African Indigenous Jurema: The Greatest Common Divisor of the Brazilian Minimum Religion

Abstract

African Indigenous Jurema: The Greatest Common Divisor of the Brazilian Minimum Religion Nancy Cardoso and Cláudio Carvalhaes To Afonso Maria Ligório Soares who taught us to do theology as pilgrims, from tent to tent, in transitory ways, but animated, since our pilgrim bodies are always the home of the Spirit. Over the course of the last few decades, questions surrounding what encompasses a minimally Brazilian religion (MBR) have been discussed and debated in conjunction with the consolidation of the religious studies field. One of the most significant attempts to address the issue was articulated by Andre Droogers, who gathered contributions made during the 1970s and the 1980s in the Revista Religião e Sociedade (1987). Brazil is a country that has had to overcome its own self‐understanding as a Catholic Christian country and to acknowledge its religious polyphony over and above any attempt by the Church to establish cultural consensus. This process of acknowledgment remains an important task today, as this process is still incomplete and the religious field has only become increasingly complex. Carlos Brandão identifies “a great symbolic matrix of common use, onto which each group edits and adds its own repertoire of beliefs,” and Pedro Ribeiro de Oliveira considers that “…there should be more than one set of religious elements available to different religions,” suggesting that a possible MBR would stem primarily from popular Catholicism. Rubem Cesar Fernandes prefers to talk about a “common substrata capable of reaching an agreement among the many traditions” or “elements of general knowledge” that are shared by several religions with certain variations on the “relationship among each of the parties” (God, nature, human beings, deceased souls, and both positive and negative deities). He particularly debates the role and function of the “clergy” as a “translator” in relation to the religious mass seen as “polyglot,” yet unable to translate its contents on its own. Drooger, however, believes that the MBR is not dependent on intermediaries (translator priests), nor does it need recognition from so‐called institutionalized religions. Based upon this debate, Droogers proposes the following concept for MBR: It is a religiosity that is publicly manifested in secular contexts, that is conveyed by mass media, but also by ordinary language. It is part of Brazilian culture. It exists on a national level and can even serve nationalistic purposes. Since its inception, this debate has developed in many ways and has continued to inquire about Brazilian culture and what might be unique to it in terms of its relevance to the religious question. This process of actualization has taken two discernible paths: a descriptive research method based on science and methodologies used in anthropology, sociology, history, etc., and research centered upon particular subjects’ (women, black people, gays, etc.) modes of belief. While the first path has solidified the intuitions present among the “patriarchs” of religious studies, the second has acknowledged the divergence in dealing with religious power and its representations (class, gender, ethnic, etc.). Two important examples of this second research trajectory deserve to be mentioned here: Brazilian feminist and black theologies. Ivone Gebara highlights the experience of poor, black, native women in Latin America: prostitutes, women who were abandoned by their husbands, etc., and gives priority to women making choices for themselves as the first step toward determining the role and function religion serves for them. In this sense, a real “minimum” does not exist, but we should still ask what the “minimum” for women is. Gebara relativizes all efforts at a so‐called women's “popular reading of the Bible” and identifies a potentially more meaningful set of realities and power relations. Similarly, Afonso Maria Ligorio deconstructs the debate on syncretism and religious enculturation, asserting that most efforts to establish a viable “minimum” end up reinforcing the “maximum” religion and its capacity of annexation. To Ligorio, displacing the issue of enculturation as a means of correcting a decayed and flawed syncretism fails to deal with the power issues present in the religious sphere. Was it African and indigenous people who corrupted Portuguese Catholicism, or it was the latter who violated the ancient traditions of the former? This question highlights an ambiguous relationship, but loses its paradox to...