Papers by Eleonora Lundell
Religious transitions and border making in southeast Brazilian spiritual landscape – the encruzilhada (crossroads) perspective
Religion, Dec 12, 2021
ABSTRACT This article discusses religious transitions and border making in Southeast Brazil. The ... more ABSTRACT This article discusses religious transitions and border making in Southeast Brazil. The study is based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2011–2015). The article navigates the Southeast Brazilian cross-religious spiritual landscape, shedding light on the knowledges and experiences of Umbanda and Candomblé leaders, devotees and clients, as well as my own experiences as a researcher crossing through different religious environments. The research results show that besides institutions and identities, the religious lines of association emerge via acknowledgement of spatial/territorial engagements with humans and other-than-humans (spirits, entities, orixás, egums). The study argues that beyond the conventional conceptualization of syncretism and hybridism, the concept of the encruzilhada (crossroads) allows a deeper understanding of the unexpected range of phenomena and ongoing transit, exchange and mutual influence in the epistemologically pluriversal spiritual landscape of Southeast Brazil.
Revista del CESLA, Dec 31, 2020
La guerra pentecostal contra los "demonios" afrobrasileños: políticas, individualidad y experienc... more La guerra pentecostal contra los "demonios" afrobrasileños: políticas, individualidad y experiencia compartida del trabajo espiritual en el sureste de Brasil
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, Jun 1, 2016
This article * concentrates on the material side of religious intimacy in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda ... more This article * concentrates on the material side of religious intimacy in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda through an 'ontographic' perspective as well as looking at materiality as evidence. It is based on an eleven-month fieldwork period among devotees, clients and individual practitioners of Umbanda in Southeast Brazilian metropolises, especially in São Paulo. In people's experiences of spiritual work (trabalho) and spiritual development (desenvolvimento) carried out with Exús-guardians, guides and protectors who have, after their death, returned in order to work for people's wellbeing-ritual objects (such as bodies, clothes, beverages, herbs, cigarettes, candles, songs) are seen as constitutive in knowledge production and life transformation. The central claim in this article is that diverse material and immaterial objects through which Exús interact and materialise, are neither primarily symbolic nor representative, but are re-configurative.
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, Jun 27, 2017
Doctoral dissertation- Dissertationes Universitatis Helsingiensis 2023/5, 2023
Brazil is a place of multiple religious and epistemological encounters. Despite the historical st... more Brazil is a place of multiple religious and epistemological encounters. Despite the historical status of Catholicism as the official religion and the recent considerable Pentecostal growth in Brazil, Afro-Brazilian religions, such as Umbanda and Candomblé also have significant roles in the formation of contemporary religiosities. In Southeast Brazil, individually built religiosity and consumerism of religious services is common since well-being and adversity on the other hand are often understood as questions related to the balance of the material and spiritual dimensions. Religious services are sought especially, when problems occur regarding financial situation, family and romantic relationship, or health. During the past decades, radical neo-Pentecostal actors, such as the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, have performed serious physical, political, and dogmatic attacks against Afro-Brazilian religions, ritual sites, and followers. These attacks are based on the theological idea of Afro-Brazilian orixás (powers of nature/deities) and entidades (people who have returned as entities, such as Exus, among the living after their biological death) as demons. These ancestral beings from an Afro-religious perspective are present in everyday hereness and are known for their abilities to heal, advise, and transform people’s everyday-life conditions in efficient ways. This study contributes to academic discussions concerning religious processes in Latin America, especially in the disciplines of Latin American studies, anthropology of religions, and the study of religion. It invites the reader to think of contemporary Brazilian religiosities at encruzilhadas, the crossroads of Afro-Brazilian, European, and Indigenous onto-epistemologies in Southeast Brazil. The dissertation answers the following research questions: RQ1: What are the central dimensions that constitute the presence of more-than-human actors in Afro-religious and neo-Pentecostal experiences in Southeast Brazil? RQ2. How can religious intolerance toward Afro-Brazilian religions be understood by looking at cross-religious experiences through onto-epistemological lenses? RQ3. How are transitions between different ‘religions’ experienced and what is constitutive in these transitions in Afro-religious perspectives? The analysis focuses on the experiences of clients, devotees, and leaders in Afro-religious and neo-Pentecostal churches and communities in the Southeastern cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The study is based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2008, 2011, and 2015, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and audiovisual documenting. The ethnographic field is the Southeast Brazilian spiritual landscape that emerges through narratives of experiences about things, beings, and places. The research data consist of personal interviews, field notes, photography, and video recordings of conversations, religious rituals, ritual preparations, and ritual sites. Theoretically, this study draws from decolonial ideas about epistemic pluriversality, applying the Afro-Brazilian epistemology of encruzilhadas in order to rethink religious processes in contemporary Brazil. Encruzilhadas shed light on religious processes as communication and transformation. For this purpose, the ontographic method has been used in order to perceive the ontological status of significant things in interlocutors’ knowledge and experiences, and thus their onto-epistemology. The analysis in this work also benefits from post-human ideas about relationality. These ideas have been compared to the research interlocutors’ experiences and ideas of relational agency and dynamism within the constitutions of ritual objects and religious selfhoods. This dissertation consists of three peer-reviewed articles and a summarizing report. The articles examine ritual materiality in Exus’ work in Umbanda (PI), neo-Pentecostal religious intolerance towards Afro-Brazilian religions (PII), and cross-religious engagement in Afro-religious contexts (PIII). The dissertation also includes an additional non-refereed article and an ethnographic documentary. The articles show that the agency and efficacy of beings, such as spirits, Exus, orixás, and demons are essential aspects in Southeast Brazilian religious processes. The central argument of this dissertation is that religiosities in these contexts should be understood as contextual knowledge of ‘crossings,’ indicating spatial, temporal, and material dynamisms of more-than-human entanglements. These entanglements emerge in different forms in religious selfhoods and ritual objects through ontological continuities involving people, things, and beings indicating cross-religious knowledge and pragmatics in diverse religious contexts. Trabalho, spiritual work as cross-religious pragmatics, refers to actions in which the spiritual-material balance is reconfigured and can be understood as a domain of power. This dissertation discusses trabalho as a non-anthropocentric, decolonial possibility for thinking and understanding religious processes at encruzilhadas, crossroads of practiced knowledges, i.e. primarily as pragmatics rather than representations. Understanding religious processes in Southeast Brazil as encruzilhadas and trabalho pragmatics provides possibilities to take steps towards epistemological justice for the Afro-Brazilian intellectual legacy in Brazil. Thus, decolonization opens a door for transformation of social and metaphysical power structures.
Religious transitions and border making in southeast Brazilian spiritual landscape – the encruzilhada (crossroads) perspective
Religion, 2021
ABSTRACT This article discusses religious transitions and border making in Southeast Brazil. The ... more ABSTRACT This article discusses religious transitions and border making in Southeast Brazil. The study is based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2011–2015). The article navigates the Southeast Brazilian cross-religious spiritual landscape, shedding light on the knowledges and experiences of Umbanda and Candomblé leaders, devotees and clients, as well as my own experiences as a researcher crossing through different religious environments. The research results show that besides institutions and identities, the religious lines of association emerge via acknowledgement of spatial/territorial engagements with humans and other-than-humans (spirits, entities, orixás, egums). The study argues that beyond the conventional conceptualization of syncretism and hybridism, the concept of the encruzilhada (crossroads) allows a deeper understanding of the unexpected range of phenomena and ongoing transit, exchange and mutual influence in the epistemologically pluriversal spiritual landscape of Southeast Brazil.
Religiones y religiosidades en América Latina, 2020
This article discusses the religious conflict between Afro-Brazilian and Pentecostal groups shedd... more This article discusses the religious conflict between Afro-Brazilian and Pentecostal groups shedding light on the complex relations between cross-religious experiences and the official acknowledgement of ‘religion’ in Brazil. The study analyses devotees and clients’ experiences in the rituals of Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus and Umbanda addressing fluid selfhoods and the multiple human and other-than-human agencies in the making of individual life trajectories through ritual participation. Thus, regarding religious conflict merely through bounded identities, institutions or dogma, the study shows that behind the fortifying religious conflict between Pentecostal and Afro-Brazilian religious groups relies a politically complex, colonially framed concept of ‘religion’ which leaves out of academic and political consideration a large part of effective ritual knowledge and agency, continuously re-producing the inferior position of ‘Afro-Brazilian religions’ within the Brazilian societ...
