Religious world-view and environment in the Sertão of North-East Brazil
Abstract
The importance of religious cosmology for environmental ethics is explored in a case-study of enchanted and disenchanted world-views in the Sertão of North-east Brazil. Popular Catholicism is shown to have retained an enchanted world-view of humans interacting with saints, souls and animist spirits. In order to differentiate themselves from Catholics, evangelical Protestants pursue a disenchanted view of the natural environment but hold a highly supernatural view of human society. Afro-Brazilian cult members are Catholics who graft an enchanted view of human society on to an enchanted view of nature, producing a hyper-enchanted world-view. The relationship between religious world-view, agricultural modernisation, deforestation and social disparity is evaluated, showing how the process of disenchantment has been highly uneven with the selective elimination of certain enchanted beliefs alongside the persistence of others and their re-adaptation to the contemporary needs of the local population.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Protestant-led capitalism historically has fostered 'a disenchanted view of the natural environment.'
“As Hoefle (1999: 56) notes, Protestant-led capitalism historically has fostered”
From Beyond the “supply chain” framing: Cattle ranching as a vanishing mediator of deforestation and dispossession in the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon (2026) · cites this paper as Hoefle, 1999
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Bastos Lima, M. G., & López, J. (2026) · World Development · doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2026.107532
- Authors
- Hoefle, S. W.
- Affiliations
- Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (BR)
- Corresponding author
- Hoefle, Scott William
- Venue
- Ethics, Place & Environment
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 1999-03
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 55-79
- ISSN
- 1090-3771 (ISSN-L)
- 1366-879X
- 1469-6703
- OpenAlex
- W2089970560
- Cited by
- 6
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2019: 1 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Philosophy and Geography (publishedVersion)
- Ethics Place & Environment (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Banco do Nordeste do Brasil
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Religion, Ecology, and Ethics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Religion and Society in Latin America
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Study and Philosophy of Religion
- Keywords
- religious cosmology, environmental ethics, disenchantment, enchantment, popular Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, Afro-Brazilian religions, animism, saints, deforestation, agricultural modernization, social disparities
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
