Inimigos da torre: um estudo sobre Testemunhas de Jeová, desvio, moralidade e dissidência

Abstract

This work analyzes sociabilities at the Ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses Virtual Forum (Fórum Virtual Ex-Testemunhas de Jeová). This affective community was created in 2008 with the aim of fighting discrimination against former members of the religion. The forum is a space for the sharing of experiences, political organization and emotional support. The focus of this research is to understand the relationship between disfellowship, collective trauma, and stigma. Disfellowship is a process of social production of the moral indifference that operates through demonstrations of disdain, scorn, contact tabu, loathing, and public humilliations. Because they have been expelled from the religion, the disfellows have now their character, dignity and even their humanity contested. In order for us to better understand this process, we discuss important aspects of the history of this religion’s development, its relationships with fundamentalism and modernity, highlighting the doctrine of demonization of the individual autonomy seen as a reaction to a plural world, marked by uncertainties and continuous transformations. This work unravels the operation of an economy of punishments, which encompass legitimating symbolic order, and mechanisms of control, both internal (guilt and shame) and external (judicial tribunal, eitquette rules etc.). Our rationale is that the efficiency of the control systems depends on the union of institutional programs and the action. The consolidation of the religious moral order would be the result of rituals and social practices hierarchically routinized, but susceptible of being negotiated by the subjects involved. A type of moral grammar and certain affective competency would guarantee the social order not to become anomic. This research indicates that the affective community enables the elaboration of a more positive self-image of the disfellows, based on new moral, emotional, and cognitive frames. They would start to play a more active role related to their own emotions and notions of morality, which end up by acquiring an important political dimension.