Ethnographic studies on socialization for sexuality of youth and the faith: \come over, you\'re gonna love it\.

Author(s)

Elias Evangelista Gomes

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Educação (FE/SBD)
• Defense date: 2010-03-26

Examining board members

Maria da Graca Jacintho Setton; Juarez Tarcisio Dayrell; Miriam Pilar Grossi

• Advisor: Maria da Graca Jacintho Setton

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of a socioanthropological study whose goal was to identify and to analyze contemporary socialization practices of youth among evangelists. The purpose was to understand the context and the forms through which social experiences of young people are constructed, as well as their forms of acceptance, resistance, upholding, innovation and dissension. The research, supported by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo FAPESP, was carried out at Sara Nossa Terra (Heal our Earth) Evangelical Community - located on Augusta Street in the city of São Paulo - SP, a faith inserted in the high Brazilian neo-Pentecostalism trend. Based on a two-year ethnographical field work carried out with the church and its youth, it was possible to analyze the existing strategies and tensions around socialization for sexuality and faith. The study describes and analyzes: a) affections, familiarities and unfamiliarities in the ethnographic meeting between the young researcher and the researched youth; b) leisure practices and church liturgy (church services and parties), based on the concepts of party, cosmopolitism and hybridization; c) the place of young people in the social interaction and in the discourse of the church, under an organizational model called Vision G12; d) the social construction of romantic-sexual preference, a native category theoretically questioned, as well as the exercise of sex, based on the consumption of pornography by the youth; e) the symbolic exchanges and the circuit of gifts around the socialization for sexuality. The inspiration for understanding socialization emerge from the concepts of configuration by Norbert Elias, habitus by Pierre Bourdieu, experience and institutional program by François Dubet, hybrid dispositions of habitus and socialization as a total social phenomenon by Maria da Graça Jacintho Setton. A wide range of classic and contemporary socioanthropological theoretical references about ethnography, youth, evangelists and sexuality were used in this study. Some seismic events were observed in the youth socialization process in the evangelical church, result of both acquiescence and disagreement about romantic-sexual preferences for same sex and opposite sex regarding the sexuality schedule proposed by the church. Conformities and offenses are, therefore, results of the configuration and the anthropological confluence between different socialization instances and subjects, which results in a kaleidoscope of subjects and cultural practices within the church, as well as in the reconfiguration of the mechanisms of docile control. (AU)