(VAN de PORT, M.) Candomblé in Pink, Green and Black - Rescripting The AfroBrazilian Religious Heritage in The Public Sphere of Salvador, Bahia

M AT T I J S VA N D E P O RT
Candomblé in pink, green

and black. Re-scripting the
Afro-Brazilian religious heritage
in the public sphere of
Salvador, Bahia
Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession cult that will be discussed in this

essay, has been intensively studied by anthropologists. From the first ethnographic
explorations in late nineteenth-century Salvador by Nina Rodrigues (1935) to the
post-modern musings of Muniz Sodré (2002) on the contemporary significance of
candomblé, the tendency has been to highlight the African ‘genius’ that animates the
cult’s rituals and practices. However, the focus is invariably placed on what is distinctive
and singular about the cult, stressing how it differs from the world in which it operates
rather than how it is part of that world. The temple (terreiro) is often portrayed as a
universe on its own. In the pages that follow, I will argue that this approach obscures
candomblé’s thorough insertion into Bahian society, as well as the intricate ways in
which Bahian society is involved in the making of the cult. To underline my proposition
that a study of candomblé should no longer be confined to the temples of Salvador, I
propose to start in an appropriately unconventional place: a fancy beauty parlour called
Beleza Pura (‘pure beauty’) in a well-to-do neighborhood in Salvador.
It was there that Emerson had alerted me to an upcoming event in the famous
terreiro of a priestess called Mãe Stella. Emerson was my hairdresser, a guy in his early
thirties, born in the Bahian capital of Indian parents and raised in Madras, but happy to
be back in Brazil. Brazileirı́ssimo1 is how he liked to describe himself. At the occasion
of my second haircut he had already confessed that he was ‘from candomblé’. It struck
me that he wasn’t very secretive about his being an adept of the cult. He made no
attempt to lower his voice, nor did he look around nervously, as is often the case when
candomblé is talked about in public places.
Take, for example, his friend Toninho, who I also happen to know. Toninho worked
in a photography shop on Rua de Chile, the place where I would take my films to be
developed. We knew each other from some gay bars that we both frequented, and for
months he had seen me coming to pick up pictures related to the candomblé universe
(candomblé merchandise, statues of the orixás,2 altars, celebrations, and so on). While
we had even discussed some of the technicalities of these photographs and he had
1 The expression could be translated as ‘utterly Brazilian’.

2 Orixás are the spiritual entities around which the cult is centred.
Social Anthropology (2005), 13, 1, 3–26. © 2005 European Association of Social Anthropologists 3
DOI: 10.1017/S0964028204001077 Printed in the United Kingdom
commented on the ones that he liked, he had never given me a hint that he was an adept
of the cult. Only when I met him during a celebration in the terreiro of Pai João in the
Federação (a popular neighbourhood) did I learn about this fact. It appeared that he
was connected to the terreiro as an ‘ogã-of-the-knife’, meaning that he was in charge
of the killing of sacrificial animals.
‘So you have found out about our ekêdi’, Emerson joked when I told him about
my encounter [ekêdi being the female counterpart of the ogã]. I laughed. The image of
Toninho butchering goats and chickens with a knife hardly qualified for the attempted
feminisation. Then again, his depilated eyebrows and highly fashionable outfits seemed
incompatible with his ritual tasks. After having met him in the terreiro of pai João,
Toninho started to inform me about upcoming events in the world of candomblé when
we met in the shop. He would always do so in a highly discrete manner – making sure
none of his colleagues or clients could hear our conversation. ‘Há muito preconceito’,
he said when I asked him about his caution. ‘There is a lot of prejudice’.
It was Emerson who urged me to go to the upcoming event in Mãe Stella’s terreiro.
He gave me a newspaper, saying that I should read the announcement. ‘Come to the
opening night’, he said. It would be ‘very interesting’ for my research. Toninho would
also be there, and I might get to know some of his other friends. At home, I read
that there was going to be a Semana Cultural de Herança Africana na Bahia (Cultural
Week of the African Heritage in Bahia), and that a host of national and international
specialists in candomblé would be present. I clipped the announcement because it
was such a typical example of the rather servile way in which Salvadorian journalists
reproduce the discourse of the city’s leading terreiros, copying and translating Yorubá
terms, respectfully distinguishing between the religious traditions of the Angola, Jeje
and Ketu ‘nations’ so as to educate the general public, and stressing the solemnity and
importance of all that happens in the candomblé universe.3
I left the clipping on my desk, a bit in doubt as to whether or not I should go.
From what I read, this was going to be yet another utterly boring coming-together of
Salvador’s candomblé elite – people who organise a never-ending cycle of (often highly
self congratulatory) seminars, debates and fairs. But then again, my hairdresser was a
nice guy, and I figured it would be a good opportunity to meet Toninho and his other
friends.
When I got stuck in a traffic jam in São Gonçalo do Retiro, the peripheral
neighbourhood in which the terreiro of Mãe Stella is situated, I began to realise that my
assumptions about the upcoming event had been wrong. Things might well be different
this time. What must have been hundreds of cars were trying to make it to the opening
night of the Semana Cultural da Herança Africana na Bahia, impatiently honking their
horns, clogging up ill-lit roads and floodlighting street vendors, who ran from one car
to the next selling cashew nuts, beer and silicone bra-strings. Policemen were all around,
trying to control the traffic and monitoring the crowds, who entered the central square
of the terreiro’s compound in a steady stream.
The candomblé elite was there. I recognised some of the dreadlocked activists from
Oxumaré, a candomblé house with an activist profile, chic ladies with expensive afro-
print frocks and turbans and men dressed in Nigerian fashion, with wide, colourful
3 For an analysis of newspaper reports on candomblé in Bahian newspapers and the shifts in topics
over time, see Jocélio Teles dos Santos (2000: 68ff.)
4 M AT T I J S VA N D E P O R T
pants, kaftan-like shirts and little hats in matching prints. I soon spotted some of
the intellectuals and anthropologists who always show up at these events (the latter
probably commenting on my eternal presence in their field-notes). I also identified
some of the girls from the terreiro choir, who all boasted new, elaborately braided
hair-dos and wore identical wine-red dresses. The rest of the audience must have been
made up of a significant portion of the clients, members and affiliates of the Ilê Axé
Opô Afonjá temple and – judging from their plastic sandálias – a great number of
people from the local neighbourhood. As always, the place was full of gays, people like
my hairdresser Emerson (who had alerted me to the event) and his friends, having an
evening out, paying their respects to the temple, meeting up with friends and flirting a
bit with strangers.
On a raised platform behind a long table decorated with African fabrics, raffia,
palm leaves and dried pumpkins on a string, sat Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, high priestess
of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, with her honoured guests. The priestess was all dressed up
for the occasion. Her white turban, many coloured necklaces and white crinoline dress
sparkled in the spotlights – an exotic, queen-like figure, overshadowing the elderly
gentlemen in ties and suits who sat to her right and left: Gilberto Gil, the minister of
culture in the newly elected, leftist Lula government; Imbassahy, the mayor of Salvador;
and two well known anthropologists, Julio Braga and Vivaldo da Costa Lima.
