L’umbanda est guérison ! Création et adaptation d’un dispositif thérapeutique au Portugal

Abstract

This paper presents the results of research on a therapeutic device used in Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion also present in Portugal. From an anthropological approach, it proposes to identify the modes and possibilities of adaptation of such religious health practices in a transnational situation. Based on ethnographic elements gathered in a house of worship in northern Portugal, this study focuses more specifically on the activities of the “healing group”, and on the discourses of its members. As many authors have already noticed, the practice of charity in Umbanda houses of worship has a therapeutic aim. The first contact with this Afro-Brazilian religion's rituals is often a quest to find solutions to health problems. Umbandistas express this explicitly, saying that “umbanda is healing,” in a spiritual, physical, and mental sense. The elements used in therapeutic practices are also grounded in a symbolic system, which encompasses all of the “spiritual work” performed in a house of worship. Such elements are also related to a cosmology and a religious worldview specific to this universe. Yet, due to their presence outside of Brazil through to a process of transnationalization, healing practices in Umbanda propose new modes of acting and thinking. Indeed, based on this study of a “healing group,” this paper will show how new rituals and spiritual entities highlight Umbanda's plasticity and its potentialities of adaptation, including in Portugal.