African Cults Research Articles

Theater of Ancestral Mediation

Theater of Ancestral Mediation

A (NÃO) contribuição da tipificação do crime de curandeirismo para a demonização das religições de matrizes africanas

The observation of the data of religious intolerance in Brazil against Afro-Brazilian religions generates curiosity about the reasons why this occurs. Inserting Criminal Law as a matter of analysis, the crime of african traditional medicine provided for in Article 284 of the Penal Code might be assessed as a possible reflection of religious racismwithin the legal system. Whereas, in order to classify the aforementioned crime, the protected legal good is public security, the concept of health privileged by the ordering system will stand out, in contrast to those adopted by african cults. By demonizing these religions, the practice of healing iscriminalized, but also a determined way of existing, being and remaining in this the world. The main objective of the research is, therefore, to verify if the typification of the healing crime contributes to the demonization of African-based religions. For that, the bibliographic research technique and the deductive method will be used. In conclusion, it was demonstrated that the law functions as an instrument to maintain the interests of a certain racial group. With the work of political and legal forces legitimizing ethnocentrism and the persecution of Afro-Brazilian religions, the typification of the crime of africn traditional medicine silences beliefs of African matrices, contributing to the increase of religious intolerance against them and perpetuating structural racism in the Brazilian legal system.

Aspectos teológicos e religiosos do candomblé de caboclo

O candomblé de caboclo, como o próprio nome diz, é oriundo do candomblé ou culto de nação africano, com influências da pajelança, espiritismo e catolicismo, em estrita relação com a formação da umbanda. Discutem-se as semelhanças e diferenças com outras escolas, como quanto às vestimentas, rito-liturgia etc.

Bentyia (Kukyia): a Songhay–Mande meeting point, and a “missing link” in the archaeology of the West African diasporas of traders, warriors, praise-singers, and clerics

The present tragedy in Mali draws our attention to the divisions, tensions and conflicts between West African ethnic groups, religious persuasions, and populations from different regions, in both the present and the past. But a long-term critical perspective on the past brings to light borrowings between cultures, and shows how the mobility of people across West Africa links regional and ethnic histories. The communication axis running from the Aḍagh to the Niger and, along the Niger Valley, from Gao to Busa (in Nigerian Borgu) and beyond, is a strategic locus for investigating this mobility and connectivity. It has linked together the Saharan, savannah, and forest zones of West Africa. It was a magnet for diasporas of Soninke praise-singers and Mande warriors and traders. Fishermen and other waterfolk along the river, oral traditionists and other craftspeople, priests and priestesses of African cults, and Islamic clerics, as well as armies, long-distance merchants, and enslaved human beings, moved along it. Although the archeological sites at Bentyia/Kukyia occupy a strategic position on this historical axis, they have not been excavated, whence a serious gap in our knowledge of the history of the eastern Niger Valley and of West Africa as a whole.

Europe and the African Cult of Saints, circa 350–900: An Essay in Mediterranean Communications

Shortly after the Vandals took Carthage in 439, the city's Catholic bishop, Quodvultdeus, and a large number of his clergy were said to have been placed “naked and despoiled on broken ships” and put to sea, banished from Africa. By God's mercy, the exiles made their way safely to Naples, where Quodvultdeus quickly came to be regarded as a saint: a fifth-century mosaic from the catacombs of St. Januarius (San Gennaro) in Capodimonte seems to depict the African bishop, and by the middle of the ninth century his feast day was celebrated in the local liturgical calendar. A similar story could be told of Gaudiosus of Abitina, another fifth-century African bishop who was said to have fled the Vandals and who also achieved sainthood in Campania. The flight of refugees like Quodvultdeus and Gaudiosus from the political turmoil that wracked North Africa between the fifth and the eighth centuries, however, has long been seen as having a far greater significance than the reinvention of exiled African bishops as sout...

A presença do religioso no espaço público: modalidades no Brasil

Toma-se como problema central especificar as formas pelas quais se configuram relações de reconhecimento do religioso pelo Estado no Brasil no quadro definido pelo regime republicano. Em outras palavras, considerando a laicidade por causa dela ou apesar dela , como o Estado foi legitimando a presença do religioso no espaço público. No caso da Igreja Católica, isso ocorreu inicialmente por meio de uma aliança simbólica e material e com a ajuda de um regime jurídico de baixo controle estatal. No caso do espiritismo, ocorreu em meio a uma batalha pela legitimidade de práticas com algum sentido terapêutico. No caso dos cultos afros, envolveu a aceitação de um argumento culturalista. Partindo do delineamento histórico de diferentes modalidades de reconhecimento, busca-se a caracterização do que ocorre atualmente, considerando a presença dos evangélicos no espaço público. De modo geral, trata-se de problematizar a definição de fronteiras no interior do campo religioso e nas relações entre religião, sociedade e Estado no Brasil.