The latter was reading out loud an article he had written for the occasion: something
about the Obás of Xangô, a council of twelve ‘ministers’ – a honorary function this
particular terreiro has introduced in the internal temple hierarchy. Da Costa Lima had
made it his task to highlight the authenticity of that move with detailed ethnographic
accounts from Africa. It went on and on and on, a stream of words that no one really
listened to, but that, as a play of sounds – Portuguese mingling with ‘African’ – sufficed
to convey that Bahia’s link with Yoruba culture was being celebrated here.
When Gilberto Gil finally took over the microphone, the chatting and muttering
audience quietened down. The new minister in the Lula government – flown in by
helicopter specially for the occasion, Emerson told me – reminded the audience that
he too was an obá, a minister of Xangô. Accepting his new job in Brası́lia, he said, had
been greatly facilitated by the fact that he had already been a minister ‘at this primary,
that is, the spiritual level’ long before achieving his current position as a minister of
state. He praised Xangô, that ‘great saint’, and expressed his deepest respect and the
respect of all the ministers and members of parliament in Brası́lia to Mãe Stella, to the
community of Axé, to the Roma Negra that is Salvador, to this Bahia, the ‘blessed
land of the Orixás’. Time and again, he received a standing ovation from the audience.
Television cameras pushed forward, trying to get as close as possible to the speaker.
People in the audience took pictures as well. A guy in front of me was recording the
event on his digital camera. Peeking over his shoulder on to the little LCD-screen he
held in front of him, I could see how he immediately zoomed in on Mãe Stella and
Gilberto Gil. Just once he widened the focus, but immediately corrected the image by
going back to a frame that showed only the priestess and the minister.
The opening of the Semana Cultural de Herança Africana na Bahia ended with
a presentation of ‘Xangô Awards’ to people whose outstanding support for the
community of candomblé deserved to be highlighted. It turned out to be a veritable
celebrity show as artists, scholars, actors and television personalities from within the
community of Axé handed over the sculpted statues to artists, scholars, actors and
television personalities from society at large.
C A N D O M B L É I N P I N K , G R E E N A N D B L A C K 5
All the while, Mãe Stella remained seated, nodding her turbaned head appreciatively
when the merits of the winners were proclaimed, and distributing vague smiles to no one
in particular. At one point she whispered something into the ear of Gilberto Gil, who
was sitting to her right. She also communicated something to the mayor of Salvador,
who was sitting to her left. But that was for us to see, not to hear, for she never addressed
the audience. No word of welcome and no word of gratitude. Nothing. Not a single
word came from her lips. ‘She’s very humble’ is what Emerson told me when I asked
him about her not saying a word. I knew what he was talking about. People would
always tell me, time and again, that Mãe Stella is such a humble woman. Common,
plain – humilde e simples – were the terms they would use. But that was not what I was
looking at during this opening night. Amid the hollow phrases and worn out clichés
that make up the soundscape of officialdom, Mãe Stella remained silent, a veritable
queen of the sacred, radiating a power and potency that put ministers, mayors and
academics in the shade.
I have tried to give a flavour of my research sites to introduce you to the topic
I want to discuss in this article: the circulation of candomblé (its symbols, aesthetics,
rhythms, philosophies and cosmovisions) through various circuits of Salvador’s public
sphere. The fact that in present day Salvador candomblé has made it to the worlds of
fancy hairdressers, politicians, entertainers, celebrities and intellectuals cries out for its
history to be told: the story of how a ‘primitive’ creed and worrisome reminder of
the continuous presence of African culture in the state of Bahia became transformed
into a highly esteemed part of the cultural heritage; how the solace and ultimate
relief of the poor and desperate became a venue at which the high and mighty
show off their dedication to Bahia’s age-old traditions; and how an invisible presence
that was whispered about in the shadowy corners of public life became a hyper-
exposed phenomenon in the spotlight of public attention. That history will have to
be told elsewhere, however. In this essay I want to focus on the consequences these
transformations ought to have for the study of the cult.
My description of the events in the temple of Mãe Stella indicates that the
boundaries between candomblé and society at large are highly permeable: in Salvador
candomblé is ‘all over the place’ and conversely, society at large is seeking and finding
access to the temples. This observation is strikingly at odds with the way the cult
is described in much anthropological work (Landes 1947; Carneiro 1948; Bastide
1958; Verger 1981; Santos 1986). Time and again one finds candomblé described as
a closed universe, shrouded in mystery, guarded by secrecy and accessible only through
initiation. In line with this vision, the ‘classical’ anthropological project is to study
candomblé ‘in its own terms’. In this article I will argue that such a project is a highly
problematic endeavour. As more and more groups have taken an interest in the cult, and
more and more re-readings and re-interpretations of candomblé’s cosmology and ritual
practices have started to circulate, it is increasingly difficult to decide which terms could
be labelled ‘candomblé’s own’. Likewise, as more and more groups claim to belong to
the candomblé universe, and adopt practices and beliefs derived form the cult, it is
increasingly difficult to argue that anthropologists should subscribe to the claims of
the priesthood that they, and they alone, are to decide what qualifies as the ‘real’ and
‘authentic’ candomblé.
An alternative (or I should rather say complementary) approach to the study of
candomblé that I deem worth exploring takes the absence of an ‘ultimate’ or ‘essential’
candomblé as a starting point for investigation. Keeping in mind Talal Asad’s (1993:
31 ff.) warning never to lose sight of the fact that statements as to what constitutes the
‘essence’ of a religion are inextricably tied up with, and work in the service of, specific
configurations of power, I will take a sceptical stance towards any group that claims to
represent the one-and-only candomblé. An exploration of the candomblé that figures in
the discourses and practices of the Bahian gay movement, the green movement and the
movimento negro allows for the suggestion that the cult can very well be approached as a
set of symbols-and-practices-on-the-move, forever transforming and metamorphosing
owing to its travels, defying all attempts at fixation, and at all times obstructing the
classical project to study candomblé ‘in its own terms’.
Wo r k i n g i n t e m p l e s , t a l k i n g t o p r i e s t s a n d h av i n g
oneself initiated
The suggestion that to study candomblé is to study the circulation of symbols and
practices in new settings, implies a thorough break with the way the cult has been
studied in the exemplary and highly influential work of anthropologists such as Ruth
Landes (1947), Edison Carneiro (1948), Roger Bastide (1958), Pierre Verger (1981) and
Juana Elbein dos Santos (1986). For these authors – and many of their followers –
three methodological points of departure stand out as somehow indispensable for any
successful research into the cult: (i) the designation of the temple as the prime locus
of research; (ii) the designation of the priests as the prime exegetes of the cult and the
prime interlocutors of the researcher; and (iii) the idea that a methodology akin to
initiation itself is the via regia to knowledge about the cult. The pressure to adopt these
methodological directives is considerable. Time and again, I was asked by colleagues in
the field (as well as by priests and cult adepts) which particular temple I was studying,
and whether or not I was on the initiation track already. My insistence on wanting to
study the public appearances of candomblé elicited comments such as the one from the
priest who said, ‘Oh, I see, you want to interview me about the superficial things !’
