Search

The Xangô religion of Recife is a the cult of the orixás, gods of West African (mainly Yoruba) derivation syncretized with the saints of Lusitanian popular Catholicism. The essential act of the cult consists of sacrifice and feasting: animal slaughter, during which the faithful sing, dance and experience trances. The cult characteristics imply a whole set of responses to environmental pressures of various kinds, with oppositions of a dialectical character between the community and domination; the initiate as a ritual son and the initiate as a client; the meat and the feast; and the sacrifice and the party. In other words, between the practical requirements of culture and its surplus that transpires as the feast and as the holy and the beautiful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, a number of African American writers, including Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Danzy Senna, and Elizabeth Alexander, have developed literary works around Brazilian spiritual, cultural, and social formations. Advancing within a hemispheric context Houston Baker's concept of an “oceanic critical consciousness,” this article examines how narrative representations of Candomblé in Toni Morrison'sParadise(1997) prompt acts of self-reconstruction that penetrate the national borders framing certain notions of African American identity in the post-Civil Rights era. The author argues for greater recognition of the abiding yet often ambivalent transnationality of African American identity and its employment, particularly by women writers, in contemporary African American literature. The article suggests that African American literature and U.S. blackness in general must be resituated in global terms and that one way of doing so is through the figure of the woman spiritually reconstituted through transnationally rooted practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article the author explores the ways in which Catholic, evangelical, and Candomblé actors produce competing framings that shape encounters taking place in the city of Cachoeira in the Brazilian state of Bahia. The framing of Cachoeira as a site of heritage tourism – one where local religious practices are read as part of the African heritage and attractions for African American ‘roots tourists’ – obscures as much as it reveals. This is not to suggest that this framing is entirely inaccurate or to deny that many visitors themselves describe their trips to Bahia this way. But I contend that the ‘heritage frame’ masks key issues that complicate diasporic encounters in Cachoeira, particularly different understandings of heritage and religion and their relationship to black identity that African Americans and Afro-Brazilians bring to these encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

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]

For decades, social scientists have seen money and religion in Brazil as two incompatible terms. In contrast, this article shows how money has always been present in Brazilian popular religion. This argument leads to a second point: a criticism of the interpretation of Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal churches as ‘money fetishists’, religions of neoliberalism and globalization. Neo-Pentecostals in Brazil appropriate money not just for economic ends, but also with the political project of Christianizing the country. More generally, the article introduces a different perspective both from the classical discourse on money as an agent of globalization and modernity on the one hand, and a more recent literature on the personalization of money and alternative currencies, on the other. In both the discourses on modernity and personalization, nation-states are increasingly marginal. But the nation is still very much at the centre of the Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal project. [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]

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]