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This essay aims to focus on the concept of religion and its conceptual implications in the observation of African religions, taking the Yorùbá and Candomblé religious attitudes and beliefs as case studies. I intend to trace a new itinerary in the conceptualization of African religious experiences, using native structures as the setting for theory. I point out that African-Yorùbá religious experience is deeply merged with ritual practice – religion is made – and tied to a sense of origins and duties that must be fulfilled. In that vein, I present alternative categories to the classic ones of monotheism, polytheism, and pantheon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is presented here an ethnography of a celebration for the Yorùbá goddess Yemanjá in a Portuguese Candomblé temple named Ilé Alaketu Omo Iya Iyemoja Sobayin, also known as Candomblé of Barreiras. The pertinency of this text results from the evident particularities of the mentioned celebration, wherein religion and the ludic are interrelated, and the so-called Bahian authenticity dialogues with rites imported from the reafricanized São Paulo's Candomblé. Thereby, the case study constitutes an opportunity to revisit the concepts of normativity and reafricanization in Candomblé studies. At the same level, it allows us to think out of the box of classic categories of classification in order to better understand the dynamics in stake here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to analyze the construction of the yorùbá religious identity in two of the diaspora's historical moments. The first of these is the slave trade to Brazil, which gave rise to the "nàgó" identity in eighteenth-century Bahia de Todos os Santos. The second case-study refers to the contemporary yorùbá diaspora in Lisbon, which came about due to employment opportunities in the globalized labor market. The purpose of this article is to stress how an African culture has accommodated to new sociocultural contexts and entered into dialogue with exogenous elements. I conclude by examining the specific tools with which the yorùbá people operated an "invention of tradition". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]