Global Trajectories of Brazilian Religion by Martijn Oosterbaan;Linda van de Kamp;Joana Bahia;
Author:Martijn Oosterbaan;Linda van de Kamp;Joana Bahia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Part Three
Heritage, Embodiment, and Spirituality
9
Between Brazil and Spain
Structure and Butinage in the Trajectories of Santo Daime and União do Vegetal
Jessica Greganich
Introduction
União do Vegetal (UDV) and Santo Daime (SD) are Brazilian ayahuasca religions. Both religions base their services on the religious use of ayahuasca,1 though they have different mythical narratives and rituals. In this chapter I intend to understand the transnationalization process of these religions both to and from Spain. On the one hand, transnationalization denotes the expansion and integration of these two Brazilian religions in Spain; namely, the process of relocating the rituals and doctrines of SD and UDV from the Brazilian context to a Spanish one. On the other hand, the spread of SD and UDV in Spain is not only the result of circulating Brazilian migrants taking their ayahuasca religions with them, but is also a resulting effect of the travels of spiritual seekers to and from Brazil. Instead of examining the “global” expansion of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions as a “cultural boundary negotiation in multicultural contexts” like Groisman (2013: 363) has done, I argue that we should examine the multidirectional flow of ayahuasca Brazilian religions between Brazil and Spain from the perspective of assemblages and butinage.
I define butinage as an intrinsic experience in religious practices where something escapes from a preceding tradition, system or structure, based on desire, and assemblages in a skein of interwoven lines that produces new connections. According to Gilles Deleuze (in Tonkonoff 2017: 100), the relations of force which make up the social field are indeed relations between lines or flows of belief and desire, and every dispositive/assemblage is “a tangle, a multilinear ensemble.” The concept of butinage, in relation to transnational religion, offers us a broader way to comprehend global religious spread and its transformation since it shifts the focus from “re-ritualization” (Groisman 2013) to flows. This leads us to view transnational religion as a way of organizing experience, of building or “avoiding” assemblages, of articulating values and formulating enunciations of identity, ideology, and/or politics. The ways in which people organize their experience has consequences for religions. When SD and UDV are transnationalized, power constructions are displayed and formed: the power that the state exercises over these religions, i.e., biopower (Foucault 1979), and, the internal power of religious groups that arises otherwise. These power constructions are a component of assemblages, which historically, are always notable. According to Deleuze, desire, via the inventions, escapes, and sublimations it motivates, is opening up forms of subjectivity and territorializations of power. Analyses of the trajectories of people and their religious practices, ideas, objects, and media, allow us to capture the desires that stand at the heart of the construction of assemblages. “The trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it” (Deleuze, 1997: 61).
Butinage emphasizes the primacy of desire over power. In a continuous process, the structure constructs the agency of the religious practitioners, and these agents realize and transform this structure.
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