Culture, Nation, and the Struggle for Black Atlantic

Religion
Roger Sansi

Journal of Africana Religions, Volume 6, Number 1, 2018, pp. 95-103 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/683886

Access provided by University Of Pennsylvania (17 Jul 2018 00:31 GMT)

 95  Roundtable: J. Lorand Matory’s Bl a c k At l an t ic Re l igio n

Culture, Nation, and the Struggle for Black

Atlantic Religion
ro g er sansi, Universitat de Barcelona

Abstract
In this paper, the author responds to J. Lorand Matory’s  paper,
“The Communal Stakes of Scholarly Debate: A Retrospective on the
Critical Reception of Black Atlantic Religion (2005)” and the influence
that Black Atlantic Religion has had in the field of African-Brazilian
studies.

Keywords: Candomblé, Afro-Brazilian culture, culture

Black Atlantic Religion has been unquestionably a very ­important book. In his
retrospective essay, the author, J. Lorand Matory, accounts himself for its high
impact, numerous citations, and awards. This retrospective essay is written as
a recursive example of one of the main arguments in the book: “that multiple
cross-cutting communities define themselves through their contrary definitions
of the same hypercathected social object.”1 The hypercathected social object
in this case is the book. This retrospective could be then “a case study in how
scholars of diverse social positionalities—with respect to nationality, gender,
race, and class—get similarly excited about but still differentially interpret the
same social phenomenon.”2 But then he withdraws from developing this case
study: “In order to avoid the appearance of any ad hominem response to the
book’s critics or admirers, my analysis here treads lightly on the matter of other
scholars’ biography and positionality, highlighting instead—and by way of
example—what is distinctive about my own life.”3 This is, I think, a quite unfair
move. If Matory really thinks that this is an interesting case study, and that his
critics interpret his book differently because of their social ­positionality, he
should develop his argument. I will come back to this point later.
Matory’s account of his background is interesting and certainly enlighten-
ing to understand his work and approach. He sees himself struggling for the
possession of the sign, just like the people who are at the core of the book,
exercising his strategic agency to build an argument from the point of view
of his own social positionality. This is not a very orthodox understanding of

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what social research should be, at least in the Weberian tradition of Science as
a Vocation (2004), given that he claims to be a Weberian.4 But I understand his
perspective. Matory is not afraid to show that he is helping to build a particular
community through his work. He proves to be a very honest scholar, a quality
that should not be underestimated.
However, my impression after reading the whole retrospective is that,
even for Matory himself, it is not clear that he has won the struggle for the
sign. Following the bellic metaphors, it may be partially because he has chosen
the wrong strategy. After the initial withdrawal (“my critics speak from their
social positionality, and that is interesting, but I will not talk about it”) Matory
spends many, many pages refuting his critics one by one, sometimes in groups
or two or three. While reading, I was wondering what a reader who does not
know the sources would think about this narrative. If you mention three, four,
five scholars who made the same criticism, arguably from different positions,
at the end, however convincing your argument is, the reader may suspect that
maybe they have a point. Throughout the text Matory engages in battle against
everyone else, one after another, like his Orisha Ogun cutting a path through
the forest. The final picture is a bit exhausting and uncertain. After the battle,
after defeating an army single-handedly, the warrior stands alone. So who is
going to celebrate his victory? Did we get out of the forest at all?
If I may, I think that a different strategy would have been preferable for this
retrospective: one that would have assessed the influence of the book in more
affirmative terms. Not just to mention its influence, but actually to explain its
influence: which new arguments have been built upon it, how far they have
extended its conclusions, and which new perspectives have been developed in
the field, beyond the book. Many books and articles on Candomblé and the
Black Atlantic have been published in the last ten years, many of them influ-
enced by Black Atlantic Religion. That could include, for example, some of my
work, such as Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic and Sorcery in the Black
Atlantic.5 We have missed the opportunity to describe a landscape in which
Black Atlantic Religion does not stand alone, as an inexpugnable fortress against
its critics, but flows in the work of other scholars.
At this point I guess I should go back to my particular place in the nar-
rative of the retrospective. Returning to the question of social positionality,
Matory first mentions my name together with that of Luis Nicolau, saying
en passant that we are “Iberian.” To be honest, I am not sure what Matory
implies by it: maybe nothing, just a poetic substitute for Spaniard. Maybe it is
an acknowledgment that both Nicolau and I, born in Barcelona, are perhaps
uncomfortable being called Spaniards because we are Catalans, whose struggle
for independence may be more or less known to the other side of the Atlantic.

