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Copyright of Intersecoes: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Latin American state efforts to recognize ethnically and racially marked populations have focused on knowledge and expertise. This article argues that this form of state recognition does not only call on subaltern groups to present themselves in a frame of expertise. It also pushes such groups to position themselves and their social and political struggles in a matrix based on expertise and knowledge. In the context of early 2000s Brazil, the drive to recognition led activists from the Afro‐Brazilian religion Candomblé to reimagine the religion's practitioners' long‐term engagements with scholars and scholarly depictions of the religion as a form of epistemological exploitation that had resulted in public misrecognition of the true source of knowledge on the religion: Candomblé practitioners. To remedy this situation, the activists called on Candomblé practitioners to appropriate the "academic's tools," the modes of representation by which scholarly expertise and knowledge were performed and recognized by the general public and state officials. This strategy transformed religious structures of expertise and knowledge in ways that established a new, politically efficacious epistemological grounding for Candomblé practitioners' calls for recognition. But it also further marginalized temples with limited connections or access to scholars and higher education. [politics of recognition, politics of expertise, state recognition, Candomblé religion, Brazil] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migratory phenomena and global flows have changed the religious diversity in Europe. The resulting processes of accommodation of religions and practices within new social contexts are characterized by complex dynamics of preservation/adaptation of religious elements. This paper aims to discuss the ways Afro-Brazilian religions, specifically Candomblé Ketu, have been introduced into and adapted within an Italian context. Based on fieldwork that took place in 2013-2016, it analyzes the religious/spiritual paths of Italian practitioners in order to understand how they approach Candomblé and how their observance of both Afro-Brazilian religions and so-called therapeutic practices promote dialogues and re-significations of some religious/spiritual elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Candomblé rituals from the perspective of human-environment relations, taking into account not only human followers, but also animals, plants and artifacts that are necessary for the making of Candomblé terreiros. While this process of interaction between different realms is codified by strict rules and prescriptions, it also adapts according to the environment where the Candomblé community is located. Drawing from fieldwork data collected in a Candomblé terreiro that has been active in Italy for almost two decades, this paper aims at presenting the challenges and adaptations of the religious practice in different natural landscapes. By taking into account the spatial composition and the material culture involved in the Italian terreiro and its references in Brazil, this work re-thinks how Candomblé practitioners relate to the cultural and ecological environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A paper which describes the everyday life of religious shrines in the city of Cachoeira in Bahia, Brazil, how people relate to them and how they work, is presented. Topics covered include how the festa, sacred objects and images of Catholicism, Candomblé and even Spiritism are brought together in the ritual performed at the Ogun shrine during the festival of Saint Anthony, altars and secrets in Candomblé and magic and images in popular Catholicism.

The text of a public lecture delivered by Valdina Oliveira Pinto, a teacher and practitioner of the philosophical and healing traditions of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé, at the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Denver in April 2011. Topics include Pinto's personal history with Candomblé, reflection on the environmental consciousness embedded in the religion and role of Candomblé in the preservation of African-based ritual resources in Brazil.

