Espiritismo no Lar dos Humildes: uma abordagem organizacional, cultural e antropológica do corpo e do trabalho em reuniões mediúnicas em um centro espírita de Fortaleza-Ceará

Abstract

This article amalgamates themes pertinent to the sciences of anthropology, spiritism and organizations, notably culture, the body and mediumistic work. The general objective was to analyze the division of tasks in mediumship meetings, as well as the administration of the human body in the Spiritist Center Lar dos Humildes, located in the city of Fortaleza, in the state of Ceará. To develop it, the ethnographic method was used, from which 12 semi-structured interviews were carried out and recorded, observation of participants in different environments and sectors of the place, capture of still and moving images. The ethnography covered the period between July and December 2019. This research provided the following results: 1) we discovered that the division of work in mediumistic meetings has heterodox and contingent aspects and 2) we realized that the orderly and regular administration of the human body entails a spiritual improvement in two fields: the moral and the intellectual. The research offers an important conceptual and theoretical contribution to the areas of organizational and socio-anthropological studies, mainly because it relates spiritual, socio-cultural and administrative phenomena, under the ethnographic approach and, in effect, expanding the reflective and methodological approach of spiritual phenomena.