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Or perhaps it could be a way of associating us with the Portuguese, who are

not only Iberian but the colonizers of Brazil and, like Spaniards, slave traders
for centuries in the Atlantic. I take no offense in being called Iberian—actually,
I find it amusing—but it is a good example of the way that Matory is treading
lightly on the issue of other scholars’ identities and positionalities, so lightly
that it is not clear if he is ironical, critical, laudatory, or simply descriptive.
Perhaps it would be better if he explained how exactly my social positionality
affects my relationship to the hypercathected social object. Otherwise, this
light use of names is ambiguous, like the term “gringo” being applied to Matory
himself. In Bahia, “gringo” is a blank descriptive for foreigners, American or
not, white or not. Both Matory and I could be called gringos in Bahia.
Both of us being gringos in Bahia, and both being anthropologists, Matory
and I have been to the same places and have met many of the same Candomblé
people, including Mãe Stella de Oxossi and the one he calls Pai Francisco,
even if that is not his actual name. The Candomblé that he has seen is indeed
the same Candomblé that I have seen, even if he thinks it is simply not. It
is indeed a world of intense competition for prestige, like he says, in which
conflicts over hierarchy are common. I never wrote or said that Candomblé
“functions entirely in a realm of otherworldly African-inspired values exempt
from the priests’ desire for wealth and status for themselves and the collec-
tives they lead,” that it was an “otherworldly antipode of Western capitalism,”
“a religion free from the influence of class society and . . . its priests immune
to materially and politically interested conduct.”6 What I wrote in Fetishes and
Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century, or in any of my
other publications on that subject, was quite different.7 Since Matory does
not seem to have read the book thoroughly, I will have to explain it briefly.
In Fetishes and Monuments I was interested in understanding how Candomblé
was objectified as Afro-Brazilian culture in the twentieth century. I addressed
Afro-Brazilian culture not as a given culture, in the anthropological sense, but
as an institution built in the restricted sense of the term “Culture” and cultural
policy, with its objects and subjects: museums, heritage sites, works of art,
intellectuals, artists, and so on. I described Afro-Brazilian culture as a historical
object that was formed throughout the twentieth century. I addressed this his-
tory within the cultural history of Brazil, in which a new modernist narrative
of national culture emerged, and a new set of cultural institutions and policies
were formed between the 1930s and the 1960s.
The formation of Afro-Brazilian culture is an interesting case because it
may not exactly fit the general modernist narrative of Brazil as a miscegenated
country. One of the reasons to explain this apparent contradiction is the narra-
tive of “African purity” of the Candomblé of Bahia. I explain this ­particularity

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in my book as a transformation from being objectified as “sorcery” to being

objectified as “culture.” I agree with Matory in saying that the discourse of
African purity is anterior to the Brazilian intellectual project of ­miscegenation.
In fact, it can be identified in the work of ethnographers of previous gen-
erations, such as Nina Rodrigues, who worked within a racialist framework
and who was a direct interlocutor of some of the main characters in Matory’s
narrative, such as Martiniano de Bonfim.8 Actually, the discourse of African
purity fitted perfectly into a racialist framework. For Rodrigues, the “Yorubas”
were the superior race within the Africans, those who had a more elaborated
religion and managed to maintain it better. Other Africans, on the other hand,
would have forgotten their religion and mixed it with Catholicism.
The superiority of the Yorubas and their religion was also an argument
used against accusations of sorcery. African religious practices in Brazil had
historically been identified as forms of sorcery and prosecuted by the police.9
One of the objectives of Rodrigues, in spite of his racism, was to defend these
religions from sorcery accusations. As forms of sorcery, African religious prac-
tices were described in newspapers and novels as fraudulent schemes through
which mischievous Africans would dupe honest white people, not only enrich-
ing themselves but also dominating their minds and bodies.10 The practices
of sorcerers were by definition superstitious, mixed, impure, and false.11 To
counteract these persecutions, prejudices, and fears, African religious practi-
tioners had to enact various strategies, besides relying on powerful patrons:
for example, promoting an image of their practice as a “pure religion,” not as
mixed and superstitious sorcery. The “pure African religion” of the Yorubas
had to distinguish itself from other forms of “African religion” that were not
pure, and were not even worth being considered religion, but sorcery, building
a hierarchy based on whether religious practices were more or less African.
Thus, other forms of African religious practice were despised or ignored for
the sake of the superior Yorubas. Scholars like Rodrigues contributed to the
construction of this discourse, giving it public visibility as “science.”
Now, how does this discourse fit into the Brazilian national modernist nar-
rative of miscegenation? In fact, it does not fit very well, as Matory says. The
discourse of miscegenation and racial democracy is not based on separation
and hierarchy but unification and equality. In logical terms, the form of African
religion that would better fit into the national discourse of miscegenation was
Umbanda, which is a truly accumulative, unifying religion. And social scien-
tists until the 1970s, such as Bastide and Ortiz, thought that Umbanda in the
long run would overcome Candomblé.12
But that wasn’t the case. In the following decades, many Umbanda temples
became Candomblé temples. Candomblé was becoming increasingly popular

