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How can ethnographic research be used to study conflicts, social mobilizations, and public policies? This paper tackles this challenge through an ethnographic study of conflicts involving African-rooted religions, their distinctive ways of resisting, reexisting, and reinventing traditions, in context of a growning trend of a "politics of hate" in Brazil. It also seeks to discuss the tenuous boundaries between religion and politics, strategies of social mobilization and struggle, and the role of the researcher and their methodological interventions, who becomes entangled in the public scene. The paper is dedicated to analyzing mobilization actions as a dynamic and multidimensional process, especially when referring to identity-based conflicts, which result in the construction of networks and forms of protest that ambivalently engage with the State and its agents, in unstable circumstances and conjunctures, revealing rules, values, and moralities in permanent dispute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article discusses the processes of political and social mobilization of the Afro-religious in the face of the religious racism and "christofascist" politics deployed by groups with an Evangelical-Pentecostal profile. Based on ethnographic research conducted since 2008 in Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Aracaju and Maceió, the article analyzes how these mobilization strategies are constituted in a modality of "terreiro politics" as a means of "doing politics", delimiting public identities, and debating accusations of increased and growing symbolic and concrete violations of Afro-based religions. The article also discusses how the categories intolerance, racism and genocide are part of a civic grammar that seeks to charge the State - most particularly the police and the judiciary - and push it to guarantee of rights in face the face of growing religious extremism characterized by narratives and actions aimed at building political agendas fueled by religious dogmas ("christofascism"), which result in violent acts against afroreligious terreiros. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]