The Church of the Nazarene in Cape Verde: A religious import in a Creole society

The islands of Cape Verde are home to a Crioulo society that has emerged from prolonged intermingling between Africans and Europeans, since settlement began in the 1460s. Overwhelmingly Catholic, they host a branch of the Kansas City-based Church of the Nazarene, organized locally in 1901 by a returning emigrant named Joao Dias. The leader of the Nazarenes until his retirement in 1936, Dias was replaced by U.S. (and European) missionaries who remained active on the islands until 1994. For nearly a century, the Nazarene church has been Cape Verde's largest, most prominent Protestant denomination. Despite this fact, its actual engagement with--and relevance to--local society have been seriously challenged, especially in the post-independence period.;Considering the socio-historical features of Cape Verdean society, in combination with those of this religious body, this dissertation explores the process whereby a mixed society, such as Cape Verde, with a diverse cultural-historical heritage, receives and appropriates new and foreign social elements. Specifically, it analyzes a religious dimension of this problem, from the perspective of Bourdieu's concept of the relative autonomy of religion and, especially, his consideration of religious interests, religious habitus, and the logic of the market of religious goods. It argues that as long as Nazarene production of religious goods and services heeded, in the initial phase (under Dias), the religious and worldly interests stemming from the laity's specific conditions of existence in Cape Verde, there was a degree of convergence between religious demand and production, that might undergird the Cape Verdeanization of that religious import. By contrast, once local needs and interests became supplanted, in the missionary phase, by predominantly intrainstitutional interests, the Nazarene phenomenon abandoned the path of Cape Verdeanization, and became largely self-contained within local society.;A range of primary materials, mostly in Portuguese, a series of tape-recorded interviews, and participant observation, all undertaken in Cape Verde and the United States, are combined to provide an account of the relationship between church and society. The theoretical analysis of this relationship is undertaken in Chapter 3. Chapter 1 draws a profile of Cape Verdean society, while Chapter 2 traces the rise of the Nazarene phenomenon there.