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Black Catholicism in Brazil
Abstract
Studies of Afro-Brazilian religion have tended to focus on Candomblé and other African-derived religions, and this is especially true in studies focused on the northeastern state of Bahia. Indeed, Bahia has long been imagined as a kind of living museum where African culture has been preserved in the Americas, a place where Christianity appears only as a thin veneer. This article focuses on my work on the intersection of Candomblé and Catholicism and more specifically on the Afro-Catholic Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death (Irmandade de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte, or simply Boa Morte), whose members are women of African descent involved with Candomblé. Because of its grounding in African-derived religion, observers often wonder whether the sisterhood’s yearly festival is actually Candomblé ritual masquerading as a Catholic celebration. I argue that behind this question is the questionable presumption that Catholicism is somehow epiphenomenal in Afro-Brazilian religious life, a view that I contend is rooted in specific racial ideologies and cultural nationalisms and stems from certain ideas concerning the relationship between religion and belief.
... Along these lines, as I have written elsewhere, we often see a resistance to the idea that Afro-Latin Americans were and are earnestly Catholic (Selka, 2014). I argue that this is at least partly grounded in certain Protestantinflected understandings of conversion. ...
This article provides a historical and ethnographic overview of Afro‐Catholicism in Latin America. For the purposes of this article, ”Afro‐Catholicism” encompasses the wide variety of ways that people of African descent have practiced or engaged with Catholicism. Much of the article focuses on Brazil, but it also draws on the literature on Afro‐Catholicism in Haiti and Cuba both to highlight similarities and differences throughout Latin America and to foreground the necessarily transnational scope of this topic.
Antonio Obá (b.1983) was born and grew up in Ceilândia, a dormitory town thirty kilometres outside of Brazil’s capital, Brasilia. Though this may not seem like an especially significant biographical detail in considering Obá’s work – other writers, for example, have focused on the artist’s race and devout Catholic upbringing – I argue that this foundational fact of Obá’s upbringing and experience is more telling than first impressions suggest. This paper posits Brasilia and Ceilândia as stand-ins for a more general dynamic that structures Brazilian identity and nationhood. That violent and generative dynamic – which occurs between a range of other symbolic pairs of concepts, such as black and white, rich and poor, formal and informal, progress and stasis, sacred and profane, European and African, and so on – is Obá’s focus, thus “syncretism” emerges as an important term within his practice. The paper offers readings of two of Obá’s performances – Atos da transfiguração – desaparição ou receita de como fazer um santo (2015) and Malungo: Rite for a Black Mass (2016) – as well as an accompanying installation, Malungo (2019), as examples of the syncretic dynamic or dialectic that runs through much of Obá’s work.
Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a "survival," or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world. With counterparts in Nigeria, the Benin Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad, and the United States, Candomblé is a religion of spirit possession, dance, healing, and blood sacrifice. Most surprising to those who imagine Candomblé and other such religions as the products of anonymous folk memory is the fact that some of this religion's towering leaders and priests have been either well-traveled writers or merchants, whose stake in African-inspired religion was as much commercial as spiritual. Morever, they influenced Africa as much as Brazil. Thus, for centuries, Candomblé and its counterparts have stood at the crux of enormous transnational forces. Vividly combining history and ethnography, Matory spotlights a so-called "folk" religion defined not by its closure or internal homogeneity but by the diversity of its connections to classes and places often far away. Black Atlantic Religion sets a new standard for the study of transnationalism in its subaltern and often ancient manifestations.
Set in the enchanted mountain of a spirit-queen presiding over an unnamed, postcolonial country, this ethnographic work of ficto-criticism recreates in written form the shrines by which the dead--notably the fetishized forms of Europe's Others, Indians and Blacks--generate the magical powers of the modern state.
Andrew Apter is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society and is working on a new project, "Festac (Festival of African Culture) for Black People: Oil Capitalism and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria."
This essay was first presented at the African Studies Public Lecture Series, Northwestern University, 28 Oct. 1991. I would like to thank David Cohen, Ivan Karp, Karin Hansen, Bill Murphy, and Teju Olaniyan for their challenging and insightful comments.
