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What is the place of young people in society today? This book presents a searching and comprehensive picture of youth, demonstrating both its diversity and singularity, and helping to dispel many of the myths, discriminations, stigmas and prejudices attached to this segment of society. Drawing on a vast empirical research exercise including over 8000 interviews and 40 focus groups in eight metropolitan areas of Brazil, this book explores the most important aspects of young people's social participation and the resulting challenges for public policy. With clear resonance beyond Brazil, this research is designed to inform youth policy strategies in the developing and developed world.
Brazil is a rapidly emerging country. Brazilian theology, namely the Theology of Liberation, has become well known in the 1970s and 1980s. The politically active Base Ecclesial Communities and the progressive posture of the Roman Catholic Church contrasted with a steadily growing number of evangelicals, mostly aligned with the military regime but attractive precisely to the poor. After democratic transition in the mid-1980s, the context changed considerably. Democracy, growing religious pluralism and mobility, a vibrant civil society, the political ascension of the Worker's Party and growing wealth, albeit within a continuously wide social gap, are some of the elements that show the need of ...
Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the “other” has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the con...
"... one of those rare edited volumes that advances social thought as it provides substantive religious and media ethnography that is good to think with." -- Dale Eickelman, Dartmouth College Increasingly, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and indigenous movements all over the world make use of a great variety of modern mass media, both print and electronic. Through religious booklets, radio broadcasts, cassette tapes, television talk-shows, soap operas, and documentary film these movements address multiple publics and offer alternative forms of belonging, often in competition with the postcolonial nation-state. How have new practices of religious mediation transformed the public sphere? How has the adoption of new media impinged on religious experiences and notions of religious authority? Has neo-liberalism engendered a blurring of the boundaries between religion and entertainment? The vivid essays in this interdisciplinary volume combine rich empirical detail with theoretical reflection, offering new perspectives on a variety of media, genres, and religions.
Tells the remarkable story of the transformation of the Latin American church on every level, from professional theologians to the individual in the remotest Latin American village.
As the twenty-first century begins, tens of millions of people participate in devotions to the spirits called Òrìsà. This book explores the emergence of Òrìsà devotion as a world religion, one of the most remarkable and compelling developments in the history of the human religious quest. Originating among the Yorùbá people of West Africa, the varied traditions that comprise Òrìsà devotion are today found in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Australia. The African spirit proved remarkably resilient in the face of the transatlantic slave trade, inspiring the perseverance of African religion wherever its adherents settled in the New World. Among the most significant manifestati...
This 1997 study explores one of the most dramatic current interactions between religion and politics: the development of progressive Catholicism in Latin America. In particular, it examines economic, social and religious obstacles to progressive theology in Brazil. This 'popular' church built a utopian vision of social emancipation, drawing on Catholic social thought, humanistic Marxism and existentialism. It was a major democratizing force as Brazil emerged from dictatorship in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, however, the popular appeal of progressive Catholicism came under threat. Focusing on a Catholic community near Rio de Janeiro, Manuel A. Vásquez's incisive study shows how economic and political changes have affected religious practices, and argues that the plight of progressive Catholicism in Brazil forms part of a wider crisis of modernity and of humanist discourses.
For a generation, the Catholic Church in Brazil has enjoyed international renown as one of the most progressive social forces in Latin America. The Church's creation of Christian Base Communities (CEBs), groups of Catholics who learn to read the Bible as a call for social justice, has been widely hailed. Still, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that the CEBs are lagging far behind the explosive growth of Brazil's two other major national religious movements—Pentacostalism and Afro-Brazilian Umbanda. On the basis of his extensive fieldwork in Rio di Janeiro, including detailed life histories of women, blacks, youths, and the marginal poor, John Burdick offers the first in-depth explanation of why the radical Catholic Church is losing, and Pentecostalism and Umbanda winning, the battle for souls in urban Brazil.
The diverse case studies in this volume explore facets of the Protestant movement in Central and South America, such as the role of women, the connection with Catholic mysticism, the politics of supposedly conservative evangelical misssionaries, and the implications for existing patterns of authority.