Paper short abstract:

This essay aims to provide an ethnographic approach for understanding how Soka Gakkai creates innovative strategies of accommodation into a specific religious field, presenting themselves in Brazil primarily as a NGO rather than as a religious group.

Paper long abstract:

Soka Gakkai International ("International Value- Creation Society"; also, SGI) is a lay Buddhist movement that was founded in 1930 by a Japanese educator, Tsuneaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944) and has now over 12 million members in 190 countries. The International Association Brazil Soka Gakkai (port. Associção Brasil Soka Gakkai Internacional- BSGI), the Brazilian umbrella organization of SGI was founded in 1960 by its president Daisaku Ikeda and since then has been expanding in the whole country. Their strategy of insertion and recruitment of new members in the Brazilian society, nevertheless, is given through the construction of their identity as an NGO, and not as a religious group.

This essay aims to provide an ethnographic approach for understanding how Soka Gakkai creates innovative strategies of accommodation into a specific religious field, presenting themselves in Brazil primarily as a NGO rather than as a religious group. This article intends to show the ambiguous strategies of a group that tries to answer to some of the necessities of a country laid in immense social inequalities but, at the same time, uses this process as an indirect practice of proselytism. Although Buddhist groups rarely proselytize, Soka Gakkai has invested in marketing strategies and plans of action to recruit and maintain members.