Syncretism and the racial issue: lexical relations and confl icting representations in two newspapers and two magazines in Brazil

Abstract

In the field of Social Sciences, especially Anthropology, syncretism has often been focused on as a research topic. In the field of linguistic studies, there is very little or apparently no research on the issue being carried out in Brazil. This article aims at filling in this gap in linguistic studies. It sets out from an analysis of the lexical item syncretism as culturally relevant for the study of discourses on the racial issue in Brazil, as mediated by the press. The theoretical background of Critical Discourse Analysis and some tools of Corpus Linguistics are combined in order to investigate lexical relations constructed with the word sincretismo in two newspapers and two feature magazines. Some of the results suggest there is a conflict between different religious discourses and a tension in the wider discourse of racial democracy in Brazil.