Religion and urban transformations in Recife, Brazil

Abstract

The urban landscape is the stage of many significant religioustransformations in recent decades. Urbanization and religious diversification wenthand in hand, and the researchers on religion and religious movements accreditedthe migration to the cities of millions of poor peasants in Latin America as animportant contribution to the growth of new religious groups and identities in theurban environment, the increasing emancipation of old religions, and adiversification of the religious field as a whole. Like other Brazilian cities, Recifehas witnessed many processes of religious meaning making and religiously inspiredidentity formation. Where Roman Catholicism once predominated, there is now arich variety of religions, ranging from Anglicanism through Pentecostalism toMormonism, while the previously hidden urban indigenous and Afro-Braziliancults – such as Catimbó and Xangó – have now emerged into the open. Suchreligious transformations are worth including in analyses of contemporary urbanlife. In the urban context of increasing cultural pluralization, religion plays multiple roles. These roles and the development of religion in this city, are explored byrecounting three different episodes of the connection between the urban landscape,urban lives, and the religious meaning making and practices of different urbanpopulations, with a focus on the visual aspects of the religious presence in theurban landscape, and processes of identity construction.