Publication Date

Spring 5-2022

Abstract

This dissertation examines middle-class religiosity in Brazil through an analysis of the birth of a new religious organization, the Brazilian Orthodox Church. I investigate how the performance of “authentic tradition” (tradição verdadeira) orients and authenticates new middle-class subjectivities. In considering the unprecedented recent boom of middle classes worldwide, I explore how and why members of the growing Brazilian middle class, whose livelihoods are increasingly oriented around international finance capital and foreign corporate marketing, locate sources of the authentic beyond given, national boundaries. Through participant observation and interviews with middle-class congregants, I analyze how aligning with the “authentic tradition” of Eastern Christian Orthodoxy is personally experienced through material culture and ritual participation. Moreover, I argue that the visible construction of authenticity, through purposeful re-mediation of Orthodoxy in public festivals and in social media channels, is integral to the feeling and performance of “middle-classness.” This dissertation research contributes to studies of religion and modernity, to an anthropology of Christianity, and to theories of authenticity and the experience of class in neoliberal Brazil.

Keywords

Religion, Middle Class, Urban Brazil, Authenticity, Orthodox Christianity, Anthropology of Christianity

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Ethnology

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Anthropology

First Committee Member (Chair)

Suzanne Oakdale

Second Committee Member

Les W. Field

Third Committee Member

David Dinwoodie

Fourth Committee Member

Carly Machado

Fifth Committee Member

Rodrigo Toniol

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