Full Description
This book represents a unique contribution to understanding the interactions between law and religion in contemporary Brazil. It analyzes how the regulation of religions according to the classical notion of secularism has become a source of tensions since the 1990s. Against this background, the respective chapters demonstrate, on the basis of various case studies, how the constitutional principle of pluralism, introduced by the 1988 federal constitution after a military dictatorship, has been addressed by new political actors, such as religious leaders, parliamentarians, influencers, state representatives, and activists. In particular, the chapters demonstrate how the mobilization of legal language, notably the language of human rights, has become fundamental to developing and consolidating new political agendas concerning secularism, tolerance, freedom of expression, gender and sexuality, family, and cultural heritage. In the authors' approach, human rights assume a central role in social disputes as a language in which actors constitute themselves as rights subjects, form activist networks, and pursue their goals by expressing themselves in public. Given its focus and scope, the book will be of interest to all scholars seeking to understand the relationships between diversity and the regulation of religious practices in plural societies, where the classical notion of secularism continues to show its limitations.
Contents
Introduction: Religious Pluralism and Law in Contemporary Brazil.- Part I Pluralism: minority rights, religious freedom and secularism.- Religion and Laicity in Dispute: Two Categories Under Construction in Brazil's legal Debate on Religious Education in Public Schools.- Evangelical jurists and human rights in Brazil: a case study of the National Association of Evangelical Jurists (ANAJURE).- Formalizing religious intolerance in police records: a picture of a (de)construction problem.- Evangelicals Against the Criminalization of Homophobia: The "Christian Majority" and the Dispute Over Public Morality.- "It is not solved just by writing it down on paper": patrimonialization policies and the religious use of ayahuasca as a Brazilian intangible cultural heritage.- Part II Human Rights as Language.- Controversies in Brazil's Supreme Court over when human life begins.- Quilombola communities and the right to land ownership: notes on a legal controversy in the Supreme Federal Court.- Humanrights and their policy-visibility in producing a public Islam in Brazil.- Human rights and works of the imagination: an ethnography of the first ordained transgender reverend in Latin America.
