BOAVENTURA PEREIRA SOUSA: Memória, oralidade e escrita na Igreja Assembleia de Deus (1963 – 1996)

Abstract

This paper centers its analysis around the figure of Boaventura Pereira de Sousa, pastor of the Assembly of God Church (AD) in the state of Maranhão. With a time frame between the years 1963 to 1996, the period in which he was ahead of the AD as president pastor in the city of Bacabal. During these three decades leading the church, Boaventura Sousa became a leadership with strong influence within the assembly community in Bacabal where he became one of the main representations of the preservation of customs and identity (re)affirmation of the Pentecostal movement in Maranhão. His broad performance in evangelistic work contributed for the pastor to build around himself places of memory that perpetuated him in the collective feeling of the group to which he belonged. The sources that we used for the development of this work were the autobiography of Boaventura Sousa, interviews conducted with assembly members who had experience with the ecclesiastic supported in the methodology of Oral History and mapping of material records, or rather, the places of memory about the figure / object of research among these: photographs, plaques, newspapers, personal reliquary of the pastor, among others. The theoretical contribution is structured in the field of History of Religion and Cultural History. It dialogues with the concept of: Places of memory, identity, memory and discusses about autobiography.