Manuel A. Vásquez

Studying Religion in Motion: A Networks Approach

This essay offers some theoretical and methodological reflections on how the study of religion might look if we were to assume that complexity, connectivity, and fluidity are preponderant features of our present age, without ignoring the strong countervailing global logics of segregation, surveillance, and control. After characterizing transnational, global, and diasporic modalities of religion in motion, the essay explores the strengths and weaknesses of the analytical tools of flows, landscapes, and networks in the study of mobility. I argue that by placing power front and center, the concept of networks provides a necessary corrective to hydraulic models of flows and spatial metaphors of landscapes. These metaphors tend to overstate the pervasiveness of porous boundaries and movement or to privilege the hermeneutic and phenomenological dimensions of religious activity.

New Latino Destinations

On April 10, 2006, Latino immigrants and their allies took to the streets in more than 100 cities throughout the United States to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform. In Albertville, Alabama (population 20,000), more than 5,000 demonstrators marched, some carrying signs that read “Sweet Home Alabama.” In Jackson, Mississippi, approximately 500 participants joined together in singing a Spanish translation of “We Shall Overcome,” a song closely linked with the African American Civil Rights Movement (Hardin, 2006). Three Nebraska cities—South Sioux City, Lincoln, and Omaha—saw a combined 20,000 participants (Gonzalez & Stickney, 2006). Approximately 3,000 demonstrators gathered in Siler City, North Carolina (population 8,079) bearing signs that read, “We love Siler City” and “I pay taxes.” In Atlanta, Georgia, more than 50,000 protestors took to the streets, significantly surpassing the number of participants in such traditional immigrant gateway cities as San Diego, Los Angeles, and Miami (Skiba & Forester, 2006). As news reports documented rallies from Charleston, South Carolina to Indianapolis, Indiana; from Jackson, Mississippi to Garden City, Kansas, they highlighted the complex physical, cultural, and economic contours of a new map of Latino presence in the United States. Although the policy impact of this mobilization remains to be seen, one thing is perfectly clear: The cartographies of settlement for Latino and Latina immigrants have shifted in recent decades, and as Latinos filled the streets in protest, they mapped these shifts onto the landscapes of cities and towns throughout the United States. Who were these Latino demonstrators? How is it that they have come to reside in municipalities, states, and regions that, as recently as 20 years ago, had negligible Latino populations? What is the impact of their presence on socioeconomic, political, and cultural life in new destinations? In this chapter, we survey the small but growing literature on Latinos in

The Global Portability of Pneumatic Christianity: Comparing African and Latin American Pentecostalisms

This article argues that Pentecostal Christianity is able to spread so quickly across the globe because it provides its adherents with the conceptual tools to deal with desire and materialism in a world of limited means and lack. It thus offers adherents an authentic belonging that is located globally as well as in the afterlife, rather than bound by geographical territory. This is particularly relevant for poor migrants – such as the African migrants in South Africa – who are faced with misfortune and lack of success. The Pentecostal imagination of what it means to be human offers them tools by which to remake their self and on which to build their hopes for a better future. It allows adherents to deal with the tension of a globalised world economy that imposes systems of exclusion and lack in third world areas.

The diaspora of Brazilian religions

The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions explores the global spread of religions originating in Brazil, a country that has emerged as a major pole of religious innovation and production. Through ethnographically-rich case studies throughout the world, ranging from the Americas (Canada, the U.S., Peru, and Argentina) and Europe (the U.K., Portugal, and the Netherlands) to Asia (Japan) and Oceania (Australia), the book examines the conditions, actors, and media that have made possible the worldwide construction, circulation, and consumption of Brazilian religious identities, practices, and lifestyles, including those connected with indigenized forms of Pentecostalism and Catholicism, African-based religions such as Candomble and Umbanda, as well as diverse expressions of New Age Spiritism and Ayahuasca-centered neo-shamanism like Vale do Amanhecer and Santo Daime.