Ordini religiosi, santita e culti: prospettive di ricerca tra Europa e America Latina. Atti del Seminario di Roma 21-22 giugno 2001 (review)

Reviewed by: Ordini religiosi, santità e culti: prospettive di ricerca tra Europa e America Latina. Atti del Seminario di Roma 21–22 giugno 2001 Jeffrey Klaiber Ordini religiosi, santità e culti: prospettive di ricerca tra Europa e America Latina. Atti del Seminario di Roma 21–22 giugno 2001. Compiled by Gabriella Zarri . [Università degli Studi di Lecce—Studi Storici, 59.] (Galatina [Lecce], Italy: Congedo Editore. 2003. Pp. vii, 193. €16,00 paperback.) Holiness and sainthood have recently become popular themes among scholars who recognize their importance for understanding Latin American colonial society. New studies on Rose of Lima, for example, analyze the popularity of the first American saint and attempt to answer the question why she was canonized so quickly, before Toribio de Mogrovejo, the Spanish archbishop who confirmed her, or other missionaries who belonged to influential religious orders. In line with these studies, the authors of Ordini religiosi, santità e culti, a collection of essays produced by a seminar organized by the Italian Association for the Study of Saints, Cult, and Hagiography, aim to propose new avenues of research on popular images of holiness and religiosity in Catholic Europe and colonial Latin America. The essays do not pretend to be finished studies, but rather guides for future research. One of the authors, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, underlines the historical importanceof the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which was Rome's response to the royal patronage of the Spanish and the Portuguese. Rome attempted to wrest control over missionary activity in the New World from the tight grip exercised by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs who often subordinated evangelization to their own political interests. Another author, Giacomo Dalla Torre, describes in detail the history and the holdings of the library and the [End Page 830] archives of Propaganda Fide, neither of which are well known. Jaime Valenzuela Márquez suggests new lines of research into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Latin America: processions, confraternities, shrines, convents, popular notions of sin, etc. Two authors, Claudia Rolle and Paolo Broggio, deal with the Jesuits. Roble studies the "policy of holiness" in the Jesuit missions in Paraguay and Bolivia. The missionaries fell prey to a "utopian temptation" when they held up the primitive church as their basic model for the mission Indians. Paolo Broggio shows that the Jesuits applied European baroque piety and practices to their urban missions in Latin America, but there were differences, too. In the New World the sacrament of confession played a key role in the evangelization of the Indians. Francesca Cantù addresses the question of why Rose of Lima became so popular not only among the Creole élite, but also among the Indians. Rose, of course, became one of the first symbols of a Creole identity, but she also seemed to fulfill several messianic prophecies. Sara Cabibbo reviews the curious but not uncommon case of María d'Ágreda, the seventeenth-century Spanish contemplative who was "transported" in her mystical visions to the New World. In an age in which women could not do missionary work, some of them fulfilled that need in their visions. Oscar Beozzo studies the cult of the saints and the Virgin during the first stages of the evangelization of Brazil. Beozzo carries out a detailed study of the names of parishes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century as a way of determining the popularity of certain saints and Marian titles. He also proposes further research into the possible connections between certain saints and African cults. This is not an organically unified work, but rather a collection of essays dealing with the same general subjects. Indeed, the two chapters on Propaganda Fide and its library and archives, although very informative, do not really seem to belong with the other essays. In any case, the individual essays, which the editor terms as "works in progress," contain up-to-date bibliographies and in most cases provide interesting and new avenues for research. Jeffrey Klaiber The Pontifical Catholic University of Peru Lima Copyright © 2004 The Catholic University of America Press

Die Sklavenbefreiung in Brasilien, eine soziale Frage für die Kirche? Die Katholische Kirche und das Ende der Sklaverei in der Kaffeeprovinz São Paulo, 1871-1888

