Cosmologías practicadas: un acercamiento etnográfico a la antroposofía

PABLO WRIGHT; MARIELA CEVA Y CLAUDIA TOURIS

Periferias Sagradas en la modernidad argentina

Biblos

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2018; p. 57 - 76

From an anthropological perspective religious phenomena, be them well settled institutions as well as fragmented, scattered, proteous groups are regarded as social expressions of ways of being related to ideas, dogmas, feelings and embodiment immersed in dimensions of history, class, gender, nationality, ethnic and/or sociopolitical boundaries. Argentine modernity, as an outcome of a wider historical process of European expansion, colonization,, and nation-building is traversed by the religious hegemony of Christianity in its Roman Catholic persuasion. Catholicism became the hegemonic actor in the social-religious field, within which different forms of Protestantism, Judaism, and Eastern religions were considered almost ?foreign? actors in the national scenario. In this book we analyze religious institutions as well as groups and communities related to religious phenomena little addressed in academic studies in Argentina, that share peripheral loci in the religious field. We propose to call them sacred peripheries in the sense that they propose non-mainstream cosmologies, ontologies, rituals, organization and identities. This book analyzes some of these sacred peripheries stressing a socio-anthropological and historical perspective, including Spiritism, esoteric schools such as AMORC Rosicurcianism and Anthroposophy, the Santo Daime church, Zen Buddhism, and UFO religions. They are regarded as critical projects of Latin American modernity condensed in their sociological, ideological and ontological imaginaries and practices.