Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The aim of this article is to analyse the emotional experiences associated with the supervision of welfare among the participants of the Aztec dance tradition in Tijuana, Mexico. The article is based on addressing the way in which the adherence to the tradition of dance is part of a process of de-westernisation of spirituality in modern times. It then proceeds to discuss the way in which the spiritual trajectories of the participants place this tradition in a dialogue with other cultural traditions, and in such a way that some of the rituals appropriated by the collective are reinterpreted from the matrix of meaning of the new era, as proposed by De la Torre, as part of a personal/spiritual path of development. Finally, these experiences are addressed in terms of the processes of embodiment - in accordance with Csordas -, as it is argued that it is on the basis of these processes that it is possible to express different cultural/spiritual traditions that are experienced as complementary in the supervision of experiences of emotional and spiritual welfare in ritual contexts.

This article analyzes the definitions and practices oriented to sexual and reproductive healthcare of women and the healing of situations experienced around bodily processes such as menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and abortion. All these definitions and practices are proposed in women's circles and networks for the dissemination of feminine spirituality. It is based on qualitative research carried out in the City of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, between 2014 and 2021. Various techniques for data collection, such as participant observation in women's circles and interviews to their facilitators and participants are applied in this research. In addition, we analyzed the contents shared by the facilitators in their social networks, and books that are part of their training. Findings are discussed and understood under the light of an arena of popularization of definitions and practices of feminine spirituality, social and political recognitions of feminisms, and public policies on sexual and reproductive health in contemporary Argentina.

We discuss the relevance of a brief prescription of the Ethics of the Fathers, a short Talmud treatise, which asks what should be the correct path that the person must take. This path is – depending on the translation of the original text in Hebrew-, related to the person’s self-image and the image projected towards others. From the perspective of a hermeneutic of a “spiritual aesthetics,” we analyze the implications of a utilitarian hedonism to support an ethic of communication in today's digital media ecosystem dominated by the projection of people’s personal image.

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the consequences for the anthropology of religion in terms of an approach that privileges practice. In the first section an examination is made of the effects of the proposed framework on how we study the pathways by which people move between religions and change their religious allegiance. In the second section, the question of how to approach religion as a practice from the standpoint of an ecology of practices outlined by the philosopher Isabelle Stengers is addressed. This reflection is developed through the description of cases drawn from research among Afro-Brazilian religions.Keywords: Religion, movement, ecology of practices.

This article focuses on the South-South transnational connection of Brazilian Pentecostalism in Angola, focusing on representations and perspectives aimed at modernisation. It is argued, therefore, that the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKD) has been inserted in Angola as a modernising agent that has been responsible for cultural reforms, the objective of which are to readapt individuals in the new liberal political structure. Their proselytizing aspect ends up dismantling the stable identities of the past, focusing on the emergence of a more individualistic conception of the subject, in order to meet the economic dynamics of contemporary capitalism. In this sense, the authors make use of the idea of the “resonance machine” by Willian Connolly (2005), in which the public face of the UCKD in Angola is being constituted in its interface with state policies, social problems, local cultural arrangements, and national legal norms. The authors are especially interested in the interactions between the discursive practices of the UCKD and liberalising state policies, both in the Church's public discourse and in the construction of subjects and subjectivities related to neoliberalism, in what Foucault (2008) referred to as “self-entrepreneurship.” The analyses thus benefits from fieldwork carried out in the city of Luanda, the capital of Angola, between 2016 and 2018, in which the authors seek to analyse the discourses that support the structure of the UCKD’s narrative.

La finalidad de este artículo es esclarecer la diversidad evangélica-pentecostal en el Chile actual. Mi enfoque en especial está puesto en la emergencia de un grupo de “consumidores religiosos” que se pueden categorizar como “evangélicos a su manera” o “pentecostales a su manera”. Ellos, en su mayoría, son personas que han crecido en iglesias pentecostales y tienen un mayor nivel de educación que sus padres. En mi análisis me baso en el concepto de iglesias estrictas de Iannaccone (1994), que alude a aquellas iglesias que imponen restricciones a sus miembros, generando así una relación tensional con la sociedad que les rodea. A lo largo de su historia, las iglesias pentecostales chilenas se han caracterizado por ser estrictas, pero en el Chile actual existe una demanda creciente por un pentecostalismo menos estricto. Propongo a lo largo de este artículo que para entender la competencia religiosa en el Chile actual no es suficiente enfocarse en cómo los pentecostales compiten con la Iglesia católica. También es necesario considerar cómo las iglesias pentecostales compiten entre ellas. En esta competencia religiosa algunas iglesias logran “robarles ovejas” a otras porque se adaptan a las demandas religiosas del nuevo grupo de pentecostales que prefieren iglesias que les permitan ser pentecostales a su manera.

