Paper short abstract:

Focussing on the ethnographic example of the Brazilian religion of Vale do Amanhecer, this paper explores religious hybridism as the product of an ongoing negotiation between the global and the local.

Paper long abstract:

The Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) is a rapidly expanding Brazilian religion representing one of the clearest manifestation of religious hybridism. In its complex belief system elements of Christianity, Brazilian indigenous beliefs, and European Spiritism, appear merged together with Afro-Brazilian traditions, Western esotericism, classical mythologies, and new forms of millenarian spirituality. In the Temples of the Amanhecer such complexity is produced through and performed in a large number of rituals, whereby mediums offer spiritual healing to patients.

Religious hybridism is here analysed as the product of an ongoing negotiation between the global and the local. In contexts in which cross-cultural contacts are intensifying, in the border zones in and between cultures, religious traditions find themselves interacting with one another and undergoing a process of transformation, often resulting in the production of new hybrid religious forms. The performance of religious rituals is at the core of a process of re-semantisation.

This analysis highlights how the process of globalisation produces transformation not only in religious systems, but also in contemporary religious experience within a context of religious pluralism.