Emerson Giumbelli

Para além do "trabalho de campo": reflexões supostamente malinowskianas

The article proposes a re-reading (confessed to be interested and ironic) of the well-known explanations rendered by Malinowski in the opening chapter of the Argonauts of the Western Pacific. In this text, Malinowski explains the reasons for the type of approach adopted to study a Melanesian population in the 1910s, which has ever since become the consecrated approach in Anthropology known by the idea of fieldwork. The author intends to show that the same reasons used by Malinowski, placed within the propitiated framework by different objects, are able to base a different methodological approach. In this sense, to continue faithful to Malinowski means to re-read (or even to subvert it) in ordet to explore certain vital aspects of the text, based on real research situations that anthropologists have come across at present time. This should allow the adequation of methodologies in the field that do not need to be strictly defined as fieldwork. These reflections were defined after a personal trajectory characterized by researches using archive materials and textual sources.

Heresia, doença, crime ou religião: o Espiritismo no discurso de médicos e cientistas sociais

Desde a segunda metade do seculo XIX e ate a decada de 1940, as praticas e doutrinas espiritas mobilizaram o pensamento medico, num duplo empreendimento intelectual e de intervencao social. O artigo aborda varios textos elaborados, neste periodo, por medicos (tais como Nina Rodrigues e Leonidio Ribeiro), explorando como neles e definido e analisado o espiritismo, e localizando, entre as diversas epocas, continuidades e rupturas. Na decada de 1930, o espiritismo e os cultos de possessao em geral comecam a ser tratados por referencia a categorias sociologicas e antropologicas, sinalizando uma transformacao importante no seu estatuto (Arthur Ramos e um nome chave). No artigo, esta transicao e problematizada a partir da analise da categoria higiene mental, utilizada por intelectuais durante as decadas de 1920 e 1930 e associada as discussoes sobre a constituicao e destinos do Brasil enquanto nacao.

A noção de crença e suas implicações para a modernidade: um diálogo imaginado entre Bruno Latour e Talal Asad

The article aims to reflect on the implications of the presence of the category of belief in modernity. Formed in a critical project, which led to its ontological weakening, the notion of belief was fundamental to the modern definition of religion. On the other hand, modernity did not fail to positively incorporate the same notion, which is evident in its stated commitment to the principle of freedom of belief. The text establishes connections between the senses of the modern definition of belief and the modern construction of the notion of society. In this exploration, themes as freedom and subjection and situations are considered, as well situations as the status of credulity and blasphemy. Its course and its outcome are set in dialogue with the work of two authors, Bruno Latour and Talal Asad.

A religião nos limites da simples educação : notas sobre livros didáticos e orientações curriculares de ensino religioso

This article examines some official curriculum guidelines and textbooks of some major publishers directed to religious education - a discipline offered by public schools in Brazil. The goal is to know what in this material is defined as religion and how it organizes the universe resulting from that definition - especially the way it tackles what it would be common and what it would be specific to the particular religious traditions and groups. The inspiration for the analysis comes from authors who explore the disputed status of the category religion. The article also discusses part of that literature and proposes avenues for future studies.

Introduction: Secularities, Religiosities, and Subjectivities

What has become of secularism following the so-called postsecular turn? As a consequence of the demise of modern twentieth-century secularization theory (as per Peter Berger’s ‘sacred canopy’), we live in an interesting intellectual moment in which the so-called postsecular (understood descriptively rather than theoretically, see, e.g., Habermas 2008; Mavelli and Petito 2012; Wilson 2012; Rosati 2015) coexists with the secular, which in turn has become pluralized and historicized (see, e.g., Taylor 2007; Agrama 2012; Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013). On the other hand, if, as Habermas argues, the secularist paradigm has learned to cohabitate with the religious, we also witness the conflictual anti-religious stance of ‘new atheist’ movements, which claim a ‘scientific’ argument for the removal of the religious from the public sphere (see Oustinova-Stjepanovic and Blanes 2015). This cohabitation of the secular and the postsecular is revealed, as the new atheism example above shows, mainly through political dialectical processes (see also Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Sullivan et al. 2015). This in turn makes us, editors of this volume, feel that (1) those political statements overshadow the subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of secularity, making it difficult to pinpoint concrete sites, agents, and objects of expression; and (2) for that same reason, they tend to obscure rather than illuminate the pragmatics and empirical dimensions of secularism. We argue that one such move toward the concrete and the subjective will allow us to know more about the plural, heterogeneous, and processual character of the secular/religious conundrum, and thus move beyond the monolithic, immobilized configurations that often flourish in the public sphere.

What Is Spirituality for? New Relations between Religion, Health and Public Spaces

Since the 1980s, we can identify a progressive and pluralistic recognition of spirituality as a health issue. In this period, medical scientists have engaged in that theme, global government agencies as the World Health Organization included the thematic in its official documents and healthcare policies have mentioned spirituality as a permanent dimension of primary care. Each of these formulations has legitimized, in different levels, the idea “spirituality is health”. Is this process also a new way to institutionalize the relationship between state and religion? This chapter presents reflections about the way in which the idea of spirituality, in healthcare settings, has configured a special frame for the religion in the public space.

Regulação do religioso: discussões conceituais e panorama da situação em quatro países latino-americanos

Este texto apresenta panoramas sobre a situacao em quatro paises latino-americanos – Argentina, Brasil, Mexico e Uruguai – quanto a duas realidades: 1) os modos pelos quais uma igreja ou grupo religioso obtem “personalidade juridica”; 2) a existencia e o funcionamento de aparatos estatais voltados para o registro e acompanhamento desses coletivos religiosos. O objetivo e entender como tais dimensoes participam das condicoes pelas quais as religioes, em determinado contexto social, tem existencia (e nao so em termos juridicos) e das formas pelas quais uma sociedade – pela mediacao de aparatos estatais – define o lugar do religioso. Esse objetivo e perseguido com o recurso ao conceito de “regulacao do religioso”, ao qual se dedica uma das secoes do texto. A apresentacao dos dados busca dar contribuicoes para o estudo de caracteristicas do campo religioso nos quatro paises levando em conta suas situacoes contrastantes quando se usa as nocoes de secularizacao (Brasil e Uruguai) ou laicidade (Argentina e Mexico).

Macumba surrealista: observações de Benjamin Péret em terreiros cariocas nos anos 1930

Benjamin Peret, a French surrealist poet who lived in Brazil between 1929 and 1931, observed in this period Afro-Brazilian rituals and wrote a series of articles (“Candomble and macumba”) that were published in a Sao Paulo newspaper. This text presents an analysis of this set of articles by using other references by and about Peret. It approaches two sets of questions. First, how the French poet’s observations dialogued with contemporary ethnographies of Afro-Brazilian groups. Second, the dialogues established between Peret’s perspective and the concerns of a parcel of Brazilian modernism. The transformations which Afro-Brazilian religions undergo may be seen as processes that raise issues similar to the modernist project of “discovery of Brazil”. The report of Peret with his surrealist traces is both a testimony and a product of this search.