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among the middle classes.13 Why? Perhaps Candomblé was more prestigious
because it was a form of “Culture.” Since the time of Rodrigues, the Candomblé
of Bahia, in particular the Yoruba houses, had maintained a particular ­relation
with intellectuals, social scientists, writers, and artists—both Black and white,
Brazilian and international. They were not necessarily “converts” to Candomblé.
But they valorized its mythology, its art, its beauty, its philosophy—to sum up, its
“Culture,” its “heritage.” They worked for new institutions, universities, and muse-
ums that were promoting a new modernist vision of Brazilian society. They col-
laborated with the people of Candomblé in building “Afro-Brazilian culture.” This
may appear to contradict the discourse of miscegenation, but in fact this discourse
was increasingly under criticism since the 1960s, giving way to the multicultur-
alism that was sanctioned in the Constitution of 1988.14 In the new multicultural
Brazil, Afro-Brazilian culture and Candomblé would occupy an important position.
In this process, people of Candomblé became cultural agents, artists, and
social scientists; they built museums, and Candomblé houses became recog-
nized as places of cultural heritage, not just of religious practice. Candomblé
people were able to travel back to Africa in cultural and diplomatic missions,
after decades in which the trade between the two coasts had almost vanished.
But the institution of culture has a very particular set of rules and ­values.
“Culture” as an institution is not a universal fact, but a rather recent and par-
ticular reality. Some of the rules and values of “Culture” fit very well into
Candomblé. Among these is the idea of heritage: of preserving a tradition in a
particular place, the house of Candomblé, which can then be recognized as a
space of heritage. But there are also some values of culture that are not so com-
patible with Candomblé, such as the value of the public, which argues that cul-
tural institutions and objects should be public, open, and available for everyone
to see. This is problematic, since the heritage and tradition of the Candomblé
house is, to a large extent, based on the value of the secret. I  explored this
paradox in particular through the material culture of Candomblé. I described
the vital force of Candomblé, axé, as a form of inalienable value that “acts as
a stabilizing force against change because its presence authenticates cosmo-
logical origins, kinship and political histories.”15 I never said that this vital
force is “otherworldly,” like Matory says,16 but it is very present in people and
things and places; the ensemble of the Candomblé house is called an axé. Axé
is both concept and thing. The shrines of Candomblé, where the “santos” live,
can be described as inalienable possessions, part and parcel of the totality that
is the axé. In this sense, they can be classified as objects of ­cultural ­heritage
and works of art, which are also, for the institution of “Culture,” inalienable
possessions. But there is a fundamental difference: cultural objects are essen-
tially public, while the Candomblé shrines are not. In fact, they are not exactly

