Eles estão “entrenós”: extraterrestres enquanto fluxos na malha de significados

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to analyze how the extraterrestrial, as a concept, permeates different groups of actors, whether they are religious or not. To this end, sociological and anthropological theories that privilege associations and interrelationships are used, such as the Actor-Rede Theory, by sociologist Bruno Latour, as well as the theoretical elaborations of anthropologist Tim Ingold, who proposes to follow a certain thing, which acts as a flow in a mesh. In this way, the concept of extraterrestrial is followed through its relations within different groups: the thinking of New Religious Movements and the adherents of New Age religiosity, Kardecist spiritism and the supposedly scientific or parascientific ufology. A bibliographical survey is carried out on books, institutional sites, news sites, films and media narratives about beings considered extraterrestrials. It is concluded that this concept is not only modified over time and contacts with other groups / actors / things, but also interferes in the conceptualizations of all the actors involved - promoting distances or approximations, and thus demonstrating the fluidity of boundaries between the thoughts of the analyzed groups.