Learning to learn in candomblé: notes on paths, knowledge, and the ‘education of distraction’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper intends to reflect on some ways of learning present in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion, and the relations between making, knowing, and being that compose this system. Based on an ethnographic experience carried out in Salvador, Bahia, the paper aims to explore the notion of path (caminho), as a way of articulating being and making, gift and initiation, to com`pose a partial and situated knowledge. In this sense, it argues that the learning system of Candomblé is a transformative process that involves a hesitantly know-how that is constituted by practical experiences and dealings with unknown forces, in a game of visibilities and invisibilities that, playing with Tim Ingold’s work, we could call an ‘education of distraction’. Finally, the paper proposes to reverberate this way of learning into anthropological practice itself, thinking of it as a partial, hesitant and transformative process that is constituted in the very experience of the encounter.