FIELDWORK AND INTERVIEWS

I went to the headquarters of the UCKG in Madrid, located at the Paseo de Santa Maria de la Cabeza, 12, Atocha, for the first time in October 2015. I stayed there for around two months, and regularly attended church services. The second time, I stayed in May and June 2016. The third and last time was in October and November 2016. This added up to about six months of fieldwork in total, from which I have than fifty transcriptions of services. In fact, I attended more services than this, but some are repetitive and hence there was a lot of irrelevant material to transcribe.

Participating in the church services with the purpose of doing research varied in difficulty for me. The first time that I went to the church, the door attendant asked me to wait and talk to the pastor. Just a few minutes later, after the door attendant called the person in charge by phone, Pastor Lenin arrived and spoke to me about my intentions. After telling him my research purposes, Lenin said: ‘I cannot forbid you to watch the service, if you do not disturb anyone during it’. I followed his recommendations and after a very enthusiastic service, the pastor came to shake my hand. The first part of my fieldwork went well in this respect.

The second time I went there, I asked the door attendant if I could talk to the pastor in charge, hoping it was Lenin again. Unfortunately, although Lenin was still in Madrid, he was spending less time in Atocha (probably also working at other church buildings) and the pastor in charge was not there. I returned and one of the assistant pastors told me that I should get permission from the UCKG office in the city. I told him that I did not need it the last time and, looking a bit confused, he asked me to talk with another pastor, who was not there at that moment. After my third try, I finally met Pastor Alberto, who would

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be the most important pastor for giving me information about church activities in the country, although I did not know this at the time. Alberto told me that the permission I needed from the church office was only in case I wanted to take any photos. Filming or any kind of recording was forbidden, something Lenin had also emphasised months earlier. The pastor said that they had problems with newspapers and journalists, but I will leave this specific subject for a later discussion in the next chapter. Alberto even mocked me in a very casual manner when he tried to understand why I was studying the UCKG. ‘A PhD about a church? Why would you want to do something like that?’, he said. However, after seeing my commitment, in our last conversation, when he gave me a brief

interview – something uncommon for the pastors of the church –, he seemed to

understand my dedication, while observing that I ‘followed him a lot’ during my time in

Madrid. He even gave me his WhatsApp number, which was in one of the church’s flyers, to talk to him while I was away from the city.

In my last period in Madrid, it was easier to access the church than in the other ones. I just asked the pastor and door attendants in charge to enter, promising I would not disturb them or make any films. He probably realised that I knew the institutional guidelines while we were talking, observed my familiarity with other members of the church and just let me in.

During the research, I turned to classical anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski (2002) to understand the correlations between ritual and many spheres of society, such as the social, economic and legal spheres, which are directly linked to the religiosity of the group that I studied. I also referred to Clifford Geertz (1973), as I tried to observe signs and symbols, and assign symbolical meaning to the practices represented. Evans- Pritchard (1976), with his comprehension of magic as a socio-cultural phenomenon, and Claude Levi-Strauss (2014), particularly his observations regarding his time in Brazil, helped me as well. The classical authors are no less important than the other sociologists and anthropologists who have done fieldwork with the UCKG (and who are discussed in the literature review chapter). I have to say that my studies as an undergraduate gave me access to perhaps the best anthropology team in Brazil, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). There, I was able to learn from anthropologists such as Elsje Lagrou, Marco Antonio Gonçalves, Maria Laura Cavalcanti and Beatriz Heredia. Even without citing them in the thesis, all of them inspired my behaviour and my search, as Mitchell Duneier (2011) (following Max Weber) proposes, to identify the inconvenient. Duneier also made me keep in mind the importance of avoiding only hearing just a part of the whole.

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The interviews also retained the characteristic of what was being observed. I tried to vary my respondents’ characteristics by gender, ethnicity, economic status and social status inside the church. I spoke with men, women, non-regular and regular members, new and old members, Spanish citizens, Brazilians, Jamaicans, Venezuelans, as well as different ethnicities, backgrounds, social statuses and ages. I was always looking for something new, about which I had not read or heard. Unfortunately, after trying to convince a few of the members to give me a proper interview, their avoidance of journalists also had an impact on my fieldwork. It was virtually impossible to interview them in significant numbers; perhaps I would have had to deal with a lot of church bureaucracy, with denial being almost a certainty. I therefore conducted interviews informally by just talking with members, always guiding them to subjects in which I was interested, whenever they let me. When they did not, I just chatted with them as much as I could about various subjects, hearing their opinions, which were almost invariably based on theology. After these conversations, which usually occurred after a service, I then had to rush to a coffee shop or bar near the church to transcribe the conversation as fast as I could, while my memory was fresh enough to remember everything. These difficulties meant that I retained less quantitative information about numbers regarding the social characteristics of the members. The quantitative parts of this research were based on observation, on official numbers provided by specialised institutions regarding membership in Madrid and Brazil, for example, and on interviews of the leaders, who were a good source of information about the kind of people who attended their services.

Following the British Sociological Association Statement of Ethical Practice, I always told the members with whom I spoke that I was not a church member and not merely a curious person, unlike a few of the ethnographers that study Brazilian Pentecostalism. I always let them know my purpose for being inside the church with them. Respecting them by telling them truth was an essential part of my task. I did not have any kind of conversation with minors under the age of eighteen for the research, since this requires special authorisation. I also took care to avoid using the names of the members; I have used only the names of leaders, since they are the official representatives of the institution and have their interviews on the church website. More than once, I tried to do what my other supervisor, Steve Fuller, suggested to me: let the people who were my object of study read my research. Unfortunately, they did not show much interest after I told them what the topic of my research was.