New Age in Latin America : Popular Variations and Ethnic Appropriations

This book is at the crossroads where a New Age sensibility, advancing like an ecumen of worldwide spirituality without national, cultural, or ecclesiastical frontiers, meets Latin America's syncretic religions, practiced by groups of people wiht African or indigenous roots or developed from the tradition of popular Catholicism. The Syncretic character of the two sensibilities makes both the New Age and popular religion behave like two, syncretizing and syncreticizable matrices of meaning. This book opens up a rich vein of debate with new dilemmas and discussions, that will provide a framework for a new field of study in anthropology. What new ways of signifying living and experiencing religion is the New Age generating in Latin America? What are its limits?

Contributors are: Alejandra Aguilar Ros, Santiago Bastos, Lizette Campechano, Sylvie Pédron Colombani, Alejandro Frigerio, Jacques Galinier, Silas Guerriero, Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga,Nahayeilli B. Juárez Huet, José Guilherme C.Magnani, Antoinette Molinié, María Teresa Rodríguez, Deis Siqueira, Carlos Alberto Steil, Engel Tally, Renée de la Torre, and Marcelo Zamora.

Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga, Ph.D. (2002), Coljal, Mexico, is Professor and Researcher at the same institution. Her work is centered on the pluralizing of religion in Mexico, new religious and spiritual movements, and the transnationalization of the Aztec dance. Her last publication (with Renée de la Torre) is entitled Analysis of the Emergence of Missionary Territorial Strategies in a Mexican Urban Context (in: The Changing World Religion Map. Sacred Places Identities, Practices and Politics, Vol 3. (Springer 2015)).
Nahayeilli B. Juárez Huet, Ph.D. (2007), COLMICH, Mexico. She is a Researcher at CIESAS Peninsular. Her work focuses on the transnationalization of Afro-American religions in Mexico. Her latest book is titled Un pedacito de Dios en Casa: circulación transnacional, relocalización y praxis de la santería en la ciudad de México (CIESAS/UV/COLMICH, 2014).
Angela Renée de la Torre Castellanos, Ph.D. (1997), University of Guadalajara/CIESAS Occidente, Mexico, is Professor and Researcher at CIESAS Occidente. Her research has centered on contemporary transformations of religion in Mexico and the transnationalization of the Aztec dance. She is the author of the chapter “Religion and Embodiment: Religion and the (Latin American) Bodies that Practice It” in the book Controversies in Contemporary Religion. Education, Politics Society, and Spirituality (Praeger, 2014).