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]