While I have no wish to discredit the merits of this particular approach (I am all too
aware how much I depend on the ‘classic’ monographs to make up for the many gaps in
my knowledge), I do think that this tends to reproduce a very particular construction
of the cult. And what is worse, if one is to remain within the methodological triangle
temple–priest–initiation, one is very likely to reproduce the blind spots that come with
this particular construction, hiding from view events such as the one described above
or dismissing them as ‘superficial things’. Allow me to elaborate my critique.
I’ll begin with the fact that the temple is designated as the prime site of research
in most studies. This terreiro is the place, the ‘universe’, in which the anthropologist
has to position him/herself in order to be able to study the cult ‘from within’. It is not
an easy accessible place as it is guarded by all the defence mechanisms of a cult with a
long history of persecution. Much research energy therefore goes into finding one’s way
into the temple, overcoming resistance and building up rapport with the priests and cult
adepts. This may count as one of the reasons why candomblé researchers who finally
succeed in getting in tend to focus on the treasures they find ‘inside’: that is, candomblé’s
rich mythology, its elaborate rituals, its highly complex rules and regulations, its use of
Yorubá as a ‘liturgical’ language and its particular cosmology. As a result of this focus,
however, the cult is time and again portrayed as something wholly other, an encapsulated
exotic world ‘on its own’, a closed and somehow timeless religious universe within
Bahian society. Curiously enough, the fact that syncretism has played (and continues to
play) such a prominent role in the formation of the cult’s practices and beliefs has been
noticed by all researchers, but this has not diminished the ‘othering’ of the cult. Roger
Bastide, for example, while fully acknowledging the transformative impact that history,
society and culture have had on the cult, announced in Candomblés da Bahia that he
purported to study candomblé ‘as an autonomous reality which certainly comprises
elements from different origins, but which nevertheless forms a coherent whole that
can be studied on its own’ (Bastide 1958: 28).
In addition, this ‘world-on-its-own’ is often understood as essentially ‘African’.
Pierre Verger, in both his anthropological and photographic work, extensively
highlighted ‘African survivals’ in Bahia, and one only needs to open Juana Elbein dos
Santos’ classic Os nagô e a morte (1986) to get the message that one is about to study
an African rather than a Brazilian phenomenon: all the cult terms – even names such as
Xangô, Orixá and Exu, with which all Bahians are familiar – are written in italics and
according to Yoruba spelling rules ‘as they have been laid down by specialised institutes
in Nigeria’ (1986: 26, note 1). Xangô, Orixá and Exu are thus transformed in exotic
beings called Sango, òrı̀sà, and Èsù.
This focus on candomblé’s separation and otherness has blinded many researchers
about what we might call the ‘Brazilianness’ or ‘Bahianness’ of candomblé – that is, the
striking similarities between this cult and the other religious denominations with which
it has to compete in what Brazilian scholars refer to as the mercado dos bens de salvação
(‘market of salvation goods’). For example, I found it quite astonishing that in the vast
literature on candomblé, very little has been said about the baroque nature of its rituals
and aesthetics (but see Montes 1998). Similarly, the famous ‘break with syncretism’ by
the aforementioned Mãe Stella and other leading priestesses in Salvador, made public
in a manifesto in 1984, and the consequent re-africanisation of the cult is too often and
too easily understood as a successful erasure of a catholic mindset in candomblé.
The second point to be commented upon is that, in the ‘classical’ approach to the
study of candomblé, the priests are the main interlocutors of any researcher.4 This
is not only because they are the obvious experts on religious matters. In candomblé,
secrecy is a major concern and breaking secrets invites divine punishment, making
many cult adepts very hesitant to talk. Priests are often the only people authorised
to talk with outsiders. As will become clear, the candomblé priesthood has a political
agenda of its own and priests tend to have very outspoken ideas about how candomblé
should be represented to the outside world. For example, priests tend to support the
idea of candomblé being a closed universe, governed by its own laws and rulings, and
accessible only after long years of initiation. This particular representation links up well
with their vested interest in making a clear distinction between the ‘real’ or ‘authentic’
candomblé of the temple and the ‘copied’ forms, devoid of any religious significance,
that are now circulating in the public sphere. Many priests also support – or at least
pay lip service to – the ‘Africanisation’ of the cult, tending to stress all that contributes
to this particular image, and negating all that is in conflict with it. In addition, most
4 For an elaborate discussion and deconstruction of anthropological work in candomblé temples,

see Valter Gonçalves da Silva (2000).
priests want it recognised that their creed is a ‘religion’ – not a ‘cult’, or a ‘sect’ or a
religious ‘practice’. Here too, one must conclude that the political agenda of the priest
works against the anthropologist’s instruction to keep in mind Talal Asad’s (1993) well
argued warning not to essentialise ‘religion’ as a universal given.
Although the expertise and knowledge of the priesthood is clearly a crucial source
of information, the work of the anthropologist is not in my opinion served well by going
along with what priests deem ‘superficial’ and ‘profound’, or ‘real’ and ‘copied’ forms of
candomblé. A preferable starting point for anthropological investigation should be the
thought that nobody can claim to be representing ‘the real candomblé’. The candomblé
that figures in the imagination of clients and workers in an expensive beauty parlour
(which takes on the aspect of astrological sign reading) is certainly not the same as
the candomblé that figures in the imagination of a priest(ess) and his/her initiates in
a temple on the outskirts of Salvador. Yet it is not up to the anthropologist to enter
qualifications about which is the more ‘profound’ or ‘authentic’. The fact that priests do
make such qualifications, and that some colleagues/anthropologists are in the business
of legitimising them – as we saw in the opening of this article – are ethnographically
interesting facts that ought to be studied. Yet these qualifications are certainly not to
be adopted as one’s own understanding.
A third recurrent characteristic of ‘classic’ candomblé studies is that a methodology
akin to initiation itself is the via regia to knowledge about the cult: the researcher needs
to immerse him/herself in the daily practices of a chosen temple, submit him/herself
to the religious regime and with time will begin to understand the ins and outs of the
candomblé universe. Thus, Juana Elbein dos Santos wrote:
Because the Nagô religion is constituted by the experience of initiation, during which knowledge
is obtained through the lived experience of interpersonal and group relationships, through
transmission and absorption of a force [força], and a gradual development of symbolical and
complex knowledge about all the collective and individual elements of the system at all levels,
it seems that the perspective that we call ‘an understanding from within’ imposes itself almost
inevitably (dos Santos 1986: 17).
This methodological directive adopts the sacerdotal notion of a gradual and time-
bound mystical revelation, as well as sacerdotal tropes of depth and superficiality.
