Esta foi a derradeira jornada. A última de muitas que começaram em novembro de 1999 com o trecho do Caminho Novo da Estrada Real do Rio à Juiz de Fora. Depois, no ano seguinte, prosseguimos de Juiz de Fora a Ouro Preto, depois de Ouro Preto a Ipoema (metade da distância do Caminho dos Diamantes) e finalmente de Ipoema a Diamantina. Lá, com outro grupo de caminhantes liderados pelo Bueno do Prado começamos a volta pelo Caminho Velho que terminou neste trecho de São Lourenço à Paraty.

This book points out how pilgrimage studies rely on interdisciplinary academic interests, being always more determined by anthropological, social, cultural and economic factors. The volume gathers interdisciplinary contributions revealing different approaches and academic interests when researching pilgrimage. Finally, the proposal introduces a comparative international breath to reflect upon such complex phenomenon that since Antiquity still impregnates the history of human being across the world. As pilgrimage studies are closely related to mobility issues, how the contemporary mobile world is altering and re-signifying pilgrimage dynamics and meanings will also be discussed in detail. The term “pilgrimage” evokes key concepts deriving from different fields, all of them collected in the final glossary. The primary audience of this work are academics and researchers from different fields involved in pilgrimage studies. The work may also be useful in teaching (advanced) university courses.

A timely and original cultural history of Rio de Janeiro.

Brazilian Spiritism (espiritismo, kardecismo) is an important middle-class religious movement whose followers believe in communication with the dead via spirit mediums and in healing illnesses by means of spiritual therapies. Unlike Anglo-Saxon Spiritualists, Brazilian Spiritists count among their number a well-developed and institutionalized intellectual elite that has reinterpreted northern hemisphere parapsychology and developed its own alternative medicine and sociology of religion. As a result, the mediation between popular religion (especially Afro-Brazilian religious practices) and the orthodoxies of the universities, the state, and the medical profession. Situating Spiritist intellectual thought in what he calls a broader ideological arena, Hess examines Spiritism in the context of religion, science, political ideology, medicine, and even the social sciences. Hess challenges the legacy of French sociologist Roger Bastide, who saw in Spiritism an elitist, middle-class ideology. In the process, Spirits and Scientists provides a new approach to middle-class religious movements in Latin America.