Introduction

In this century one sees the immense expansion of religions, or as Pierre Bourdieu says, the expansion of the market of symbolic goods. Mainly after the 50's, the consequences of the World War II, territory definitions, creation of lay universities, society's laicism, implementation of means of mass communication, the cold war and the threat of communism, the Cuban Revolution, the internationalization of economy, the independence of African countries, Latin America's military coups and immense migratory flows created different and new life expectations. Inside this complex panorama we will make a focal study - the religious field. The great paradigm will be the comparative study between Zen Buddhism and Roman Apostolic Catholic Church.

Therefore, the religious field will be our epistemological focal point. We define the modern world, according to Louis Dumont, as where religious existence stops being something shared and becomes an individual choice. This passage from the social consent to the individual one is one of the main characteristics of this new religious field, which is marked by urbanization. We do not agree with Habermas, who makes an entire study about the radical separation between public and private. We take up Bruno Latour instead, who deals with the term hybridization, a concept that characterizes our performance in the world. Departing from this point of view, the question that proceeds is: in this network, where collective, real and discursive relationships take place at the same time, how does the market of symbolic goods present itself? How are the symbols orchestrated? And why some have more acceptability than others?

Using this perspective, we will try to draw the religious field, which is defined by its ubiquitous presence in daily life, the secular life, for the composition of its symbolic universe. Hence, the religious field will not be restricted anymore, as accounts Bourdieu, but it will have a focus - the daily life - which amalgamated with the sacred, will be a place where the transcendental senses will be forged and the experiences in the urban societies and mass societies will take place.

Consequently, in this net made of facts, power and discourse, we will trace the performance of the religious field (which in our case, will be the comparative study between Zen Buddhism and Catholicism). Why these two examples? The answer is very simple; Catholicism is by definition a transnational and transcultural religion. Thus, it uses the "resemantization" process to allocate cultural diversity inside its speech, and this is obviously blended with the historical and political context. Hence, it became the official and hegemonic religion of Latin America, mainly Brazil. However, being it the hegemonic religion, how did it leave room for the arrival of other religious symbolic goods, in our case, Zen Buddhism?

Of course the question is not an easy one to answer and moreover, it will not have a single answer, since we are dealing with symmetrical anthropology, in the way of Bruno Latour. Thus, defined our theoretical and methodological parameters, we start examining our subject-objects.

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