Outside the nation, outside the diaspora: Accomodating race and religion in Argentina.

ALEJANDRO FRIGERIO

Sociology of Religion

Association for the Sociology of Religion/Oxford Journals

Año: 2002 p. 291 - 315

1069-4404

Afro-(Latin)-American religions have spread beyond the.ir original boundaries of race, class, and, increasingly, nation, to attract an economically, ethnically and nationally diverse constituency. In the process, issues of race and nationality, which have always figured prominently in these religions' discourses -- as well as of those who wrote about them -- have now acquired even more relevance. The lecture analyzes the efforts of white, mostly low middle class followers of Afro- Brazilian religions in Buenos Aires to accommodate issues of race and nation in order to overcome the increasing problematization of their practices, and examines the strategies that practitioners have employed to try to improve the image of their religion and how these have changed according to public reaction and the support they have garnered. The analysis focuses, especially, on their attempts to stress the cultural aspects of their religious practice and on their efforts to insert their religion within the country's history and culture by stressing the nation's Black heritage.