Introduction: Brazil in the New Global Cartography of Religion

In this chapter the author sketches the economic, political, cultural, and religious contexts that have contributed to the recent rise of Brazil as a key center of religious creativity and innovation within an emerging, polycentric global religious cartography. The chapter overviews the conditions that mediate the diaspora of Brazilian religions with an account of economic and political factors, including most prominently immigration, moving on to the cultural dimensions such as spiritual tourism and exoticism. It explores the dynamics of the Brazilian religious field and their interplay with globalization. The chapter provides a brief overview of Brazilian migration to the US, Europe and Japan, where the large communities are located. Keywords:Brazil; Brazilian migration; exoticism; globalization; religious cartography; spiritual tourism

“A igreja é como a casa da minha mãe”: Religião e espaço vivido entre brasileiros no condado de Broward

O texto se centra no papel que a religiao exerce junto a brasileiros migrantes, numa regiao recentemente urbanizada e geograficamente descentralizada, no Condado de Broward, Florida, EUA. Dado o seu rapido desenvolvimento, nao existem, nesta regiao, organizacoes estabelecidas de migrantes e, neste contexto, as igrejas oferecem possibilidades de criar espacos de sociabilidade, identidade coletiva e ajuda mutua. De forma ainda mais importante, a religiao serve para dar sentido ao processo de migracao em um ambiente hostil, vinculando tal processo a experiencia profundamente emotiva do sagrado. Embora tais recursos possam ser permeados por conflitos e divergencias, representam, ao mesmo tempo, elementos cruciais para uma comunidade incipiente. O texto inclui um breve perfil da comunidade brasileira, baseado em trabalho de campo realizado de 2001 a 2004 no sul da Florida; em seguida analisa formas pelas quais os recursos religiosos sao utilizados pelos brasileiros nesta regiao e finalmente conclui com algumas reflexoes a respeito das dinâmicas de assentamento em regioes naoconvencionais de migracao vinda da America Latina.

From the body: an exchange on scholarship and advocacy

Abstract In this article, the authors draw from their own experiences working among religious congregations that minister to unauthorized immigrants in the new destinations in the U.S. to reflect on the relationship between scholarship and advocacy. They argue that because of the scholars embodied condition, his/her location in networks of relations characterized by power differentials, scholarship will always involve a measure of advocacy, invariably containing judgments not only about what counts as legitimate and authoritative methods, arguments, and data for the religious-studies scholarly ‘community,’ but also about the place of the scholar and her/his scholarly community in the larger society. However, as their own experiences show, not all forms of advocacy are equal – they vary in their level of publicness, as well as the intensity and type of the engagement – and these various modalities carry potential payoffs and pitfalls. Thus, rather than trying to draw fixed, sharp, and ultimately untenable boundaries between scholarship and advocacy, the task is to develop a reflexive, pragmatic, and experimental attitude that can allow for these two dimensions of praxis to benefit from each other, animated by a critical approach and an emancipatory interest focused on the intractable problems and defining dilemmas of our age.

On the value of genealogy, materiality, and networks: a response

In response to the challenges posed by Steven Engler, Martha Finch, Mark Gardiner, Laura Harrington, Paul Johnson, and Michael Stausberg, this essay fleshes out key terms in More than Belief (2011), including genealogy, materialism, non-reductionism, and networks, showing their value in researching and theorizing about religion.

Paulo Freire and the crisis of modernity

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire played an influential role in the development of grass-roots religious movements throughout the Third World from the 1960s to 1980s. Partaking of the Enlightenment affirmation of critical thinking as the key emancipatory tool, Freires pedagogical method has empowered hitherto marginalized subjects. Toward the end of the 1980s, however, postmodernist critiques of Enlightenment rationality as domination have raised some troublesome doubts about the viability of modernist emancipatory projects, including Freires method. In this article, I reformulate Freires method to respond to the challenges of postmodernist critiques. I argue that despite some serious shortcomings, the emancipatory impulse behind Freires pedagogy is worth preserving. Further, I see a revised Freirean approach as a salutary counterpoint to postmodernisms excessive localism and elective affinity with neoliberal capitalism.

O Brasil na nova cartografia global da religião

This article analyses the social, economic, cultural and religious changes that have made Brazil a key node in the production of religion and spirituality in an emergent global cartography. This cartography is polycentric and cut across by multidirectional transnational networks which facilitate the flows of people, ideas, images, capital and commodities. In this article, we investigate flows of Brazilian migrants who take religious beliefs, practices, and identities to host countries; missionaries and other religions entrepreneurs; foreign spiritual tourists who go to Brazil seeking healing and spiritual development; and culture industries, mass media, and the Internet that spread globally an imaginary of Brazil as an exotic land, where the sacred is an intrinsic part of its culture and nature.