This thesis addresses the lack of scholarly attention devoted to African American Sunni women by examining how they use collective memory to negotiate embodied agency. Through an analysis of African American Sunni women’s narratives of testifying conversion, and vignettes from diaries and interviews, I show how African American Sunni women utilize racial, religious, and spiritual memory in the form of ritual practices and Islamic texts to multiply construct their bodies, and how this construction allows them to enact multimodal and nomadic forms of agency. A contextual analysis also illustrates how environment and interpretation (tafsir) further mobilizes forms of agency, articulating a need for flexibility in regard to the concept of embodied agency and challenging the dichotomy prevalent in Western and Eurocentric conceptions of liberatory agency.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-03T12:21:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 1-200.pdf: 3556860 bytes, checksum: 387d9dbcfae1704d703d55a6bf03316d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-03-18 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The present thesis is a study of the religious tradition and transmission of the Christian Congregation in Brazil in an area of deep social vulnerability. The study is carried out in the light of the institution and its members. Religious reproduction in the contemporary scene of modernity is difficult due to the diminishing capacity of religious institutions to regular the beliefs of its faithful. It is exactly this capacity of the Christian Congregation in Brazil that is analyzed in a situation of social vulnerability in the front region of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema. The social dimensions of the Christian Congregation in Brazil are studied in the light of a statistical overview of Brazilian pentecostalism. The social reality of the location is carefully analyzed as well as the specific peripheric situation of the area under study. An ethnography of the worship of the Christian Congregation offers the data to analyze the cultic performers, the ritual process and the function of cultic worship that help to articulate religious identity. Finally, in the light of detailed interviews and field observation the thesis presents an ethnography of its members both men and women, in situations of differentiated vulnerability. The thesis studies both the internal and external social network the members create. The thesis takes a close look to see how doctrines and the practice of the Congregation as transmitted in ritual (ritual as a privileged source of institutional reproduction) succeed in forming the subjectivity of its faithful, understood as the complex set of perception, affect, thought, desire and fear.(AU) / Esta tese estuda a tradição e transmissão religiosa da Congregação Cristã no Brasil, numa área de maior vulnerabilidade social, a partir da instituição e dos sujeitos. A reprodução religiosa, na modernidade contemporânea, é dificultada pela capacidade diminuída das instituições religiosas de regular as crenças dos seus fiéis, e esta capacidade é analisada no caso da Congregação Cristã no Brasil, num bairro de alta vulnerabilidade social, na fronteira entre São Bernardo do Campo e Diadema. São estudadas as dimensões sociais da Congregação Cristã no Brasil, a partir de um olhar estatístico do campo pentecostal brasileiro. É analisada a realidade social local e elaborada a situação periférica específica do bairro estudado. Uma etnografia do culto da Congregação Cristã fornece os dados para análise dos atores no culto, do processo ritual, e da função do culto para a articulação da identidade religiosa. Finalmente é elaborada, a partir de entrevistas em profundidade e detida observação de campo, uma etnografia dos sujeitos membros da Congregação Cristã, homens e mulheres, em situações diferenciadas de vulnerabilidade. Analisa-se quais redes sociais, internas na Congregação Cristã no Brasil e externas, estes membros criam e até onde as doutrinas e práticas da Congregação, transmitidas no rito, dispositivo de reprodução institucional por excelência, conseguem formar a subjetividade dos seus fiéis, entendida como complexo conjunto de percepção, afeto, pensamento, desejo e medo.(AU)