Recreating the “Gods”: religious practices, encounters and creativity in Libolo, Kwanza Sul (Angola)
Ana Stela de Almeida Cunha
Associate Professor at Universidade Federal do Maranhão, Brazil
CEI – International Studies Center / Lisbon University
Some authors had shown (Augé, 2009, Appadurai, 2007, Gupta and Ferguson, 2006) that the idea of “territory” as an “anthropological “place” was in the last decades, subject to a work of deconstruction. However, since integrated into formulations that situate it with other degrees of belongings, the “place/territory” still seems to be relevant methodologically, ethnographically and conceptually.
In this paper I will try to address to the religious encounters in an specific “territory” (the ambundu area in Kwanza Sul, Angola) between the new religious trends that came from Brazil, as the Pentecolstal churchs, the “traditional” ones and the Catholicism.
Xenophobia, tolerance and multiculturalism will provide some analytical keys for my research, which will also try to probe into the eventual tendencies of syncretization (Leopold & Jensen, Stewart) and mixing of these transnational religious with the prevailing patterns of Portuguese Catholicism, especially popular Catholicism.
I will try to address too to the sociological identification of the audiences of these transnational religions and their role in the redefinition of personal and collective identities within the religion realm. Special emphasis will be put on the analysis of the processes of construction of imagined pasts and communities involved in the circulation of the portable practices and transposable messages (Csordas) associated with these transnational religions. Finally, I will focus on the processes of cultural and cosmological creativity and improvisation (Hallam & Ingold) as well as on the dynamics between orthodoxy and recreation associated with the appropriation of these circulating religious practices and beliefs.
