As interfaces de uma história oficial: missionários pentecostais e o contexto socioeconômico em Belém do Pará (1893-1910)

Abstract

I address the social and economic context at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, when Swedish Pentecostal missionaries arrived in the capital of Pará (Belém) in 1911. I use the newspaper A República from the Republican Club (PA). The objective is to show the other discursive and historical side of the arrival of the Pentecostal missionaries who founded the Assemblies of God, and not only the narrative emphasized in the Official History of the Assemblies of God. I do not intend to delegitimize or pass judgment on the official history, but to bring to light the socioeconomic context in which the missionaries arrived upon disembarking in Belém, Pará. I understand that the discourse of any religious institution is constructed upon knowledge and understanding of the Official (original) History; that is, that every religious institution originated in a given period of time (within a specific historical context, endowed with external implications and influences), formalizing through biographies, resolutions, books, etc., the history of its own religion, while making other narratives related to it invisible. I use Michel Foucault's book *The Archaeology of Knowledge* (2008), which formulated the term "utterance" as a formal and scientific form of knowledge, a legitimate and regulatory knowledge that undergoes discursive changes throughout history. This allows for the comparative capture of the singularities of a theme, influenced by external circumstances such as the politics, economics, and religion of its time. This type of comparison is not aimed at seeking the originality of the discourse, nor at revealing external influences, but rather at the comparative analysis of the utterance (knowledge)—its regularities and particularities.