Pastor versus Shaman: the blow of the spirit in indigenous contexts

Abstract

Based on anthropological and sociological theories, conceptual categories and dense ethnographic work, and from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, the objective of the article is to discuss the process of religious change that is taking place in the Sororó Indigenous Land (Suruí-Aikewara), Pará, Brazil. With the introduction of Pentecostal Protestantism, and using their previous animist cosmology, most villages, in the process of evangelical conversion, incorporate, re-signify and create new expressions of the sacred. From a real and symbolic dispute between the Pastor and the Pajé, there emerged the emic category of ‘índio-crente’ (indigenous believer) and an ideal type, in the Weberian sense, which we are calling 'indigenous Pentecostalism'. With a comparative and complementary perspective, the ethnography made with a Kaingang pajé cunhã-karaí, in Santa Catarina, is also discussed. In these two indigenous contexts, there is no rupture with the original cosmologies, but rather a logic of correspondence, cohabitation of opposites, strategies of accumulation of different logics of thought, of symbolic categories and religious practices. Even constituting themselves as distinct paradigms, the two models – indigenous-shamanism and Pentecostal-Christianity – are intertwined in a web of magical-religious relationships, materialized in an evident religious hybridity, in a new syncretic religiosity and, in the Lévi-Strauss perspective, healing efficacy, real and/or symbolic.