The description with which I have opened this article, however, has made clear that
a research trajectory that urges one to dig deeper and deeper into the ‘inner world’
of the temple tends to neglect the fact that on the surface candomblé is mutating in
ever-newer forms and making its appearance at ever-newer places. In other words, a
methodology akin to initiation is unable to capture the candomblé of Salvador’s middle
classes, the candomblé of the local newspapers, the candomblé of poor neighbourhoods,
the candomblé of gays, black activists and politicians of all kinds and statures, the
candomblé of the cultural scene and the entertainment industry, or the candomblé of
the tourist. Such a methodology also leads one away from an investigation of all the
myriad connections, exchanges and dialogues between these circuits and the temples.
Following my critique of the ‘classic’ approach, I suggest that we expand our field
of investigation to take in all those circuits in which candomblé is ‘doing its thing’, rather
than prioritise one particular circuit – the temple – as the site of the ‘real’ or ‘authentic’
candomblé, one particular voice – the priest or initiand – as the prime articulator of
how one should understand the meanings of candomblé, and one particular method –
initiation – as the preferred inroad to knowledge about the cult.
Obviously, I am not the first anthropologist to advocate an alternative approach to
the study of candomblé. In an overview of Brazilian scholarship on the subject in the
1990s, Monique Augras lamented the ongoing production of ‘purely descriptive’ studies
of the cult. In her conclusion she noticed a new development, which is interested in the
way candomblé is inserted in Brazilian society (Augras 1998: 100). Peter Fry (1982),
Beatriz Goı́s Dantas (1988), Yvonne Maggy (1992), Patricia Birman (1995), Vagner
Gonçalves da Silva (1995; 2001), Stephania Capone (2000), Rita Amaral (2002), Paul
Christopher Johnson (2002) and Jocélio Teles dos Santos (2000) are just some of the
anthropologists who have pointed out the permeable character of the temple walls.5
My proposal is to radicalise the lines of thought that have been set out by these
scholars. Rather than continue to think about candomblé as a religious cult, that needs
to be described in its generic particularities, I would first and foremost think of it as an
important ‘symbol bank’ that enters into exchange relationships with ever wider circuits
of Bahia’s ‘economy of representation’ (Keane 2002).6 These exchange relationships
between candomblé and the worlds of literature, the arts, entertainment, science and
politics can be traced back to the 1930s, when candomblé began to play an increasingly
important role as a marker of Bahian identity. In the wake of an emergent Brazilian
nationalism that sought to re-imagine the nation as a unique mix of the white, Indian and
African races, a positive re-evaluation of the Afro-Brazilian heritage became possible.
Afro-Brazilian cultural practices such as samba and capoeira became popular all over
Brazil, and the beauty of Afro-Brazilian religious practices began to be appreciated.
Bahia’s (largely white) cultural elites were eager to profit from this renewed interest, and
began to explore the rich cultural heritage of the overwhelmingly black population of
their home state. Undoubtedly, one of their motives was to upgrade the image of Bahia,
which at the time was considered a poor, decaying and utterly provincial outpost in the
Brazilian federacy. Candomblé proved to be a sheer bottomless source of inspiration.
Time and again, writer Jorge Amado turned to candomblé in his literary renditions
of Bahian life,7 as did his contemporaries, the sculptor Carybé and the songwriter
Dorivall Caymmi. In the late 1960s, a new generation of Bahian artists united in a
counter-cultural movement that came to be known as the Tropicália Movement, and
that included such figures as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, discovered candomblé
and started to explore its mysticism and spirituality. From the 1970s, this celebration
of Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian heritage received the full back-up of the Bahian state, as
tourism boomed and Bahia sought to promote itself on the tourist market as an ‘exotic’
and ‘mysterious’ holiday destination. The divulgation of candomblé imagery, aesthetics,
rhythms and myths now accelerated at an unprecedented pace. ‘Candomblé virou moda’
(Candomblé became fashionable), as the often repeated phrase has it, and appeared in
ever newer settings and guises.
5 Interestingly enough, with the exception of Santos, they have all been working outside Bahia, which
is considered the cradle of candomblé ‘tradition’ and ‘orthodoxy’. One is tempted to suggest that
places like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo allow a more adventurous approach to candomblé than
the close-knit congregations of anthropologists and priests in Salvador.
6 Meyer adopted the term ‘representational economy’ from Keane to ‘capture the ways in which
practices and ideologies put words, things and actions into complex articulation with one another’
and suggests that the notion of representational economy is useful for grasping tensions about the
relations among, and value of, certain cultural expressions in Ghana’s new mediascape (2004: 94).
7 For an overview, see Hamilton (1967).
Stressing the circulation of items from the candomblé ‘symbol bank’ and the
transformations and re-evaluations that they undergo as they move from one setting to
the next means that ‘religion’ becomes one of the many gestalten in which candomblé
makes its appearance, next to commodity, entertainment, art and tourist spectacle. This
approach – fruitful examples of which I have found in the work of Armando Salvatore
(1997) on the Muslim public sphere and Birgit Meyer (2004) on the ‘pentecostalisation’
of the public sphere in Ghana – highlights the permeability of the boundaries between
the temples of candomblé and society at large, and urges one to take notice of the
continuing circular movements to which candomblé is liable: symbols, ideas and
aesthetics migrate from the terreiro to the public arena, where they adapt to new
formats and styles and find new publics. These publics then start to produce their own
understandings (and fantasies) as to what the cult is all about and begin to interact
with the religious community, taking their own particular interpretations back into the
temple.8
A further advantage of this approach is that it treats candomblé as forever in the
making. It allows the researcher to stay away from those endless discussions about
what is ‘pure’, what is ‘degenerate’, what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’ in candomblé.
Instead, it urges one to consider these attempts at fixation as moves in a political field
where several groups claim the truth. Understanding candomblé within an economy of
representation also implies a reflexive move on the part of the researcher: candomblé
research and studies are part and parcel of the circular movements in which candomblé
is made and re-made, defined and re-defined, re-scripted and re-performed. Finally, this
approach allows the study of candomblé to speak to larger issues, such as the changing
role of religion and tradition in the emergent public sphere in Brazil and elsewhere.
To explore this alternative approach to the study of Bahian candomblé, and assess
how it might further our understanding of the Afro-Brazilian religious heritage, I will
limit my analysis in this article to three circuits in which items from the candomblé
symbol bank can be found circulating: the gay scene, the discourse on ecology and the
movimento negro. This focus allows me to give more detailed and ethnographically
substantiated answers to the following questions. Why is it that groups with widely
different political agendas have adopted elements of candomblé to articulate their cause?
What is it that these adopted elements are supposed to ‘do’ in their new settings? How
are these elements moulded to serve the various projects in which they are now inserted?
And how is it that these transformed elements, re-worked and re-signified in the public
sphere, work their way back into the terreiro and link up with (or mess up) the political
agendas of the candomblé priesthood?
