit of nature.

The ethnographer-storyteller is one of the many entities that pulsate in poetic-prismatic palimpsest of traces-of-what-one-does-not-know, always on the verge of becoming something else: a collective of co-presences that anthropological praxis can let rot and continue to disappear – like a way of life grafted onto nature – or that can be revived by these flashes, even without language.

The book project Jammerthal, the Valley of Lamentation is an outgrowth of the Racialized Frontiers research hub of PIIRS's Brazil LAB. Biehl is currently working on an English-language book about the Mucker War, focusing on the healing arts of the unlettered and anti-colonial political theology. Elements of this book have appeared in the essay Insurgent Archivings: Sensing the Spirit of Nature and Reckoning with Traces of Our Dead.

Photographs of the photographic exhibition and launch of the book Jammerthal, the Valley of Lamentation: My Mucker War, at the 70th Porto Alegre Book Fair, November 17, 2024.