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 2017
Landscape' and 'ritual' have been largely discussed in the social and human sciences, although th... more Landscape' and 'ritual' have been largely discussed in the social and human sciences, although their inter-relatedness has gained little scholarly attention. Drawing on earlier studies of ritual and landscape, as well as the authors' own ethnographic works, 'ritual landscape' is suggested here as a useful analytical tool with which to understand how landscapes are produced, and how they, in their turn, produce certain types of being. 'Ritual landscape' recognises different modalities of agency, power-relation, knowledge, emotion, and movement. The article* shows how the subjectivity of other-than-human beings such as ancestors, earth
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 2016
This article* concentrates on the material side of religious intimacy in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda t... more This article* concentrates on the material side of religious intimacy in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda through an ‘ontographic’ perspective as well as looking at materiality as evidence. It is based on an eleven-month fieldwork period among devotees, clients and individual practitioners of Umbanda in Southeast Brazilian metropolises, especially in São Paulo. In people’s experiences of spiritual work (trabalho) and spiritual development (desenvolvimento) carried out with Exús – guardians, guides and protectors who have, after their death, returned in order to work for people’s wellbeing – ritual objects (such as bodies, clothes, beverages, herbs, cigarettes, candles, songs) are seen as constitutive in knowledge production and life transformation. The central claim in this article is that diverse material and immaterial objects through which Exús interact and materialise, are neither primarily symbolic nor representative, but are re-configurative.
Multidisciplinary Latin American Studies: Festschrift in Honor of Martti Pärssinen
This book contains ten articles written by the former and current Ph.D. students of Professor Mar... more This book contains ten articles written by the former and current Ph.D. students of Professor Martti Pärssinen to honor his sixtieth birthday. These texts in English, Finnish, and Spanish highlight the pronouncedly multidisciplinary nature and broad scope of the Latin American Studies program at the University of Helsinki, headed by Professor Pärssinen since 1999.
Preface to the Special Issue
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 2017
This special issue of the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics is composed on the basis of pape... more This special issue of the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics is composed on the basis of papers presented at the Ethnography of Contemporary Ritual Landscapes panel organised at the Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society at the University of Helsinki, October 21–22, 2015.
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics: Special Issue: Contemporary Ritual Landscapes
Revista del CESLA. International Latin American Studies Review, 2021
This article discusses the religious conflict between Afro-Brazilian and Pentecostal groups shedd... more This article discusses the religious conflict between Afro-Brazilian and Pentecostal groups shedding light on the complex relations between cross-religious experiences and the official acknowledgement of ‘religion’ in Brazil. The study analyses devotees and clients’ experiences in the rituals of Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus and Umbanda addressing fluid selfhoods and the multiple human and other-than-human agencies in the making of individual life trajectories through ritual participation. Thus, regarding religious conflict merely through bounded identities, institutions or dogma, the study shows that behind the fortifying religious conflict between Pentecostal and Afro-Brazilian religious groups relies a politically complex, colonially framed concept of ‘religion’ which leaves out of academic and political consideration a large part of effective ritual knowledge and agency, continuously re-producing the inferior position of ‘Afro-Brazilian religions’ within the Brazilian society. The analysis in this article is based on ethnographic field research carried out in Southeast Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during 2008-2015.
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 2016
This article * concentrates on the material side of religious intimacy in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda ... more This article * concentrates on the material side of religious intimacy in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda through an 'ontographic' perspective as well as looking at material-ity as evidence. It is based on an eleven-month fieldwork period among devotees, clients and individual practitioners of Umbanda in Southeast Brazilian metropolises , especially in São Paulo. In people's experiences of spiritual work (trabalho) and spiritual development (desenvolvimento) carried out with Exús – guardians, guides and protectors who have, after their death, returned in order to work for people's wellbeing – ritual objects (such as bodies, clothes, beverages, herbs, cigarettes , candles, songs) are seen as constitutive in knowledge production and life transformation. The central claim in this article is that diverse material and immaterial objects through which Exús interact and materialise, are neither primarily symbolic nor representative, but are re-configurative.
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Papers by Eleonora Lundell