C a n d o m b l é i n p i n k
I was alerted to the adoption of candomblé symbols by the emergent gay scene in
Salvador during the Gay Pride Parade of 2003. This Parada Gay opened with an ode
to Exu, a god of the Afro-Brazilian pantheon. Surrounded by muscled go-go-boys
8 Salvatore (1997) has argued that with the creation of a modern public sphere in Egypt, religious
knowledge and modes of discipline have had to be remade in public forms, in accord with
standardised and marketable communication patterns.
in panther-print briefs, outrageously dressed transvestites, pink balloons and rainbow
banners, a famous black singer sung his praise. Enormous loudspeakers blasted her
voice over the many thousands that had gathered on Campo Grande in the centre of
the Bahian capital. When I asked some friends whether the hymn was indeed sung in
Yorubá – which was difficult to make out because the speakers distorted the sound
considerably – they were somewhat irritated. What? Huh? Yes. They obviously felt
I was bothering them with unimportant details, things only an anthropologist would
want to know, on a jubilant and exciting moment for the gay community.
Nevertheless, someone had decided that the Parada Gay should begin with an ode
to Exu. The more obvious reasons why this particular deity qualified to begin the march
are not very hard to figure out. I have already argued that candomblé has become the
dominant marker of Bahian identity. Highlighting the Bahia-ness of the parade would
therefore mean including items from the candomblé symbol bank. More specifically,
Exu is the messenger between human beings and gods, and in Afro-Brazilian thought his
support is crucial to ‘open the roads’ towards the realisation of one’s goals. Pleasing the
god with praise and offerings is the procedure required to obtain his blessings. Hence
the hymn that marked the beginning of the march and the twenty-or-so priestesses
that walked in front of the parade in full attire, scattering on the streets the traditional
popcorn (pipoca) used to placate the Afro-Brazilian gods.
In addition, Exu has some particularities that resonate well with gay concerns.
Being the messenger between human beings and orixás (the deities of the Afro-Brazilian
pantheon), Exu is constantly being called upon to assist his worshippers in the pursuit of
their dreams. He is therefore considered to be a genuine connoisseur of human desire –
and that emphatically includes sexual desire. The fact that Exu is usually represented as a
devilish figure with an impressive and lustfully erect cock (which seems the appropriate
word here) is certainly no coincidence. In more fashionable readings, popular with
contemporary artists and poets, Exu is made to symbolise the contradictions of modern
urban life: he is lord of the city streets and the patron of the marginal and the powerless.
Contradiction, marginality, streetlife: these too are concepts that resonate with the life
experiences of many Bahian gays.
There is, however, more to the connection between homosexuals and candomblé.
When afterwards I discussed the presence of candomblé imagery at a gay pride parade,
none of my friends expressed any surprise. They took for granted the strong connections
between the Afro-Brazilian cult and homosexuality. They would say things like ‘of
course, all the priests are bichas’ [effeminate, ‘passive’ homosexuals] and that the temples
are ‘cheio de bichas’ [‘full of bichas’]. The presence of homosexuals in the candomblé
temples is hard to miss, and anthropologists have discussed their presence at length.
Patricia Birman, in an interesting discussion as to what might attract bichas to the
temples of the cult in Rio de Janeiro, highlighted an affinity between the desire to
be bicha and the available spectrum of alternative gender roles within candomblé.
Possession trance, she argued, offers an (often irresistible) opportunity for bichas to
have their male bodies invaded by female orixás such as Iansá or Oxum or female spirits
such as Maria Padilha or Cigana. Given the conviction in candomblé that possession
implies the annihilation of self, which is subsequently replaced by the invading spirit,
the practice allows bichas not just to dress up like women but to become the women of
their dreams. In other words, she showed how bichas put a religious practice of divine
possession at the service of the gender bending they were looking for (Birman 1995).
In addition, Fry pointed out that once the terreiro got to be known as a place where
bichas go, this designation became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: ‘real men’
started avoiding the temples for fear of being accused of being bichas, and gay men
started frequenting the temples to realise themselves as bichas, to ‘hunt’ other men or
to hide from hostile families (Fry 1982).
What is interesting about the Parada Gay, however, is that it hardly qualifies as an
example of bichas seeking refuge and the possibility of self-realisation in the sheltered
confines of the candomblé temple. On the contrary, what we see here is the spectacle
of gays moving into the public sphere, adorning themselves with the signs and symbols
of candomblé.9 (The adoption of this English word ‘gay’ is a significant move towards
an identity label, as ‘bicha’ primarily refers to sexual practice and, as such, seems a less
totalising designation of self.)
Once alerted, one can find candomblé imagery adopted in many other public sites
of gay life in Salvador. Anchor Marujo, for example, is a popular lower-class gay bar,
named after a well-known entity from the Afro-Brazilian pantheon, Marujo. This spirit
of a drowned Spanish sailor often takes possession of people and is notorious for the way
he brags about his sexual exploits, his heavy drinking and his foul-mouthed language
(Santos 1995: 126). The bar boasts a little altar with his statue, some offerings and
burning candles. It had always struck me how in the setting of a gay bar, the worshipped
sailor spirit, dressed up in an immaculate white uniform, seamlessly merges with the
global gay icon who appears in pornography and films of the Querelle-de-Brest type. In
reverse, the way that orixás are being represented in a Rio de Janeiro-based magazine is
highly suggestive of the way gym/sauna aesthetics are entering a religious iconography;
Rio is a city famed for its corpolatria, and these orixás are all heavily muscled.
Another public site in Salvador where both candomblé and gays are strikingly
present is Korin Efan, a carnival club or afoxé. Korin Efan organises weekly rehearsals
that are a curious mixture of terreiro de candomblé and gay dance club. Sacred songs and
rhythms are performed to stir up the spirit of the almost exclusively gay audience, many
of whom are cult adepts or even priests (one of them always comes in full regalia). There
is a lot of flirting, and on the dance floor everyone has great fun mimicking possession,
mocking the authoritarian behaviour of priests and exaggerating the dances of orixás and
caboclo-spirits. ‘Candomblé com cerveja’, is what a friend used to call these meetings:
‘candomblé with beer’.
Ema Toma Blues, a successful theatre production by a transsexual actor/actress
called Valeria, provides a last example of how candomblé makes its appearance in gay
localities. The show follows the life story of a transvestite, Ema, with the usual sequence
of starry ambitions, broken dreams, nightly drinking sprees and endless cigarettes. As
she lost her voice, Ema sought – as many Brazilians would – solace in religion, first
with the Catholics (who are revealed as a bunch of horny hypocrites), then with the
Pentecostals (who take her money and advise her to start play-backing). It was only
when candomblé enters the scene that Ema’s life takes a positive turn. In her dreams,
the orixá Xangô appears in the shape of a negão maravilhoso (‘gorgeous big black stud’
would be an adequate translation here), who gives her back her voice and restores her
to fame.