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objects; they are not just the product of human work, like works of art, but
c­ ontain the “santos,” and they have agency. Hence, they cannot be easily
reduced to objects of cultural value.
In the long run, the increasing “culturalization” of Candomblé can also
result in a growing elitism. As Candomblé provides for intellectuals, artists,
gringos like Matory and me, and middle-class people in general, it appears
increasingly detached from the Black and poor people that live in the neighbor-
hoods around some of the more prestigious houses. Many of them have turned
to Neo-Pentecostalism, which, paradoxically, raises again the old accusations
of sorcery against Candomblé.
My book described this long historical process, with many turns, contradic-
tions, and different sets of agents. How does it relate to Black Atlantic Religion?
In my view, the main contribution of Matory’s book is bringing together
the anthropological and historical literature on Afro-Atlantic religions with
­theories of transnationalism, imagined communities (after Anderson), and the
Black Atlantic (after Paul Gilroy).17 By the way, I am a bit surprised that there
is no mention to Gilroy in the retrospective as a clear influence and precedent.
I agree, as I have said, with Matory’s thesis that discourses of “purity”
were not the product of modernist Brazilian intellectuals, but were present by
the late nineteenth century among Candomblé people themselves. The ques-
tion is what the consequences of these discourses of “purity” were. And here I
found Matory’s arguments about the “Black Atlantic nation” (the original title
of his book I think) less convincing. Are we really talking about “­nationalism”
when we are making arguments of African purity in Candomblé? How is this
“imagined community” or “nation” made concrete beyond the discourse of
religious purity? What constitutes a “nation” beyond the word, which, by the
way, was widely used by slave traders to identify their slaves rather than being
used to denote a sense of “nationalism”? Why did Yoruba nationalists choose
Candomblé, at a time when it was persecuted, to deploy this transatlantic
nation project? The answers to these questions were never really clear to me in
Matory’s argument, and remain unclear.
In Fetishes and Monuments I proposed to focus on notions of “culture” rather
than on concepts of “nation” or “imagined community.” I did so, first of all, because
the object that I encountered doing research was “Afro-Brazilian culture,” which
was clearly objectified in texts, objects, people, and places rather than a “nation”
or an “imagined community”; it was not just an ­ideology, but an institution. The
focus on Brazil is related to the particularities of the historical process. For many
decades in the twentieth century, the direct exchange and trade between Bahia
and West Africa was almost nonexistent. In that period, Bahia became a regional

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capital clearly turned toward Brazil.18 It was in that period that Afro-Brazilian
­culture was formed. And, in the second half of the twentieth century, it was
through the institutions of Afro-Brazilian culture that people of Candomblé were
able to return to Africa in cultural and diplomatic missions.
Being objectified as “Culture,” Candomblé obtained prestige and
­recognition, but this objectification also resulted in some paradoxes. I did not
argue that this objectification was the result of the strategic intentionality of
Candomblé people, nor of Brazilian or international intellectuals or artists.
Rather, it was a historical event to which different actors contributed in dif-
ferent ways, without knowing their precise outcomes. Of course I do not think
that Candomblé priests were dupes or clones, as Matory implies, but they were
part and parcel of the historical process like anyone else, and they had only a
partial view and partial control over what was happening. The resulting con-
tradictions of these processes of objectification are an example of this relative
(lack of) control. This partial view was a result of their “culture,” in the anthro-
pological sense: their own given background, their own set of values. A set of
values that they could not fully objectify because it was part of who they were,
not just what they had. And, again, that is true for all the social agents at play.
People preserve their culture because it is part of them, even if they are not
fully aware of it, not just because they can use it in a particular way. That is
what I meant when I questioned ideas of strategic agency and intentionality in
Matory’s work. Social actors are only in relative control of their culture, and
they can only instrumentalize it to a certain extent. The “culture” of Candomblé
(in the anthropological sense) could only be objectified as Culture (in the insti-
tutional sense) to a certain extent. Candomblé can be used for a nationalist
narrative, but that is only part of the story. I understand why Matory wants to
underscore the historical relevance of the social actors and why he insists on
the nationalist narrative, but I do not think that is the full story. On the other
hand, I was interested in bringing notions of agency further than Matory was
willing to—beyond the empowerment of particular subjects like Matory does;
beyond human agency actually, underscoring the resistance of things to certain
processes of objectification. To take one example, shrines resist being objec-
tified as works of art.19 This opening of the notion of agency does not deny at
all the agency of Candomblé priests. On the contrary, it only tries to address
all the complexity of a situation in which we encounter what I then called
“multiple systems of value,” different cultures, in the ­anthropological sense.
This discussion could be of interest for Matory if he wants to pursue his book
project on the problem of the “fetish,” in which things made by people become
the gods of the people who created them.20

