The [Brazilian] evangelical visual culture: its beginnings

• Grant number: 15/13737-7
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: September 01, 2017
• End date: August 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Theology - History of Theology
• Principal Investigator: Helmut Renders
• Grantee: Helmut Renders
• Host Institution: Diretoria de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa. Universidade Metodista de São Paulo (UMESP). Instituto Metodista de Ensino Superior (IMS). São Bernardo do Campo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Etienne Alfred Higuet

Abstract

Visual culture is one of the privileged fields for the analysis of structures and historicity of religious practices. The proposed project starts from the hypothesis of the existence of a proper and articulate Brazilian Protestant material and visual culture. Since the end of the nineteenth century, there has been an awareness of the performative force of religious visual culture which has led Brazilian Protestantism to explore its pedagogical and ritualistic dimension through the widespread diffusion of properly religious images in bibles, ecclesiastical magazines, and xylographs with religious content for public and private use in Sunday Schools, services, the homes of its membership and for the propagation of its religious convictions. The research focuses on the phase of the emergence of this Protestant religious visual culture, its origins and characteristics. In response to this, the present research proposes to join the inter-national theoretical efforts around the discussion of the so-called iconic (BOEHM, 1994), pictorial (Mitchell, 1994; BOEHM and MITCHELL, 2009, pp. 103-121) or visual turn (BREDEKAMP, 2011) together with multangular theories that favor a joint investigation into the creation, use, reception and representation of the expressions of visual culture above mentioned (GILLIAN, 2007) as part of the visual religious culture (TIMM, 1990; Morgan, 1998, 2005 , 2010, 2012; PLATE, 2002; TIRAPELI, 2001). Finally, this re-search takes into account that the Brazilian evangelical [Protestant, Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal] visual culture is a well defined field of analysis, which not only can, but also should be studied and explored. (AU)