I have a multiple academic identity: as a Latin Americanist I have done research in Chile, Ecuador, Mexico and Brazil, and although Brazil became the most prominent, my attachment to and inspiration from Spanish America is extremely important. As a student of religion I have also worked in Israel and in London (as part of my research on a Brazil-based neo-Pentecostal church!)
The themes of my work are also multiple: originally specializing in Development Studies, I began working on religion in the 1980s, first in Brazil, then in Israel and now globally. Then in the first decade of the 2000s I branched out in a new direction with a big project on the spread of multiculturalism and affirmative action in Latin America. This took me to Mexico, Peru and Brazil and led to the publication of an edited volume entitled The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America (2016) and a book on Brazil: The Prism of Race: the Ideology and Politics of Affirmative Action In Brazil (2018). The latter is due to appear in Portuguese translation in 2025.
Both religion and ethnicity have taken me to broader themes. Religion to a major project on a Brazil-based neo-Pentecostal church mentioned above : the humbly named Universal Church of the Kingdom of God which is present in 127 countries and which I have visited in 13 of them, from Chile to Israel in addition to Brazil itself. I have written a few articles about it and intend to publish a book about it in the near future.
As result of the research on ethnicity I have found compelled to pay attention to the Latin American variant on postcolonial thought. The result is a gently polemical book After the Decolonial: Ethnicity, Gender and Social Justice in Latin America (2022).
My academic career began in Oxford, but really only came to life in 1968 when I went to Chile to do research on land reform. The next five years were, to say the least, a turbulent period in Chile, starting with moderate reform, then embarking on a radical but still democratic path to socialism which was viciously repressed in Pinochet’s 1973 military coup and the authoritarian regime that followed. The experience, from near and from afar, influenced a whole generation.
My first job was at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, after which I worked briefly at the University of Kent, and then from 1973 in Cambridge. I have taught on Development, Latin America and Religion, and was Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies for 10 years during the 1990s. I have been a Visiting Professor in Brazil, Chile, Spain, Israel and France.