This study is Katharina Bosl’s doctoral dissertation as submitted to the Catholic University Eichstätt in 1997. It asks “whether and how Catholicism influenced the debate over the abolition of slavery [in Brazil] and what position the church took vis-à-vis its own historical involvement with slavery” (p. 16). The church’s adoption of social causes since Vatican II inspired Bosl, who characterizes her approach as “church history motivated by liberation theology” (p. 23). The study is an historical search for a liberating church in the decades before the abolition of slavery in 1888.The subject proves elusive: Bosl concludes that the Brazilian church played at best a minor role in the abolitionist movement. Clerics and religious orders owned slaves, the church defended slavery (despite occasional condemnations of slave abuse), and church leaders lent no support to the abolitionist movement. Having failed to find the liberating church, Bosl struggles to find a clear analytical focus. The second chapter, for example, retells the familiar history of slavery in Brazil in the first half of the nineteenth century and then jumps to an entirely separate survey of the state of the church in São Paulo around 1850. The fifth chapter offers interesting discussions of the role of caifazes (groups encouraging slave flight from plantations) and black brotherhoods in the abolitionist struggle in São Paulo. Although Bosl infers an influence of Catholic religion on these movements, she acknowledges that the evidence is inconclusive and then oddly proceeds to document religious influence for African cults and Islam. The study is strongest when it firmly establishes church agency in the development of African slavery in Brazil. The opening chapter surveys the church’s involvement and response to slavery during colonial times and the fourth places the abolition of slavery in convents in 1871 within a trajectory of the religious orders’ general economic decline.The two remaining chapters go to the core problem: the politics of the Brazilian church hierarchy. Bosl never anchors the discussion in the context of romanized church doctrine, however, and thus misses the opportunity to deepen the analysis. The short third chapter on the lack of clerical involvement in the liberation of slave children in 1871 contrasts the positions of bishops and prominent abolitionists on the church’s role in the genesis of the free-womb law. Bosl refers to the church’s conflict with Brazilian liberals over freemasonry and ultramontane reorientation, locates the question of abolition between these ideological fronts, and concludes that “[a]n objective recognition and a real interest in the situation of the enslaved population did not take place under these circumstances” (p. 335). This appears apologetic in light of her evidence, in particular Joaquim Nabuco’s disgust at the church’s decision to prioritize economic interest and self-preservation over humanistic ideals. Bosl touches upon the importance of neo-Thomism and identifies the “collision of interests between the right to freedom and the right to property (also in people) as a contradiction that is difficult for our modern sensibilities to resolve” (p. 156). She never attempts to solve this historical puzzle, however, despite the paramount importance of property doctrine in explaining the hierarchy’s silence. The sixth chapter covers the bishops’ late, opportunistic conversion to the abolitionist cause, and Bosl highlights the church’s failure to develop a “social consciousness” for the fate of the Afro-Brazilians after abolition. To assess the kind and extent of social consciousness one could expect the Catholic Church to display in the 1880s, it would have been indispensable to discuss the Roman context. The Vatican first addressed social questions in Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On the Condition of Labor”), the fruit of a decade of debate among Catholic social reformers. The encyclical described the “yoke of the laboring poor as little better than that of slavery itself” (Art. 3), suggesting that Vatican politics played a role in the Brazilian hierarchy’s sudden shift on abolition.Bosl’s study provides a good introduction to the history and historiography of slavery in Brazil for German readers, although those familiar with Brazilian and U.S. scholarship will find her bibliography dated. The parts on the history of Catholic institutions in São Paulo are interesting, as is the conclusion that the church played hardly any role in the abolitionist movement. Still, to fully answer the title question would have required more context. Bosl’s study also illustrates why inspiration by liberation theology, common in recent historiography, is a problematic starting point for understanding the earlier history of the Catholic Church in Latin America. Portraying its history from 1850 to 1960 as a mere prelude to Vatican II downplays the romanized church’s deep-rooted social and political conservatism, often in alliance with the extreme political right, and obscures the origins of liberation theology.

Afro-Cuban religions

African cults and religions enrich all aspects of Cuba's social, cultural and everyday life, and encompass all ethnic and social groups. Politics, art, and civil events such as weddings, funerals, festivals and carnivals all possess distinctly Afro-Cuban characteristics. Miguel Barnet provides a concise guide to the various traditions and branches of Afro-Cuban religions. He distinguishes between the two most important cult forms - the Regla de Ocha (Santeria), which promotes worship of the Oshira (gods), and the traditional oracles that originated in the old Yoruba city of Ile-Ife, which promote a more animistic worldview. Africans who were brought to Cuba as slaves had to recreate their old traditions in their new Caribbean context. As their African heritage collided with Catholicism and with Native American and European traditions, certain African gods and traditions became more prominent while others lost their significance in the new Afro-Cuban culture. This book, the first systematic overview of the syncretization of the gods of African origin with Catholic saints, introduces the reader to a little-known side of Cuban culture.

Evidence that ibogaine releases dopamine from the cytoplasmic pool in isolated mouse striatum.

