Identidade e militância no CIMI: um estudo sobre a identidade dos missionários do CIMI-Leste

Abstract

The earlier studies about the catholic identity points to a tangle of meanings and diversity feelings. This paper proposes a study of the indigenous Missionary Council – CIMI – as an institution and its formative setting within a line of militant Catholicism, to explain the formation of a specific identity within the CIMI and also raise the discussion about the Christian identity in relation to the mission. We performed a case study with the missionaries of the East Regional of CIMI in order to explain the context of identity formation of the missionary as well as individual and institutional contexts that involve the formation of this identity. We sought to examine in the exercise of missionary work possible mediation caught in the daily experience of living and acting in a region of cultural frontier, where the question of difference becomes explicit. Thus it was possible to perform also a discussion of the different domains of identity and its relations in the sense that this understanding of itself fits into a distinguished Catholic thought and generate direct consequences in relation to the other cultural. The study focuses on the formation of the identity of "being a missionary in CIMI", through a politicized mission, and possible cultural mediations that this mission has generated in these people identities.