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Publicação
Going for god : mobility, place and temporality among evangelical guineans in Lisbon
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Resumo(s)
In the last decades the intensification of migratory flows has led to a gradual pluralisation of urban religious landscapes in Europe. One of the most relevant aspects of this process is the spreading of Evangelical and Pentecostal churches founded by African migrants, a phenomenon that contributed to the emergence of new configurations of Christianity in Europe. The town of Lisbon (Portugal), a place where different experiences of spirituality and distinct worldviews meet and interact, is an emblematic case of religious encounter between deep-rooted Catholicism and imported forms of Christianity. This dissertation provides an ethnography of Guinean Evangelical Christianity in Lisbon, focusing on the case of the Missão Evangélica Lusófona (MEL), a church settled in the outskirts of Lisbon and attended mostly by migrants from Guinea-Bissau. Taking the MEL as a case-study of African Churches in the diaspora, I try to describe and analyse the centrality of religion in the lives of Evangelical Guinean migrants in Lisbon. My central argument is that, in this context, religious faith appears as a way to make sense of the experiences of dislocation and re-location of believers. Accordingly, in the following pages I portray MEL as an emblematic example of how Evangelical Christianity sustains migrants in their transnational movements while concurringly enables them to create a sense of place in the localities in which they chose to dwell. Furthermore, by examining the experiences and life stories of MEL’s members, I address a series of issues, such as: the meaning of conversion for individuals and communities; the connection between religious faith and the condition of stranger; the relationship between global/universal and local/particular dimensions of religious identity; the ways in which religious actors appropriate and transform the urban space where they live in; the emergence and transformation of peculiar visions of space and time, including the ways how human groups produce their past, present and future.
Descrição
Tese de doutoramento, Antropologia (Antropologia da Religião e do Simbólico), Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, 2014
Palavras-chave
Teses de doutoramento - 2014