Religious stigmas in school environments: dilemmas for the republican school in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This paper is an ethnography of social interaction processes in a public school in Rio de Janeiro. The analyses are part of a study conducted in 2019, in a School of Early Childhood Education and Elementary School, from early childhood education to sixth grade of elementary education. We argue that children's religious belonging to Afro-Brazilian religions constitutes a motivating element for actions and interactions that contribute to the production and reproduction of inequalities inside the school. Such processes occur in school rituals. Therefore, analyzing them allows us to understand the subtleties of the production and reproduction of inequalities at school, conected with processes of stigmatization and labeling of religious belonging. Rituals - directive and non-directive - prescribe types of identity and models of social interaction for students including pedagogical and religious elements. If these prescriptive expectations are not realized, a process of social classification and separation between I/we/they will be created and will tend to organize children’s social interactions and their school experiences. It is argued, therefore, that in addition to the reproduction of inequalities linked to the students’ social and cultural background, already discussed in sociological theory, there are also processes of production of inequalities inside the school, connected with stigmas and labels associated with students based on their religious beliefs. As we will demonstrate, students who practice afro-brazilian religions develop processes of negotiation of their religious identities, sometimes by hiding them, sometimes by exposing them. Evangelicals and Catholics, on the other hand, do not carry out this type of negotiation because their religious identities are considered to be legit and adequate to those school learning processes.