This article argues that scholarship on Umbanda (a distinctively Brazilian hybrid of Candomblé, Kardecist Spiritism, and popular Catholicism, with romanticized indigenous elements) manifests certain limitations that lead to insufficient emphasis on the religious tradition's internal doctrinal, ritual, and organizational variation. It compares the complex and ambivalent place of African traditions in Umbanda and Candomblé, highlighting the extent to which Umbanda has been seen as derivative, more distant from Africa. The article also notes other distorting factors such as cen/ros in the southeast of Brazil being considered normative, and scholars focusing inordinately on the question of the tradition's "birth." The case of Umbanda underlines the Brazilian context of Afro-Brazilian traditions, in contrast to an emphasis on transnationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the Brazilian religious landscape and an introduction to this special issue on new religious movements in Brazil. I stress how, the Brazilian religious landscape, although often imagined as a place of religious syncretism and cultural mixture, is crosscut by an array of boundaries, tensions and antagonisms, including ones grounded in race and class. The article outlines the major topics and problems taken up by the contributors to this issue, including appropriation across lines of race, ethnicity and class; the growing influence of evangelical Christianity in Latin America and beyond; esoteric religious practice in the late modern era; and questions of purity and authenticity, syncretism and anti-syncretism. Through their engagement with these themes, the articles in this issue contribute to a number of important discussions that relate not only to the study of religion in Brazil but to the study of new religious movements in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I seek to update and deepen the conversation about female same-sex sexuality in Candomblé through description and analysis of the ethnographic data that I have gathered in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil for the past ten years. Instead of focusing on the topic of male same-sex sexuality in the religion, which has been studied internationally by numerous scholars since the late-1930s, I concentrate on black lesbians' experiences in Quêto houses of Candomblé in Salvador. In the article, I argue that lesbians find different forms of affirmation in Candomblé than do gay men; these differences stem from certain theological and hierarchical aspects of the religion and from the influence of Brazilian gender and sexual ideologies on the religion. Unlike gay men, who find affirmation both as men and men who have sex with other men, lesbians are only affirmed as women and not as sexual beings in this purportedly matriarchal religion. This analysis of black lesbians' encounters with Candomblé also highlights the inability of present-day academic discourses about same-sex sexuality, which typically focus on men's behavior, to describe adequately the lived experiences of black lesbians in Brazil, and throughout the African Diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the presence of "images" in the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé In many traditional houses of Candomblé it is often said that it is not allowed to photograph or film rituals. On the other hand, in recent years, the presence of Catholic and other figurative images in Candomblé shrines has been questioned by recent "purification" movements--often led by these traditional houses--who fight syncretism, separating Catholicism from African religion. Still, in many cases figurative images are present in shrines, and rituals are photographed and filmed. This article argues that, beyond syncretism, images in Candomblé are contentious because they can be powerful: they can be indexes of the presence of Candomblé santos, they can become instances of a "distributed person." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors will present findings from a phenomenological study exploring the healing experiences of favela residents who utilize Candomblé as a psychospiritual intervention for traumatic response to neocolonial conditions. Findings have transnational implications for understanding Afro-Brazilian spiritual methods of resisting colonialism and the cultural genocide that plagues Diasporic Africans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes to analyse ideological discourses in places of Afro-Brazilian worship (terreiros) in Portugal. Largely inspired as they are by lusotropicalism, they see Portugal, Africa and Brazil as a united religious and cultural community. In this view, Portugal takes on a special role for many Portuguese initiates, and the birth of Afro-Brazilian religions is seen as being a positive result of colonisation. In the terreiros, claims are heard to Portugal's “African heritage” derived from longstanding contact between Africans and Portuguese and which could give rise to the “Portuguese africanity” of Candomblé and Umbanda. Underlying this re-writing of history are the political issues of the transnationalisation of the Afro-Brazilian religions in Portugal, a country which must legitimise the great expansion in practices from its main former colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with the axiom that, for anthropology, the only relevant epistemologies and ontologies are those offered by the peoples we work with, this article offers a sketch of the current debate around the once famous ideas of 'fetish' and 'fetishism'. Focusing on the way that this debate has been extended in studies of Afro-Brazilian religions, the argument employs fieldwork and bibliographic data from one of these religions, candomblé, in order to present a native theory of the creative process underlying what has been baptized with the strange names 'fetish' and 'fetishism'. In short, this native theory holds that the creative process consists more in the actualization of already existing virtualities contained in beings and objects in the world than in the model of ex nihilo production, which is characteristic of our dominant Judeo-Christian and capitalist cosmologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spirituality has been an influential force for many people. Although often ignored in business settings, it has recently been a topic of heightened interest to managers and scholars worldwide. In Bahia, Brazil, the fundamentals of spirituality for some have existed through Candomble and have been an integral part of the community including the workplace. Candomble encompasses a variety of African religious traditions established in Brazil during the nineteenth century. This study examines the positive influences of the Brazilian Candomble on workers and business life in Bahia. Through qualitative analysis, it offers organisational insights and managerial reflections that can be adapted and used in workplaces worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the interweaving of the traditional, the modern, and the postmodern into the practice of Candomblé, an African-derived religion of Brazil. Multiple and competing perspectives on what is traditional or legitimate Candomblé practice coexist today. Over the course of the twentieth century, such claims about authenticity have been staked by an increasingly wider variety of agents—including government officials, social activists, college professors, and tour guides—and have been mediated by an expanding array of means of representation, including television and the Internet. Here I examine some of the ways that candomblecistas have actively responded to and shaped the shifting context in which they practice their religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of its history, candomblé was a marginal and persecuted spirit possession cult. From the 1920s onward, however, the cult evolved into the "trademark" of Bahia, a state in northeastern Brazil The color white--a spotless and impeccable white--has come to dominate the public face of the cult: evoking positive connotations such as cleanliness and purity, the color helped to portray candomblé as the splendid cultural heritage of the Bahian state as well as a respectable African religion. However, the "politics of white" has always been intersected by a "poetics of white," as Bahian artists, writers, and other image producers sought to destabilize the condoned meanings of white. Hinting at that which is absent from the impeccable surfaces of candomblé's public appearance, this "poetics of white" produced a layered public understanding of the cult. As people engage in speculations over the "true" candomblé that lies hidden behind its public façade, claims to be "in the know" reconfigure the notion of cultural capital, and new standards of belonging come into being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the effects of new media technologies, such as televisions and videos, on religious imaginations on Bahian candomblé cult in Brazil. The authorities within the cult said that media technologies is in complete opposition with authentic traditional religion. A discussion on the video productions already made had revealed that the cult community members are modern media consumers. Television has become an authenticating and authorizing agent in the religious field.

Through the presentation and analysis of a prototypical medium- ship narrative, this article shows how individuals initiated into the Candomblé religion of north-eastern Brazil come to alter their own self-narratives by learning and internalizing the cultural model for an established social/religious role: that of the medium. As individuals come to identify with this 'role model,' they are able to reinterpret their own life histories in terms of the model's structure and its symbolic content. This article also demonstrates how the social articulation and cognitive internalization of this new self-narrative act therapeutically, to foster a positive transformation in self-understanding that facilitates positive behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious systems brought over by African slaves in Brazil gave rise, especially throughout the 19th century, to Candomblé and other modalities of worship of African deities, especially of Yoruba deities known as orishas. This article seeks to provide a general description of Candomblé, of its main orishas, initiation rites and view of the world. It also proposes an interpretation of the fact that this Afro-Brazilian religion is no longer an ethnic religion exclusive to the black population, but a universal religion, without racial, ethnic or geographical barriers, a religion that congregates followers of all racial and social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of history on the religious culture of Salvador, Bahia in Brazil. Due to its slaveholding past, African heritage is prominent in the state of Bahia and Afro-Brazilian religious cults permeate the city life, particularly in Salvador. The candomblé religion has an especially strong following. The author thoroughly describes a candomblé ceremony with the intent to convey and explain the spiritual beliefs behind the rituals and dispel the notion that cult members perform such demonstrations for the entertainment of tourists.