Pentecostal cultures in urban peripheries: a socio-anthropological analysis of Pentecostalism in arts, grammars, crime and morality

Cultura pentecostal em periferias: uma análise socioantropológica do pentecostalismo a partir de artes, gramáticas, crime e moral

Abstract

In past decades, Catholicism in Brazil has emerged as a privileged theme in the Social Sciences literature, coming to be recognised as a key element in the formation of a "national culture". For the less affluent residents of the city, Catholicism constituted what Sanchis (1997) called “traditional urban popular culture”. Despite the abstraction contained in the notion of a "popular culture", Sanchis’ perspective has had wide academic repercussion. With the growing presence of Pentecostal Evangelicals in the public sphere, and the percentage of people who claimed to be “Evangelical” in the IBGE censuses since 1990, part of the social science literature began to reflect on the possible establishment of a "Pentecostal culture" in Brazil. In this article, I analyse the formation of a Pentecostal culture in urban peripheries. To this end, I consider that the increase in the number of Pentecostal churches and their devotees in these localities provoked changes in different spheres of social life. This article is based on empirical field research carried out intermittently between the years of 1996 and 2015 in the Acari shantytown (Rio de Janeiro).

Keywords: Pentecostal Culture; Peripheries; Favelas; Drug dealer; Evangelical Graffiti