The Samba Schools in the Competition between Religious and Secular Forces in Sao Paulo

Samba schools are the associations that animates Brazilian carnival, the most secular event in the collective imagination. However, as this article wants to stress, there is a strong and apparently unbreakable bond between samba and religion. First of all, the rhythm and the connected performance were born as an invisibilisation strategy implemented by the followers of the afro Brazilian cults and specifically Candomble. Secondly, the departure from this genesis, due to a partial secularisation of society and samba, resulted in a gradual loss of popularity of the event itself, which can still be observed today. Lastly, the field research conducted between 2019 and 2020 shows that Pentecostalism is metaphorically and sometimes physically substituting samba schools. Pentecostal churches are providing the most needy layers of the population with an efficient and updated sociability network by intervening in the purely religious sphere as well as in the secular one, for example by redefining samba in a religious sense. Such process witnesses a certain persistence of religious forces in the Brazilian urban context. Therefore, apart from unhinging stereotypes, the panorama of Sao Paulo presented in this article contributes to the debate on the flexibility of the concepts of secularism and secularisation.