Abstract
The present article analyzes the meanings attributed by Vedanta students and yoga practitioners from Rio de Janeiro who have made two pilgrimages to India to what they understand as devotion and conversion to a “Neo-Hindu” group. My main concerns are to understand the meanings these journeys represent and in which sense devotion is felt by certain members of the group. I observe that devotion was frequently triggered when coming across Hindu temples and symbols; therefore, despite seeing themselves as “Hindus” in Brazil, India itself has been revealed as a place conducive to the manifestation and renegotiation of the creeds and meanings of “being Hindu” in the Brazilian context. From this, I critically reflect upon the individualism inherent in these actors’ understandings of spirituality, as opposed to religion, showing how my interlocutors adhere to authority and tradition and how they adapt to social norms in the process of building a worldview that is socially organized and systematized.
Keywords:
Neo-Hinduism; devotion; pilgrimage; individualism; spirituality