We measured the effect of ibogaine on the tritium efflux from isolated mouse striatum preloaded with [3H]dopamine ([3H]DA). Ibogaine increased the basal tritium outflow in a concentration-dependent manner, but it was without effect on electrical stimulation-induced tritium overflow. Separation of the released radioactivity after ibogaine administration showed that this drug increased the release of [3H]DA and [3H]-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid ([3H]DOPAC), but the efflux of O-methylated-deaminated metabolites was not changed. The dopamine (DA)-releasing effect of ibogaine was reduced by the DA uptake inhibitors cocaine and nomifensine. The tritium efflux evoked by ibogaine was not altered by omission of Ca2+ from the perfusion buffer or by inhibition of the voltage-sensitive Na+ channels with tetrodotoxin. Ibogaine maintained its effect on release from superfused striatum prepared from reserpine-pretreated mice. The ibogaine-induced tritium release measured from mouse striatum that was preloaded with [3H]DA was not affected by the D-2 DA receptor ligands (-)-quinpirole and (+/-)-sulpiride, indicating that the ibogaine-induced release is not subject to presynaptic autoreceptor regulation. Ibogaine failed to affect [3H]DA uptake and retention in mouse striatum. These data indicate that at the nerve terminal level ibogaine releases DA, and the primary source for the release is probably the cytoplasmic pool. The DA-releasing effect of ibogaine may have importance in mediation of its hallucinogenic action, as seen in a frequent practice in African cults.

Women's Medicine, the Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and beyond

Despite the large-scale destruction of traditional practices throughout the world, the Zar-Bori spirit-healing cult continues to hold tremendous meaning for some women in West Africa, the Sudan and North Africa, and even in the more progressive countries such as Tunisia, Kuwait, Egypt and the Gulf States. This study uses historical, anthropological and psychiatric methods to explore the social history of this growing cult and its significance for women in different places and times. It asks how and why the cult has persisted to the present day, and throws light on the environments in which it thrives. The largest indigenous African cult concerned primarily with women's matters, the Zar-Bori has survived the fundamentalist challenge and creeping modernization, yet it is in many ways a subversive movement. This aims to be a comprehensive account of its origins, spread and increasing importance in the lives of African women.

Central African Cults Guardians of the Land: Essays on Central African Territorial Cults. Edited by J. M. Schoffeleers, with a foreword by T. O. Ranger. Gwelo: Mambo Press, 1979. Pp. xi + 315. Not priced.

Central African Cults - Guardians of the Land: Essays on Central African Territorial Cults. Edited by J. M. Schoffeleers, with a foreword by T. O. Ranger. Gwelo: Mambo Press, 1979. Pp. xi + 315. Not priced. - Volume 23 Issue 2

The New Religions of Africa.

This volume is an important and original collection of firsthand field reports and essays on contemporary African cults and churches. Using comprehensive ethnographic information, this volume focuses on the importance of religion as an agent and symbol of social change in emerging African nations, and the changing roles of gender in African society.

The Present State of African Cults in Bahia

The Present State of African Cults in Bahia

Dramatic Elements in Ritual Possession

The phenomenon of “possession” continues to elude satisfactory explanation because of the ambiguity of its nature. It belongs to one of those marginal zones where beliefs and rites are allied in the closest possible way to still obscure psychological mechanisms. We know that the phenomenon dates from antiquity, and that in numerous so-called primitive societies it is one of the means by which the faithful communicate with the supernatural. Our object is to offer a contribution to the clarification of this ambiguity by an analysis of the forms and functions of the trance in voodoo. This term, originating in Dahomey (in Fon, a voodoo is a god or spirit), denotes the ensemble of religious beliefs and practices observed on the fringes of Catholicism by the common people of Haiti. It is a syncretic religion in which elements from West Africa predominate, although other African cults have left their mark; however, this religious amalgam was impregnated from the beginning with Catholic beliefs and rites. The practice; of voodoo is not limited to Haiti. Under such names as macumba, candomblé, santeria, it is found in Brazil and in Cuba, where the Negroes, closer to the period of slavery, have conserved African traditions more completely than in Haiti. Observations made in Brazil can help to explain certain aspects of possession which, in Haiti, took an aberrant form.

Negro Poetry in the Americas

[Author's Summary.-The Negro has written verse since colonial times. In North America his most characteristic expression is the spiritual and religious verse based on the Bible. But in Latin America his religious verse is based on African cults, and there is nothing comparable to the North American Negro spirituals. The Latin American Negro's love of rhythm finds expression in song and dance, and these rhythms have been used by the new poets, notably Nicolas Guillen.]

The Structure of African Cults in Bahia

The Structure of African Cults in Bahia