The work addresses youth participation in the Scout of Argentina Civil Association (SAAC) through a sociological analysis of scouts education and trajectories from a theoretical perspective of careers (Becker, 2012). Starting from a doctoral research carried out between 2016 and 2018, a qualitative methodological design is used that combines in-depth interviews, participant observation in scout groups in the Metropolitan Area of ​​Buenos Aires and analysis of secondary sources. In SAAC, the subjects build their identity as citizens and leaders among their childhood and youth, consolidating important trajectories as “beneficiaries”, “volunteers” and “militants” through various commitments in educational, solidarity and management activities. The responsibilities assumed by the youth, as well as their positions on issues of institutional interest, constitute values ​​inherent to the horizontal and democratic formation of the movement, although this generates tensions among its members. At the highest levels of the association, the militant scouts display party-political trajectories and include issues on the national political agenda to transform the movement. This process allows making visible the emergence of scout conceptions and assessments of politics in a broader context of consolidation of youth participation in political-partisan spaces in Argentina during the last decades of the 21st century.

The article focuses on the ways in which the members of a neo-traditionalist initiative called Iglesia Nativa Americana del Fuego Sagrado de Itzachilatlan (Native American Church of the Sacred Fire of Itzachilatlan, hereinafter FSI) develop a life project they define as a “path to spirituality”. Based on the anthropological field work undertaken at the ceremonial center of the FSI in Chile, we interpreted the practices and narratives that “spiritual seekers”, men and women of the congregation, carry out to achieve personal fulfillment. The analysis centers on the “quest for vision”, a ritual instance we approached from the perspective of rites of passage (Van Gennep, 2013) and ritual symbolism (Turner, 2013). The results suggest that this process is marked by two concurrent mechanisms that, inspired on Van Gennep, we called disruption and connection. Both mechanisms intervene more or less radically in everyday order, leading people to experience and unfurl a transformation in themselves and the world they inhabit.

This article offers a discussion regarding the symbolic mediation of sacred power, investigating two intertwined dimensions: the production of charisma and aesthetic configurations. From an anthropological narrative, two highly heterogeneous Christian scenarios of contemporary Argentine religious diversity are comparatively problematised: the cult of the relics of the Catholic saint Father Brochero in the province of Córdoba and the ceremonial dances in the indigenous evangelical churches of the Gran Chaco. Three focal points of comparison define the structure of the article: the numinous power granted by relics and dances; the communal ties that articulate both religious phenomena in their particular socio-cultural and historical contexts; and the aesthetic configurations of the reliquary of the saint and the clothing used in indigenous evangelical dances. By approaching the symbolic issue of sacred power in the indicated direction, the work theoretically highlights the strong imbrication of the two dimensions discussed, proposing in the final discussion the notion of "charismatic aesthetics". Finally and with respect to this notion, a discussion is made of the dialectic between "floating charisma"/"waning charisma" and between "incarnation"/"encasing" of the sacred.

The aim of this article is to analyse, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the discourses on missionary journeys made from a political perspective "between" individual-divinity and individual and the "other". The case of the Vástago Ministerios church presents the distinctive feature of being oriented towards missionary activities, which were interrupted during 2020, to be then resumed during 2021. A selection of videos transmitted by the church's digital social network were examined, which included conferences and testimonies during short-term missionary journeys made between July and September 2021. Based on an analysis of critical discourse, an examination was made of the existence of shared religious experiences and the meanings of evangelical missions among congregations. The main results have allowed us to identify a political reflection based on the concepts of vulnerability and charity that lead to a redefinition of evangelical missionary activities as vehicles for a personal religious experience.