On craftsmen and tools: the study of religion in Brazil and some methodological trends

Abstract

The study of religion in Brazil has expanded with emphasis on ethnographic approaches and / or anthropological. This fact inquiries the major absence of Sociology in the analysis of the religious phenomena, and questions on the details of the methodological routes along of our investigations. In this text I look to the sociological thinking practice applied to the study of religion from contributions of the authors C. Wright Mills, Richard Sennett and Tim Ingold about the researcher’s relationship with the material world. From a preliminary survey in the Religion and Society Journal, I work on the second section on some methodological trends and areas of knowledge prevailing in the journal during the past six years. In the last section, I present the design of a sociological research on Catholicism in the state of Rio de Janeiro and methodological ways, focusing on the main challenges faced by developing of the study.