Given the well established and long standing relations between gays and candomblé,
it is hardly surprising that elements of the candomblé universe migrate to the localities
9 But see Wafer (1991).
of an emergent gay subculture. The presence of candomblé imagery and candomblé
ritual at the Parada Gay, however, takes developments a step further. Consider the way
the organiser, Marcello Cerqueira, looked back on the event:
Our gay pride parade was blessed by the gods, those gods one calls for on a moment like this:
Dionysus, Bacchus, Sapho, Logum-Edê, Exu. They descended and played with the crowds, and
declared themselves in solidarity with us as they sent a rainbow to bless us all, one of the greatest
symbols of nature that was like a punch in the stomach for all homophobes. 10
Here, a pre-existing affinity between bichas and the candomblé universe gets publicly
translated into the idea that candomblé is an exemplary religion as far as ‘tolerance’
towards sexual difference is concerned. The gods are with us, is what Cerqueira is
saying. In other words, a local and particular discourse gets mapped on to a global
discourse of gay rights and gay emancipation, and vice versa.
It is in this reformulation of what candomblé is as a religion that the transformative
consequences of the circulation of candomblé imagery through various circuits of
Salvador’s public sphere should be sought. In writings on the subject, one finds very clear
examples of the collapse of political activism and religion. The sociologist Reginaldo
Prandi, for example, speaks about candomblé as ‘a religion of the excluded’. He remarks
that ‘no social institution in Brazil, other than candomblé, accepted the homosexual,
always forcing this category to hide itself from view’, and then exclaims ‘How grand
and exemplary is this capacity of candomblé to join saints and sinners, the soiled and
the pure, the ugly and the beautiful !’ (Prandi 1996: 33). João Silvério Trevisan, a São-
Paulo-based historian and author of a volume on homosexuality in Brazil (2000), argues
that the gay movement has a great deal to learn from the Afro-Brazilians, who ‘have
managed to overcome the adversities of their tragic history by remaining loyal to their
African cultures and creeds’. He suggests that
to nurture our inner life and boost our self-image, it is fundamental that we uncover from ancient
times the myths that are related to us and might function as our roots. In other words, let’s
do some archeaological work to recuperate what was veiled during centuries of Judeo-Christian
civilisation.11
In his proposed ‘set up’ of what is to become a gay religious cult he first makes
his selection of useful Greek gay icons (Ganymede, Apollo, Dionysus, Achilles and
Patroclus, Hercules and Iola), then ponders the usefulness of Saint Sebastian (‘pierced
with arrows in his naked body until death by his soldiers in an indisguisable act of homo-
erotic sadism that attracted so many artists toward this saint – from Michelangelo in
painting to Yukio Mishima in literature and Derek Jarman in cinema’).12 He then argues
that for Brazilians in particular, ‘candomblé offers various orixás with an ambiguous
gender, like Oxalá, Iansã, Logum-Edê and Oxumaré’.13
Another area where gay activist readings of candomblé become visible is the struggle
against the Aids epidemic. Odo Aye is a documentary film about the responses in the
candomblé community towards Aids. The film has been shown at several international
10 www.ggb.org.br/editorial.html, last entered 13 July 2003.

11 João Silvério Trevisan, Histórias que a escola não conta www.athosgls.com.br/comportamento
visualiza. php?arcd artigo=672&arcd autor=39, last entered 20 September 2004.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
film festivals, and when one reads the announcement of the film on an American-based
website one cannot but gain the impression that candomblé falls a little short as an
exemplary, safe-sex-promoting religion:
Candomble understands that it has a special responsibility to respond to the Aids crisis. It believes
that sex, the human body and all of its secretions have ashe [sic]. Candomble sees sex as ‘an
important source of vital pleasure in life’ and does not ‘prevent anyone from having sex like
we don’t prevent anyone from sweating’. Furthermore, Candomble’s rituals involve scarification
and shaving. As a result of Candomble’s high-risk rituals and its positive attitude toward sex,
worshippers felt compelled to get involved in Aids prevention.
So, like needle-exchange programs, Candomble teaches techniques for cleaning ritual instru-
ments. Its priests and practitioners pass out condoms and prevention publications at Carnival.
Many of the high priests have become experts in alternative medicine. They use music to organise
for social justice and to teach prevention.14
The example also highlights how the designation of candomblé as a ‘gay-friendly

religion’ is picked up in places that are far removed from Bahia, and starts figuring
in the social imagination of ever newer audiences. Pointing in a similar direction is the
study called Queering creole spiritual traditions. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
participation in African-inspired traditions in the Americas (Conner and Sparks 2004),
advertised in the United States with the slogan ‘See into the heart and soul of LGBT
practitionsers of vodou and Yoruba religions !’
These examples may suffice to give an indication how candomblé is re-read, and
becomes the ‘tin god’ of both local and global gay scenes. What is important about these
reformulations of candomblé is that large segments of the priesthood (many of them
gay) seem to adopt this kind of thinking. Take my encounter with Pai João, the priest
from the temple where Toninho, the guy from the photo-shop, is ogã-of-the-knife. Pai
João had been recommended to me when I was looking for a priest to find out about the
orixás that ‘govern’ my head, and he had been described as being ‘jovem e muito legal’
(young and really cool). Arriving at his temple (right next to the gym of which he is the
owner), Pai João took me up to his altar. He first asked me about my astrological sign
(which I thought odd), then threw cowrie shells to find out about my orixás. After that
he suggested I could ask him some other things I wanted to know. ‘For example, about
your love life’, he suggested. I told him that I was having a somewhat troublesome
affair with a Baiano, and explained that I was gay. Pai João immediately picked up on
that remark, saying that he had known this from the moment I came in and that he
was gay as well. He then re-framed his explanations of the cult in a ‘gay discourse’,
saying that ‘we gays’ in particular are in need of our divine protectors because we are
‘such sensitive people’ and know more than anyone else that there are things in life
that we can only share with our orixá, ‘even if in reality we would have preferred to
discuss these matters with our mothers’. At the end of the consultation, he disclosed
14 http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/csblac/Text/Programs/Present/Shaping/Cypriano.html, last entered 20

September 2004. While it is certainly true that safe-sex campaigns have found ample response in
the candomblé community (Mott and Cerqueira 1998), and while it is noteworthy within this
discussion that it is the Grupo Gay da Bahia that started the Projeto Candomblé, Saúde e Axé and
this same GGB publishes a monthly magazine called Alafia: Jornal do Povo do Candomblé, full of
advice and reports on the Aids crisis, I cannot but notice that candomblé imaginary also endorses
unsafe sex. One friend confessed to having unsafe sex, explaining that it was not him but a spirit
called Maria Padilha that had moved him into the act.
that on entering the temple he had recognised me from Anchor Marujo, the gay bar in
downtown Salvador, urged me to have a health-check at least every year and charged
me a considerable sum of money for the consultation.
Another good example of a priest re-producing a gay discourse is a babalorixá
called Baba Ogu Dare, who hosts a website on which worried gays can check out the
religious options left to them after they have come out. This Baba Ogu Dare states that:
The concept of sin is a Christian concept that does not exist in the pure religions of Africa.
