La société civile en question : Pentecôtisme et démocratie

Civil society is usually granted the role of furthering democracy and of translating the private sphere into the public sphere. The remarkable growth of pentecostalism can be explained by the failure of such translating role in Latin America and Africa. This failure thus points to the shortcomings of the concept of civil society. Pentecostalism does perform translation, but within imaginaries. For the analysis of democratisation processes, the study of pentecostalism's translation of imaginaries provides us with categories that differ from those associated with the concept of civil society.