1. The term "New World," which denotes the post-Columbus Americas, is full of ideological problems all the more pressing in this quincentennial year. I retain the term uneasily for the sake of historiographic continuity, with the qualification that invisible quotes surround each of my usages to bracket its pejorative connotations.
2. See, for example, Du Bois; Woodson; Price-Mars; Ortiz; Hurston, Tell My Horse; Ribeiro; Ramos; and Freyre.
3. The Nigerian fieldwork on which this argument is based took place from October 1982 to December 1984 and during three months of summer 1990. I gratefully acknowledge funding from Fulbright-Hays, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society.
4. See, for example, Barnes; D. Brown; Joseph Murphy; K. Brown; and Thompson. Of these, only Murphy (120-24) discusses syncretism.
5. These conferences have been held in such cities as Ife (Nigeria), Bahia (Brazil), Miami, and New York City. They mark the self-conscious transnationalism of the Òrìṣà tradition, and deserve a special study in this journal.
6. For a sustained and rigorous critique of the rhetoric and ideology of Africanist discourse, see Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa.
7. I use the term syncretic paradigm to identify the larger model (and its additional concepts) within which the more specific meaning of syncretism proper is located.
8. In "Tolerance," Fernandez recounts Herskovits's affiliation with the NAACP after expressing an initial reluctance (150-51).
9. For a glimpse of the ideological conflict that Herskovits experienced with the Carnegie Corporation, as well as the corporation's colonial epistemology, see Jackson's "Herskovits" (117-18) and "The Making."
10. The "Fon" (also called Dahomeans by Herskovits) and the "Yoruba" are missionary-colonial ethnic designations that emerged in the nineteenth century to refer to peoples of what is today the southern half of the Republic of Benin and southwest Nigeria. The infamous slave port of embarkation was at Ouidah, controlled for a long time by the Portuguese.
11. Thus in Ayede, the Yemoja cult houses the additional deities Orisha Oko, Shango, Ogun, Oshun, Oya, and Olokun.
12. For a more detailed version of this story, see Metraux (42-43).
13. In her discussion of Tshidi Zionists, Jean Comaroff notes how the intent "to deconstruct existing syntagmatic chains, to disrupt paradigmatic associations, and, therefore, to undermine the very coherence of the system they contest" inevitably reproduces, on a formal level, aspects of the symbolic order which it reconfigures, so that "subversive bricolages always perpetuate as they change" (Body, 198). It is her association of "syncretistic movements" with subversive bricolages that I am calling "critical practice."
Mapping Africana Religions: Transnationalism, Diaspora, and Globalization" panel
- Curtis Evans
Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 272.
16. Paraphrased from Paul Christopher Johnson, "Mapping Africana Religions:
Transnationalism, Diaspora, and Globalization" panel, "Africana Religions:
Theorizing Traditions, Geographies, and Temporalities" conference,
Northwestern University, March 9, 2013.
Reflections of a Negro Convert
"Reflections of a Negro Convert," Interracial Review 9, no. 12 (1936): 183.
- See John Thornton
See John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Black Brothers and Sisters: Membership in the Black Lay Brotherhoods of Colonial Brazil
- See Patricia Mulvey
- Patricia Mulvey
See Patricia Mulvey, "Black Brothers and Sisters: Membership in the Black Lay
Brotherhoods of Colonial Brazil," Luso-Brazilian Review 17, no. 2 (1980): 253-79; and
Patricia Mulvey, "Slave Confraternities in Brazil: Their Role in Colonial Society,"
The Americas 39, no. 1 (1982): 39-68.
Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador
- Kim Butler
- Freedoms Given
Kim Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and
Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 147; cf. George
Reid Andews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004).
Discourses on Afro-Brazilian Religion: From De-Africanization to Re-Africanization
- See Tina
- Gudrun Jensen
See Tina Gudrun Jensen, "Discourses on Afro-Brazilian Religion: From
De-Africanization to Re-Africanization," in Latin American Religion in Motion, ed.
Christian Smith and Joshua Prokopy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 265-83.