PIERRE BOURDIEU AND THE RELIGION: CRITICAL SYNTHESIS OF A CRITICAL SYNTHESIS

Abstract

The objective of the article is to present the contribution of P Bourdieu to the social sciences of the religions, attempting fundamentally for the following subjects: is it possible to speak of" religion" in societies in the ones which the institutional religions they don't exist or in societies in the ones which do weak singularmente meet? Does the notion of religious field continue pertinent in not segmented societies or in societies more and more secularized? The reading of P. Bourdieu's works suggests negative answers to those subjects. The sociological validity of the notion of religious field is limited firstly by the absence of monopolização of the symbolic production in certain agrarian societies and, finally, for lhe growing uncertainty in what concerns notedly to the limits of the field, due, to the appearance of new professions specialized in the " symbolic " work and to the " disjunção " between faith and institutional obedience. The religious field seems to correspond in fact to the western historical religions, notedly the Judaism and the Catholicism analyzed in a dialética between internal relationships and externaI relationships. A definition of the " religion" centered in the" religious "field, that is, in the fights among specialists in its relationships with the global social structure, certainly hinders the study of the religious phenomenons that you/they escape thoroughly to the control of the clergies. It is important to attempt for the " bricolage " of the faiths, the construction of the followerses' lineages during the modernity, the organization in esoterismo amateurs' nets or the non bureaucratic organization of certain pentecostismos as facts that allow relativizar the power of the ecclesiastical institutions