According to the African oduns everyone is born predestined with a fate that is already set out for
him, so if a human being is born with a heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual predestination, this is
already in the plans of creation. All individuals are created to fulfill a role in the world. And these
roles need not be the same. What has been customarily understood as ‘natural’ is nothing other
than the Judean interpretation of a nomadic desert tribe for whom homosexuality was negative
because it interfered with its procreation.15
Many of my gay friends in Salvador reproduced this kind of thinking as well. They too
stressed the absence of Christian morals in candomblé. They highlighted the gender
ambiguity of Oxumaré (the orixá who is for six months of the year a man and for six
months of the year a woman), and the androgynous character of Logum-Edê and Iansá.
They pointed out the great number of gay priests and revelled in gossiping about the
assumed lesbian affairs of priestesses. They loved to draw attention to the fact that the
great divas from MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) such as Maria Bethânia and Gal Costa
are both lesbians and initiated into the cult. They directed my attention to the ‘evident’
homo-eroticism in the photography of Pierre Verger. And they emphasised how the
povo de santo were partners in adversity as they had been equally persecuted in the past
and were attacked today by the ever more powerful Pentecostal churches. Last but not
least, many loved to go to celebrations of candomblé because they knew that the place
would be ‘cheio de bichas’, that they could meet friends and flirt with strangers, and
generally identify with the splendour of the cult.
In sum, what we find in the public sphere is a re-reading of candomblé elements
in terms of gay activism and a merging of candomblé imagery with a global gay
iconography that somehow finds its way back into the cult.
C a n d o m b l é i n g r e e n
Not long before the Parada Gay, on the occasion of World Ecology Day (Dia Mundial
do Meio Ambiente), candomblé found another role to play in the public sphere. A
Salvadorian newspaper reported that:
Heavy drumming was to be heard, yesterday, at World Ecology Day, in St Bartholomew Park,
where a number of organisations from the Ferroviário district organised a forum to pay homage to
15 www2.uol.com.br/mixbrasil/id/entende.htm, last entered 20 September 2004. Yet another priest,

José Luiz Lipiani, states in his Orixás, comportamento e personalidade de seus filhos (1999), that
‘homosexuals are generally very hurt by social prejudice. This attitude is plainly wrong; being
children of God, our brothers and sisters do not deserve discrimination. If all that exists is the work
of God, we should understand and accept these people as such.’ He understands homosexuality as
a strong presence of a female orixá in the being of a male body (1999: 30).
the inquices, orixás, voduns and caboclos, who in the religions of African origin, are the primordial
defenders of nature (A Tarde, 6 June 2003).
What we see here is how an assumed ‘inherent reverence for the forces of nature in
candomblé’ has been projected on to a global concern for environmental issues. This
re-casting of orixás as environmental activists does not come out of the blue. Iconic
elements of the cult lend themselves to ecological interpretation: the worshipping of
trees; the association of each orixá with particular natural elements such as forests,
waterfalls, seas, storms and fire; and the widely acclaimed knowledge of natural
medicine. ‘Ossain’, I read on a website, is not only ‘the orixá of leaves, herbs, vegetation
and lord of medicine’ but also ‘the patron of ecology’.16 Another website presents the
cult as an ecological movement avant la lèttre, as it quotes a Bahian priestess who ‘as
early as 1902’ formulated the ecologist’s dictum that the abuse of nature will always
rebound on the abuser:
One does not take a dried leaf from a tree if it isn’t necessary; that’s like killing a person. Would
anyone like to lose an arm, an eye or a foot? Why pick a flower and throw it away? Candomblé
is living nature. There can be no worship of the orixá without earth, forest, river, sky, lightning,
thunder, wind, sea . . . Violence towards nature is violence towards the orixá.17
As in the case of the gay activists, there are a number of well-known intellectuals to
spell out the links between ecology and candomblé. António Risério writes that the
‘sacralisation of nature’ is one of the main sources of his fascination with candomblé,
and praises ‘this cosmovision in which trees, lakes and rivers are understood as sites
where the divine manifests itself’ (Risério, in Pretto and Serpa 2002: 9–10). Muniz Sodré,
a leading Brazilian scholar of candomblé who boasts degrees from the Sorbonne, argues
that candomblé in fact preceded the environmentalist movement and can therefore be
considered a kind of proto-ecological way of being in the world. His exposition, a
notable example of an attempt to make candomblé precede rather than follow global
trends, merits extensive quotation:
A long time ago, in a Bahian terreiro, I had a radical ecological experience. It was on a midweek
afternoon, and I took some of my friends on a visit to the compound of the terreiro. After having
visited the houses, an ogã (a honorific title for certain members of the cult) took us into the woods:
he wanted to present one of us with a cutting from a tree. There, surrounded by vegetation, all of
us witnessed how he embraced a trunk – the old Apaoká – murmuring some words and asking
permission from the tree to break off a twig. I clearly remember this scene, probably because its
simplicity stood in such sharp contrast with a discourse that is gaining strength in contemporary
urban society (winning even seats in parliament) – the discourse of ecology. This moment was not a
reflection of the idea that individuals should enter into a dialogue with their natural surroundings,
nor was it connected with the liberal discourse on the preservation of our natural surroundings:
it was about acting in such a way that the natural element, the tree, turns a partner of man in a
play in which cosmos and world encounter each other. What I found there was a radical ecological
posture – far removed from the neopantheist apostrophes of petit-bourgeois ecology [apóstrofes
neopanteı́stas do ecologismo pequeno-burguês] – because it wasn’t the result of some individualist
voluntarism, but followed from the cosmovision of a group in which the brotherhood of man
with plants, animals and minerals is an essential given. For the black community [o grupo negro],
the territory, as a single whole, is a patrimony to be respected and preserved. (Sodré 2002: 167)
16 http://www.aguaforte.com/ileaxeogum/ossain.html, last entered 20 September 2004.

17 http:/www.memorialdoimigrante.sp.gov.br/realizad Orixas.html, last entered 20 September 2004.
