Beschreibung:
The Azorean families, wherever they migrated, brought their cultural background in which there clearly stood out celebrations of the annual festival of the Divine Holy Spirit. The Festa do Divino, as it is called in Brazil, has turned, in places where they originally settled down, into one of the most famous religious festivals of the Brazilian Popular Catholicism. However, due to some contemporary sociocultural factors, mostly linked to the more and more frequent application of the laws of market economy to the sphere of religion and also to the visible liberalization of the religious festivals’ "rules of conduct," it has been recently suffering from some important modifications. In this article, we present and analyze such changes, basing on the study of celebrations of this popular religious tradition in four different municipalities of four different states of Brazil.