Surviving in the Land of the Dead: Bantu Religion in the Brazilian Diaspora (original) (raw)
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Journal for the Study of the Religions of Africa and its Diaspora, 2018
“Bantu Religion“ is an abstraction, an ideal-type of the consensus between different forms among the Bantu peoples. With the arrival of Bantu people in Brazil five centuries ago, a process of amalgamation began. Core features and structure have reasserted themselves interacting with non-Bantu religious and cultures around, assimilating ideas and practices. According to a systemic theory of syncretism this follows definite rules. It will be shown that Umbanda has preserved a core of Bantu beliefs, ritual practises and spiritual perceptions, in spite of all syncretistic adoptions. Thus Umbanda remains essentially a vital and complex Bantu Traditional Religion in a largely non-Bantu cultural environment persevering in an ongoing syncretistic process. It is thus a source for the retrieval of an ideal-type of African Traditional Religion. In this analytical perspective the comparison of rituals by the water in Umbanda and in South African Bantu culture presented in this study discloses a deeper understanding of their meaning and essence.
Afro-Brazilian Religions and the Prospects for a Philosophy of Religious Practice
Religions
In this paper, we take our cue from Kevin Schilbrack’s admonishment that the philosophy of religion needs to take religious practices seriously as an object of investigation. We do so by offering Afro-Brazilian traditions as an example of the methodological poverty of current philosophical engagement with religions that are not text-based, belief-focused, and institutionalized. Anthropologists have studied these primarily orally transmitted traditions for nearly a century. Still, they involve practices, such as offering and sacrifice as well as spirit possession and mediumship, that have yet to receive attention from philosophers. We argue that this is not an accident: philosophers have had a highly restricted diet of examples, have not looked at ethnography as source material, and thus still need to put together a methodology to tackle such practices. After elucidating Schilbrack’s suggestions to adopt an embodiment paradigm and apply conceptual metaphor theory and the extended min...
Discourses on Afro-Brazilian religion: from de-Africanization to re-Africanization
Latin American Religion in Motion, 1999
The m1xmg of races that began during Portugal's colonization of Brazil in the year 1500 has continued to be characteristic of the Brazilian population. The fact that Brazil is a multiethnic society has spawned a belief that racial prejudice does not exist there. This belief expresses itself as the ideology that Brazil has a "racial democracy." Umbanda, a reli gion that originated in the southeast of Brazil in the 1920s, has been praised as an expression of this ideology. However, Umbanda has also been seen as one of the manifestations of white supremacy. This article will examine how prejudices against the black Brazilian population were expressed through the de-Africanization of Umbanda and the religious discourse that accompanied that process. It then goes on to examine the recent shift to a re-Africanization of the Afro-Brazilian religions.I THE AFRO-BRAZILIAN RELIGIONS It is estimated that a total of 3,600,000 slaves were transported from Africa to Brazil between the sixteenth and the ninteenth centuries (Bastide 1978: 35), making Brazil the second-largest slave importer in the New World. During this period, the black slave population was actually larger than the ruling white minority. The laves came mainly from Nigeria, Dahomey (Benin), Angola, Congo, and Mozambique. Although the institution of slavery split up families and spread these ethnic groups throughout the country, the slaves managed to ma, intain some links with their ethnic heritage. This was due to the fact, among other things, that the Portuguese minority used their policy of divide and-rule to separate the slaves into different na�oes. The term na�iio (nation) refers to an ethnic group's local geographical area and their cultural traditions (for example, the Yoruba-speaking nations of Nigeria are the Nago, Keru, Ijeja, Egba, etc.). The unexpected conse
Deutero-learning the african religions in Brazil
2015
EnglishMarcio Goldman, Reading Roger Bastide. Deutero-Learning the African Religions in Brazil Originally considered a key contribution to the study of African-Brazilian religions, over the last thirty years Roger Bastide's work has come under a series of attacks. In this paper, I argue that most of the criticisms do not consider one of Bastide's main arguments, namely, that the understanding of �African religions in Brazil� depends on the convergence of ethnographic and sociological perspectives, or rather, on the possibility of reconciling the necessity of taking what the natives say seriously with the construction of a broader depiction of these religions. The fact that Bastide kept these two perspectives separate and developed them in two different books, suggests that the issue was never resolved by the author himself. This article suggests that to overcome this difficulty, anthropologists must try to systematically incorporate and explore the particular modes of transm...
