Brazilian Candomble Research Articles

The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make by J. Lorand Matory

Reviewed by: The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make by J. Lorand Matory Kwaku Nti Matory, J. Lorand. The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. The Fetish Revisited is rooted in the phenomenology of religion in general as well as the author's own religious experiences. The overwhelming religious theme notwithstanding, J. Lorand Matory demonstrates an impressive intellectual and analytical power throughout his exposition in this book as he delves into some aspects of Western systems, social theory, ethnological schadenfreude, and lopsided ambivalence in central Europe. He discusses the commutative nature of the history, meaning, and implication of fetishism, especially as used by Europeans in reference to Africans. According to the author, the word fetish, which generally conjures images of "a progressive Europe and a regressive other" (xi), originated on the West African littoral when European and African traders disagreed on issues regarding the value as well as agency of people and things. However, Matory is quick to remind us that this intercultural encounter between Africans and Europeans "was not the only early habitat of the fetish problem" (160). The murderous clash between European Protestants and Catholics, especially among the Germans and the Dutch during the Thirty Years' War is also mentioned as yet another intriguing instance. Matory points out that heirs to that legacy of disagreement on the West African coast, namely "Hegel, Marx, and Freud" (perhaps the list would have been fully fleshed out with the inclusion of European colonial authorities, missionaries, and scholars who operated in the selfsame locale), "consequently invoked materially embodied African gods—so-called fetishes—as the universal counterexamples of proper reasoning, commerce, governance, and sexuality" (xvi). But Matory reveals that other Westerners, such as contemporary practitioners of BDSM (bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism), embraced this word in "reimagining and refashioning their intimate relationships" (xvi). Simultaneously, he avers that priests of pan-African religions straddling Yoruba, Kongo, Cuban Santeria, Brazilian Candomble, and Haitian Voodou are equally heirs to the original "legacy of disagreement" that also went a long way to inspire "Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment discourse of the fetish in Europe" (xvi). According to Matory, all of these instances exhibit "a thing mediated, problem-solving struggle over who we humans are in our essence and how we are connected to other human beings" (xvii). Thus the seminal argument of this book is that the "the so-called fetishes of the Afro-Atlantic religions have counterparts in historical materialism, [End Page 143] psychoanalysis, . . . white American BDSM, and that each of these systems invests assertions about proper social order in certain physical props" (xvii). Matory reiterates that "contrary to the pretense of the colonial-era social evolutionism like Marx's and Freud's, Afro-Atlantic priests are their contemporaries . . . important thinkers, actors, and leaders in the circum-Atlantic world" (xvii). In the same vein, he argues that Marx and Freud were themselves intermediaries between ethno-racial groups and ranks in a hierarchical circum-Atlantic field. Furthermore, Marx, Freud, and Afro-Atlantic priests "are coeval and responsive to each other in real historical time, but the practice, the logic, and concomitantly, the material props of leadership differ in ways related to their different . . . circum-Atlantic field of power" (xvii). Matory again bluntly points out that contrary to conventional notions that European social theory is a disembodied and socially neutral articulation of truth, it is historically and socially positioned as well as materially embedded as any of the referent "other." In The Fetish Revisited both European social theories and African altars are "fetishes" as long as each is the articulation and materialization of contested proposals about how social relations should work. Nevertheless, Matory appends the caveat that his "application of the term 'fetish' to European social theories and Afro-Atlantic gods alike is comparative and heuristic, rather than derogatory, in its intent" (151). European social theories and African altars equally exhibit instantiations of material things that have been animated through contrary models of society and equally opposing personal expectations of people that have rival relationships with the material thing in question. Readers are confronted with the fact that these dialectical expectations include, but are not...

Paul Christopher Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa

Paul Christopher Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. 330. Cloth $50.00. Paper $24.95. Paul Christopher Johnson offers a rich articulation of the complexity of the African Diaspora in Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. In his previous works Johnson focused on Brazilian Candomble; here he explores the little-studied Black Carib religion of the Garifuna and explains how it challenges some preexisting conceptions of the African Diaspora. He argues not only that diasporic religious rituals and culture from the homeland are transferred to a different space, but also that they change and evolve as these practices move into different time periods and locations. He also explains the effects of a diaspora, or the movement of a diasporic religion from one homeland to a second--both outside of Africa. Finally, he shows that African diasporic religions vary in their emphasis on the influence of Africa as the homeland. Johnson compares groups of Garifuna practitioners in both Honduras and the Bronx, New York, to explain how diasporic connections to Africa were formed. While the island of St. Vincent serves as a homeland for both groups of Black Caribs, Johnson shows that the racial and cultural politics of New York City have drawn Garifuna practitioners into a close relationship with their African roots. Whereas homeland Garifuna practitioners in Honduras regard St. Vincent as their place of origin, whence the spirits return, U.S.-based Garifuna view three places--Honduras, St. Vincent, and, increasingly, Africa itself--as territorial sites of religious power. In this way Johnson explains that second diasporic religions bear the effects not only of migration within the Caribbean, but also their subsequent movement to the United States. Johnson extensively reviews existing scholarship on diasporas and religion, as well as the African Diaspora specifically. His definition of diasporas revolves around gaps in space, time, and memory, and thus broadens the relationship between geographic homelands and hostlands. African diasporic religions are those sets of religious discourses and practices that invoke Africa as a horizon of memory, authenticity, and sacred authority--whether Africa is physically known, imagined, or ritually created--and which consider the distance from that idealized place as a problem that is remedied by rendering the place as present in ritual. Thus, he explores important links among ritual spaces--St. Vincent, Honduras, and Africa--as well as the role of memory in the ritual practices of the Garifuna. Johnson then presents a brief history of the Black Carib people on St. Vincent and in Central America. He relies on European ship captains' personal letters to sketch these historical details and provides an insightful analysis of their perspectives. …

Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities

Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in Making of Transnational Communities. Durham, Duke University Press. 2004. 385 pp. 67 illustrations. Paper, $23.95. Kamari Maxine Clarke's Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in Making of Transnational Communities is a theoretical ethnographic study of Oyotunji Village, an intentional religious community in Beaufort, South Carolina. Founded in 1970 by Walter Eugene King, who later was crowned Oba Ofuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi I, after his initiation into cult of Ifa in Abeokuta, in western Nigeria. As political outgrowth of a separatist community during Civil Rights-Black Power movement and basically product of King's own racial consciousness and interpretation of his Orishavodu-centered black nationalism, Oyotunji Village emerged as an invented alternative New World culture, committed to invocation and reclamation of African ancestry, specifically Yoruba traditions. Its name, meaning literally awakens/rises again, is derived from ancient and powerful Old Oyo Empire of Yoruba in present-day western Nigeria. Despite its claimed conceptual frame of reference as primarily Yoruba, Oyotunji is an eclectic melange of African borrowings from Dahomean, Egyptian, Ashanti, and other cultures; and its origins and existence clearly an expression of 20th- and 21st-century black cultural nationalism. At core of long and illustrious history of black nationalist movements in 19th and 20th centuries are visions of, or outright calls for, formation of black identities and racial alliances outside African continent. The results of these formations and their widespread influences have provided ample research data for numerous studies and interesting theories by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists, religion scholars, and literary artists alike. The 19th century black nationalist ideas, championed by proponents such as Paul Cuffe, Martin Delany, Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry McNeal Turner and others, paved way for actions of 20th century black nationalists and movements such as Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association; W. E. B. Du Bois and Pan Africanism; Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, and Nation of Islam; and Black Panthers and Black Power movement. Notwithstanding various types of ideologies among its proponents, concept of black nationalism has spanned entire spectrum of emigrationism, Pan-Africanism, cultural, religious, economic, and political nationalism--each one a response to marginalization of African Americans in United States on basis of their African background. Not unlike every known nationalist movement or ideology, underlying principle and impetus for black nationalism is search for forms of self-definition, self-determination, and empowerment. While resulting search for African American roots and identity from 1960s to 1980s has taken many forms, from rhetoric to calls for physical and cultural separation, perhaps none has tasked imagination and generated such a range of reactions--from sheer curiosity to genuine interest--as much as phenomenon of spatial geographies and transnational revivalism which Oyotunji represents. Since 1960s Yoruba revivalism has flourished with the development of African-based religious diasporic movements such as Ashanti-Ghanaian, Haitian voodoo, Brazilian Candomble, and Yoruba orisa, effect of which has moved black cultural nationalism from margins. Noting slow emergence of serious scholarship on dynamics of memory and replication, Clarke has blazed trail in her innovative and sophisticated example of multi-sited data collection, preparation and apprenticeship, result of which is a fascinating chronicle of efforts made by a small band of U. …

Secrets, gossip, and gods: the transformation of Brazilian Candomble

Secrets, gossip, and gods: the transformation of Brazilian Candomble

Trance and Violence in Urban Brazil

James Wafer. The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomble. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. xii. 219 pp. (Winner of the Victor Turner prize for Ethnography, 1992.)Daniel Touro Linger. Dangerous Encounters: Meanings of Violence in. Brazilian City. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. + 289 pp.

The Book Review Section (Commentary, Reviews, Recent Publications)

The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, by Margaret Cruikshank. (New York: Routledge, 1992.)The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomble. by Jim Wafer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).Games of Venus: An Anthology of Greek and Roman Erotic Verse from Sappho to Ovid edited by Peter Bing and Rip Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1991. 279 pp. $28.95 hb.) and Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England:. Cultural Poetics by Bruce R. Smith. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.) 329+xii pp.$29.95 hb.

The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomble.

Candomble, a religion that traces its origins to West Africa, has become a major cultural force by adapting itself to the realities of contemporary Brazil. Spirit possession is an important feature of the rituals of this religion, and it also plays a significant part in the everyday lives of its adherents. The fact that Candomble is an essentially oral tradition means that it is difficult to understand if one attempts to separate it from the particular individuals who embody it. Accordingly, this study takes the form of a series of interlinked narratives that present the religion through the words, passions, actions and interactions of members, both spirit and human, of a small Candomble community on the outskirts of the city of Salvador da Bahia. The analytical commentary that is woven into these narratives focuses on the negotiation of boundaries within Candomble. The boundary between human and spirit realms has analogies with other boundaries - between individuals, between the sexes, between humans and animals, and between classes. These considerations provide the opportunity for reflection on anthropology's negotiation of the boundaries between cultures.

The taste of blood: spirit possession in Brazilian Candomble

The taste of blood: spirit possession in Brazilian Candomble

Sacred Leaves of Brazilian Candomble

Candomble religion diffused from the Yoruba area of West Africa to Bahia, Brazil, via the slave trade. Use of plants for spiritual and medicinal purposes is fundamental to the practice of Candomble. Religious leaders retained elements of their ethnoflora by importing Old World species and by using accidentally introduced weeds. Brazilian species were substituted, when it was not feasible to use African ones. The biogeographical similarity of the two distant areas facilitated successful diffusion of this African religion to the New World.