ABSTRACT
The Armenian experience on Brazilian soil continues to be marked by two significant constraints that interact and generate a certain balance. The religious market is open to the most diverse possibilities, giving rise not only to the proselytizing zeal of diverse options that are relatively recent but also to the need for congregations to employ a defensive strategy centered on the ethnic affirmation of 'Armenianness'. People have observed a social structure in which the perceived ethnicity of 'Armenianness' plays an important internal role in collective hierarchization and as a precious instrument for producing communal identities and individual self-esteem. The comparative study of the Armenian Brazilian community was conducted against the backdrop of copious Syrian and Lebanese immigration, along with the numerically less significant Jewish immigration. Against the backdrop, the religious leaders posed a problem that was bigger and more decisive for the group's continuity: the religious assimilation of new generations into the majority groups of the Brazilian population.