African-Brazilian Cults - Historical Context
Foreword 02; Introduction 03; 1- Main African groups in Brazil 04; 2- Events of religiosity 11; 3- Acculturation, assimilation, imposition 14; 4- Birth of an African-Brazilian cult 19; 5- Present-day forms 23; 6- Orishas and their features 34; Conclusion 52; References 53. In today’s Brazil, along with Christianity, there is another African nature of religiosity that has been preserved as part of the cultural heritage of ethnic groups that constituted the Brazilian people. Especially in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, forms of worship such as Candomblé and Umbanda have strong expression among the popular classes. But how did these cults came out? Are they completely African, representing what was left of the original cults or the result of a syncretism between the beliefs of slaves brought from Africa to work on the sugar plantations and Christianity imposed by missionaries and by employers? Had Amerindian beliefs any influence on the formation of this religiosity? To answer these questions we have to go back to the beginning of the economic exploitation of Brazil and understand what the belief system was of the ethnic groups that would be the main component of slavery in Brazil, from the African region below the Sahara desert, as well as how those groups succeeded or not to keep their traditions. In this work, we intend to study how the African religiosity mixed with the beliefs of Brazilian native Indians to Christianity and giving rise to the cults of today, which remain on par with the official religion.
Reading Bastide: (Deutero) Learning the African Religions in Brazil
Originally considered a key contribution to the study of African-Brazilian religions, over the last thirty years Roger Bastide’s work has come under a series of attacks. In this paper, I argue that most of the criticisms do not consider one of Bastide’s main arguments, namely, that the understanding of “African religions in Brazil” depends on the convergence of ethnographic and socio- logical perspectives, or rather, on the possibility of reconciling the necessity of taking what the natives say seriously with the construction of a broader depiction of these religions. The fact that Bastide kept these two perspectives separate and developed them in two dif- ferent books, suggests that the issue was never resolved by the author himself. This article suggests that to over- come this difficulty, anthropologists must try to syste- matically incorporate and explore the particular modes of transmission and reception of Afro-Brazilian reli- gious knowledges: in other words, we must engage their theories and methods of learning.
The untold story of the Afro-Brazilian religious expansion to Argentina and Uruguay
Critique of Anthropology, 1996
Sometimes, a microscopically examined sequence of events in the lives of a few individuals results in the disclosure of an often neglected characteristic of human action and discourse: its polyphonic, plurivocal naturc. It is not merely the case of the RasllOmon effect and the variety of versions of differently positioned actors, but of the even greater complexity added by the density of voices, some in the light and some in shadows, that resound when a single informant speaks to us: all the social spaces through which her or his life travels are involved, the whole of a life experience, amounting to her or his forecast of the intentions of the interlocutors with whom she or he happens to talk. How can such a plural account be transcribed in a single ethnography, in a linear series of statements'? This is very much the case of the people about whom I write in this paper-a cult community that challenges ethnographers to the point that they come out, very often, with the most contradictory conclusions. Indeed, Afro-Brazilian cults seem to be malleable enough to encompass the most confusing variety of discourses shed upon them, all embraced by data, all fitting in: they are syncretic and deny being syncretic, they are pluralistic and they are exclusive, they are political and they are apolitical, they are African and they are not so African. I will speak here about a new pair of antagonistic views: religion as conforming and not conforming to established standards in a new national milieu.
2021
Quimbanda is a ritual modality that has assumed unparalleled status in Rio Grande do Sul when compared to the rest of Brazil. Designating the cult of exus and pombagiras, Quimbanda has reached a prominent place in relation to other Afro-religious expressions, such as Batuque and Umbanda. The objective of this text is to point out the conditions of possibility of Quimbanda, showing how it corresponds to a displacement in principles that are essencial either to Batuque or to Umbanda. The forms of exus and pombagiras, Showing, associating spiritual manifestations, photographic records and internet propagation, are also addressed as part of the development of Quimbanda. The analyzes are based on the discussion of bibliography on Quimbanda, on the ethnography of rituals, and on interviews with priests. The text seeks to contribute to the debate about the religious modalities generated by the cult of orixás in Brazil.
Gender and Sexuality Chapter of Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, 2017
In the 1930s, a Jewish female anthropologist Ruth Landes provided a different perspective about Bahia, one that emphasized black women’s communal power. During the time in which Landes conducted her research, the Brazilian police persecuted Candomblé communities for “harboring communists.” The Brazilian government was linked with Nazism, torture, rape, and racism, and Afro-Brazilians resisted this oppression. Also during this period, debate began among social scientists about whether Candomblé was a matriarchal religion in which women were the primary spiritual leaders. The debate was rooted in the question of where “black matriarchy” came from. Was it a result of the history of slavery or was it an African “cultural survival”? The debate was simultaneously about the power and importance of Afro-Brazilian women in spiritual and cultural life.