Transcultural Keys: Humor, Creativity and Other Relational Artifacts in the Transposition of a Brazilian Ayahuasca Religion to the Netherlands
OpenAlex – January 01, 2013
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
A textured ethnography reveals that humor and creativity play crucial roles in negotiating cultural differences within urban-industrial societies. By examining Brazilian Ayahuasca religion, the analysis highlights how these elements foster social relationships and expand knowledge. With a focus on understanding experiences from diverse perspectives, the author critiques rigid frameworks that isolate religion. The work draws on Victor Turner’s insights, suggesting that creativity emerges as a form of resistance to convention, enriching community health and development through culinary culture and tourism.
Abstract
This chapter expands the analysis of the social and cosmic dimensions of a process of ‘re-ritualization’ in urbanindustrial societies, inspired by the knowledge of ‘traditional populations. It focuses on primarily on providing a textured ethnography of role of religion and culture in the negotiation of alterity. The chapter epistemological thrust is to deconstruct the need for a circumscribed and unified analytical framework that makes religion an autonomous reality in favor of an open search to understand the others’ experiences in their own terms. The author follows the Victor Turner, perhaps one of the first researchers to situate creativity as a phenomenon which emerges from an explicit or implicit resistance to convention. The author notices that the importance of humor, creativity, and the questioning of religious life as constituting legitimate and useful ways to improve social relationships and also of expanding knowledge. Keywords:Brazilian Ayahuasca religion; creativity; humor; knowledge; Netherland; textured ethnography