“We need to be united in public”: political conflicts, demands and strategies among African Brazilian religion leaders in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Rio de Janeiro has been the stage to conflicts and the political mobilization of African-Brazilian religious leaders demanding public policies to protect their right to express their religions in the public space. The paper intends to problematize, based on different ethnographic experiences, how the development of this rights-claiming discourse - involving groups whose political socialization process is different from that of supposedly more “engaged” groups of the black movement, but whose actions also produce results in terms of including religion politically - takes place. Therefore, this paper is an evaluation of the multiple ways of doing and thinking politics via a technology of government that truly permeates social life and professional practices, that is meetings (and similar strategies) associated to public events. By understanding them as mechanisms of government, it was possible to analyze how the discourse of official representatives (policemen, politicians, teachers, civil servants, etc.) is put forth and how it is understood by religious leaders of African-Brazilian religions in two different ethnographic contexts, which may be considered similar and equivalent because they stimulate their own practices and grammars.

Keywords
conflicts; political mobilization; public space; African-Brazilian religions