Santo Daime: A New World Religion

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Santo Daime: A New World Religion deals with a young, exotic and controversial religious movement. Emerging in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1930s, Santo Daime has since spread to many of the world's major cities. Santo Daime is a mixture of indigenous, popular Catholic, Afro-Brazilian, esoteric, Spiritist, and new age beliefs and activities. Ritual practice is centred on the consumption of a psychotropic beverage called 'Daime' which members believe enhances their interaction with the supernatural world. Because Daime is treated as an illegal narcotic in many parts of the world, outside of its Brazilian homeland most Santo Daime rituals are practised clandestinely. This book unites extensive fieldwork experience with an established theoretical background and makes a significant contribution to understanding the contemporary interface of religion and late-modern society. Individualization and religious subjectivism, pluralization and religious hybridism, transformation and detraditionalization, globalization and religious identity, and commoditization and religious consumption are among the many issues engaged by this book. Santo Daime: A New World Religion is an accessible and multi-disciplinary book suitable for undergraduate students and researchers working in Religious Studies, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Latin American Studies.

Reviews

This work is important as there are very few academic or anthropological texts widely available in English on this subject. -- Rod Sazio * De Numine *
Aimed at undergraduate students and researchers working in Religious Studies, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Latin American Studies, this work is important as there are very few academic or anthropological texts widely available in English on this subject. * De Numine *
This book is important reading for anyone interested in religion in the contemporary world. * Religion and Society *
Highly informative and enlightening ... A unique contribution to the discipline and an important example for fieldwork in religion. * Fieldwork in Religion *
Impressive ... A book of exemplary research and keen insight ... [An] exceptional ethnographic case study ... [and a] systematic and nuanced portrait of religious change. * Journal of Religious History *
A sophisticated treatment of an older new religion ... The book is a welcome contribution to the study of religion in the globalized and (post- or late-)modernized world. * Anthropology Review Database *
Andrew Dawson is the acknowledged expert on Santo Daime. This book reveals both the depth of his insight and the significance of Santo Daime for the study of religion in late modernity. -- Grace Davie, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University of Exeter, UK
Dawsons book is a welcome contribution to the study of contemporary spirituality, a field traditionally dominated by research conducted in Western European and North American settings. Tracing Santo Daime on its journey from the Amazon to Brazils individualized and subjectivized urban middle class, he paints its transformation in bright ethnographic colors, delving deeply into the complex relationship between religion and modernity. -- Dick Houtman, Professor of Cultural Sociology at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Andrew Dawson provides us with a sophisticated and well researched insight into the origins, nature, gradual transformation, and larger social significance of this fascinating and now global new religion from Brazil. One of the best case studies of a new religion ever published, this book gives us more than just an understanding of an exotic new way of being religious, it concretely explores the complexities of the relations between late-modern subjectivized selves and a neo-traditional and collective framework of religious practice. -- Lorne L. Dawson, Professor of Sociology at University of Waterloo, Canada
In this absorbing volume, Andrew Dawson takes us on a trip from the Amazonian origins of Santo Daime to international middle-class professional circles, where lawyers and doctors indulge in the psychotropic ritual consumption of ayahuasca. Drawing on both detailed empirical data and a wide range of theoretical perspectives, Dawson illuminates the complex and dynamic interrelationships between collective belonging and the individualisation and subjectivization of contemporary religiosity, explaining how the world-rejecting aestheticism of Santo Daime combines with the this-worldly concerns of an apolitical counterculture. Provocative and instructive, this is a book to be recommended to anyone interested in the ever-increasing varieties of religious experience. -- Eileen Barker, Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Religion at London School of Economics, UK

Author Bio

Andrew Dawson is Senior Lecturer in Religion at Lancaster University, UK.