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- Title
O problema da formação do “cinturão pentecostal” em uma metrópole da América do Sul.
- Authors
Mafra, Clara
- Abstract
Most Latin American metropolises entered into the 21st century with a peculiar urban configuration, the so-called “Pentecostal belt”: around an old urban nucleus, with a solid infrastructure and a majority of Catholic inhabitants, a peripheral belt was formed, characterized by recent colonization, precarious infrastructure, and the high presence of Pentecostal groups. What would have established the link between the change in urban landscape and Pentecostal conversion? Based on an ethnographic study performed in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I argue that the new metropolis, by driving rich and poor territorially apart, led to the collapse of the traditional model of relationship between unequals. In the traditional hierarchical relational model, the poor solve most of their problems by asking “favors” to people they “know” and who have an “improved situation”, in a system of giving and returning favors that smooths inter-class relationships in an unequal society with a contradictory integration. With the territorial distance between rich and poor, the opportunities of giving and receiving “favors” became rare, and the Catholicism, which is on the basis of the system, entered in collapse. Thus, Pentecostalism began to be considered as a plausible cultural alternative for poor populations in urban peripheries when the known cultural alternatives, most of them provided by Catholicism, became a synonym of failure.
- Subjects
BRAZIL; LATIN America; PENTECOSTAL churches; SOCIAL stratification; SOCIAL conditions in Brazil, 1985-; HUMILIATION -- Social aspects; CITIES &; towns; SOCIAL change
- Publication
Intersecoes: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares, 2011, Vol 13, Issue 1, p136
- ISSN
1517-6088
- Publication type
Article