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The discussion of the anthropological concept of “culture” is based on our

common professor at Chicago, Marshall Sahlins.21 And that takes me to the dis-
tinction between “culture” and “practical reason.” I never said that Candomblé
people “do not seek prosperity or profit. Nor do they compete for honor.”22 That
would contradict my narrative. I argue that Candomblé people were interested
in being objectified as Culture because that would give them prestige and would
enforce the superiority of “cultured” houses over houses without such recogni-
tion. Candomblé is a religion of vital force, axé, and this axé is expressed through
beauty, magnificence, wealth. That does not mean, however, that everything in
Candomblé is for sale. The wealth of Candomblé is built around aristocratic
principles of hierarchy and reproduction. The axé of a house can grow, but the
hierarchical principle of the house is based on unity; it should not be dilapi-
dated or severed. In other terms, a Candomblé house belongs with, it does not
only belong to the priest or pai de santo of the house. But that does not preclude
the pai de santo from being wealthy, nor does it prevent rituals from being very
expensive. On the opposite, such extravagence shows the greatness of their axé.
If I mentioned Sahlins’s idea of a “functionalism of power” (from Waiting
for Foucault, not from Culture and Practical Reason!) in reference to Matory’s
work, it was not at all in terms of economics, but of the particular politics of
Matory’s argument.23 What I said literally was that “social reality is seen only
as a function of certain political projects, strategically using the elements at
hand (like religion), which are seen by the social actors only as instruments
to attain their goals, in a ‘functionalism of power.’ It is as if the only kind of
­legitimate social ‘value’ that could justify social action were nation building.”24
From what Matory has repeated in his retrospective, he sees his work as
serving a very clear purpose, as having a function. This function, from what I
see, is political: to help define a particular imagined community, a nation, to
win the struggle for the possession of the sign. I understand that position, but I
find it limiting. The paradox of such a politics is that, in seeking to empower the
nation, one can fall into a reductionist narrative instead of recognizing that not
everything fits. We all fall into that trap sometimes, but I think it is our duty as
fellow scholars to let our colleagues know when they have gone a little bit too
far down their battle trail. Especially when, to defend their possession of the
sign, they put in the mouth of their colleagues words that they have never said.

Notes
1. J. Lorand Matory, “The Communal Stakes of Scholarly Debate: A Retrospective on
the Critical Reception of Black Atlantic Religion (2005),” Journal of Africana Religion
6, no. 1 (2017), 52.

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2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Max Weber, Max Science as Vocation (New York: Free Press, 1946).
5. Nancy Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and Dave Treece, eds., Cultures of the Lusophone
Black Atlantic (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007); and Luis Parés and Roger
Sansi, eds., Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
6. Matory, “Communal Stakes,” 62, 77, 78.
7. Roger Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th
Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
8. Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, O Animismo Fetichista dos Negros Bahianos (Rio de
Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1906).
9. Yvonne Maggie, Medo do Feitiço. Relações entre magia e poder no Brasil (Arquivo
Nacional Rio de Janeiro, 1992).
10. Xavier Marques, O feiticeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1975 [1897]).
11. Parés and Sansi, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic.
12. Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978); and Renato Ortiz, A morte Branca do Feiticeiro Negro (Petrópolis:
Vozes, 1978).
13. Luciana Duccini, Diplomas e Decás: Identificação Religiosa de Membros de Classe Média
no Candomblé (Salvador: EDUFBA, 2016).
14. In the 1988 Constitution, the first point of article 215 on “cultural heritage” declares:
“The State will protect manifestations of popular, indigenous and ­Afro-Brazilian
cultures, and the other groups’ participation in the national civilising process”
(Brazilian Constitution, 1988, art. 215.1).
15. Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 9.
16. Matory, “Communal Stakes,” 77.
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
18. Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact in Bahia (Urbana: Illinois
University Press, 1942).
19. Roger Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th
Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
20. Parés and Sansi, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic.
21. Marshall D. Sahlins, Culture in Practice (New York: Zone Books, 2000).
22. Matory, “Communal Stakes,” 77.
23. Marshall D. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976); and Sahlins, Waiting for Foucault (Cambridge, Mass.: Prickly Pear, 1994).
24. Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments, 75.

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