Even more interesting is the example of another anthropologist, Reginaldo Prandi, who
launches the come-back of a long forgotten orixá, called Onilé, Lady of the Earth:
In the present climate of a ‘return to the world of nature’ and a concern with ecology, an orixá
that had been almost completely forgotten is being gradually recovered. It is Onilé, Lady of the
Earth, the orixá who represents our planet as a single whole, the world that we live in. The myth
of Onilé can be found in various poems of the Ifá oracle, still alive in Brazil, in the memory of
those who have been initiated into candomblé for decades . . . Discretely worshipped in the old
terreiros from Bahia and in Africanised candomblés, Mother Earth raises the curiosity and interest
of the followers of the orixás, above all those who belong to the more intellectual segments of the
religion . . . For many followers of the religion of the orixás, interested in restoring the relation
orixá-nature, the cult of Onilé thus represents the concern with the preservation of humanity
itself, and all that is in its world.18
Here too, we might conclude that elements from candomblé lend themselves really
well to emphasising the local in the global concern for the environment. And here
too, I was confronted with instances where these re-readings of what candomblé is
(and does) inform people’s actions. A group of friends who wished to participate in
the yearly offering to the sea goddess Iemanjá made an ecological balaio, which is the
basket that is filled with presents for the goddess and then dropped into the ocean. This
was not your regular basket full with the plastic combs, lipsticks, dolls, flowers, curling
pins and perfume bottles that befit the vain goddess, but a wholly biodegradable balaio
filled with food, real flowers and paper cuttings. I was assured that this ecological balaio
would certainly please the sea goddess; folklore has it that gifts that return to the Bahian
shores could not please Iemanjá, something more likely to happen to a plastic comb or
Barbie doll than to organic matter.
As with the gay activist readings of candomblé, members of the priesthood show up
in the circuits where the representational economy has taken the items of the candomblé
symbol bank. For instance, priests appear on television in a programme called Saude
Alternativa (Alternative Health), and the video production that every visitor to the
little museum on the compound of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá gets to see (entitled Isso é
nosso universo, essa é nossa crença) is one endless sequence of images of nature (woods,
animals, trees, plants and water); the voice-over explains that orixás are to be understood
as ‘phenomena of nature, forces of life’ [‘fenômenos da natureza, forças vitais’].
C a n d o m b l é i n b l a c k
The black emancipation movements is a more obvious and logical example of a

circuit in which candomblé gets translated and mapped on to the political projects
of others.19 Jocélio Teles dos Santos, in his rich and detailed account of the progressive
entanglement of candomblé and black emancipatory politics in Bahia, has shown that
until the second half of the 1970s black movements actually demonstrated a striking
reluctance to approach candomblé. Marxist ideology ruled the activist discourses at
that time and propagated an understanding of candomblé as a ‘sect’ and ultimately
18 Text found at the author’s website: http://www.fflch.usp.br/sociologia/prandi/, last entered

20 September 2004.
19 For the fact that there is no single such movement, see Covin 1996.
alienating institution, all the more so because of its veneration of Catholic saints and
links with catholic institutions. Moreover, the way candomblé priests and priestesses
sought protective ties with white power holders was repeatedly held against them
(Santos 2000: 192).
By the early 1990s, however, candomblé had become something of a fetish, a
cultural relic endowed with so much prestige and power that one comes under the
impression that even the black movements could no longer resist its seductive spells.
From the 1930s, Bahia’s (white) cultural elites had been celebrating candomblé as the
prime marker of the Bahian cultural heritage. First came a generation that included
writer Jorge Amado, sculptor Carybé and song-writer Dorivall Caymmi; then the
counterculture of the Tropicália movement in the late 1960s (Dunn 2001). From the
1970s onwards this celebration of the Afro-Brazilian religious heritage received the full
back-up of the Bahian state, as tourism boomed and Bahia sought to promote itself on
the tourist market as an ‘exotic’ and ‘mysterious’ holiday destination (cf. Pinto 2001).
In addition, the work of Michel Agier (2000) on traditional black carnival
organisations in Salvador shows that, parallel to this development, candomblé imagery
was taken up in these circles as well. Radicalised by north American examples of
black power and propagating the black-is-beautiful slogans of the era, they sought
to reconstruct the aesthetics of negritude and glorified their African roots, finding in
candomblé a rich reservoir of rituals and symbolic forms. In his study of the afoxés in
Salvador, Antonio Risério gives an example as to what such appropriations may have
looked like:
Take the example of the afoxé Badauê. Moa [leader of the afoxés] is frank, as he states right away
that its participants do not understand much about candomblé (‘we know just a little bit’). ‘But we
are eager, and we are curious’, he says, adding, ‘but those who really understand do not want to
teach us’. Badauê has no special link with a particular temple of candomblé. Nevertheless, many
adepts and even some priestesses do march the streets with the group, for example Ialorixá Omim
Baim. ‘It is to people like her that we feel connected’, Moa clarifies. ‘They give us a lot of power’.
Badauê also has a ‘madrinha’, a priestess called Dona Lili, from the Engenho Velho de Brotas
district. It is she who does the ritual ‘works’ before the group sets out to march the streets, and
ritually prepares the rehearsals, and so on. Before every rehearsal of Badauê an offering to the
gods is made, the padê. In addition, every time that there is a big celebration, for instance a music
festival, or right before carnival, there is the matança, the sacrifice of animals. And although the
chants are no longer taken from the religious repertoire, they all – almost without exception – deal
with the religion, the orixás and its signs and symbols (Risério 1981: 57–8).
What these examples suggest is that, next to the occult powers for which candomblé has
always been known (and feared), the cult accumulated so much prestige, coming from
many different directions, that it became a powerful icon in itself. It seems reasonable
to suggest that the political potential that candomblé had acquired could no longer
be negated by black activists, who indeed started to undertake attempts to claim the
cult as a somehow unalienable part of an Afro-Brazilian, rather than Bahian, heritage.
Moreover, when leading terreiros in Salvador publicly broke with syncretism in order to
restore their ‘true’ African roots (which happened with the publication of a manifesto in
1984), a new lecture of candomblé as a site of African resistance in a hostile environment
becomes visible.
Risério writes that ‘in Brazil, candomblé functioned as a kind of peaceful and
sacred Quilombo, a centre of cultural resistance and of the ethnic and social identity
of blacks, saving them from total loss of their Africanness [desafricanização total]’
(1981: 83). David Covin reports that in the early 1990s, the Bahian-based Movimento
Negro Unificado included in its action programme the aim ‘to work for freedom
of culture and religion for Afro-Brazilians’ by restoring culture production to the
‘cultural and religious spaces’ of the black population, and ‘systematically’ fighting its
commercialisation, folklorisation and distortion. (1996: 48). Santos gives many more
examples of the rhetoric that now came to dominate the black emancipatory discourse:
Both the Afro-Brazilian people and their religion were always victims of serious attacks over the
centuries by the Catholic church and – ever more virulent in recent times – by the Protestant
churches, with the objective – well known by the black community – of eradicating from its
conscience the experience and the sacred world-view [of its African past] [in Santos 2000: 76].
Impressionistic and all too brief as it may be, this description allows for the observation
that the approximation of the black movements and candomblé came about through
the manifold and complex exchanges between various circuits. And just as we have
seen with the ‘pink’ and ‘green’ readings of candomblé, these ‘black’ readings enter in
circulation and move back into the temples.
In the rhetoric of the leading temples in Salvador that support the break with
syncretism and embrace the re-africanisation of candomblé, elements of a black
emancipatory discourse can certainly be pointed out. Some of these temples have
initiated social programmes and neighbourhood schools aimed at the enhancement
of the auto-estima (self-worth) and conscientização (consciousness-raising) of Afro-
Brazilians. Jocélio Teles dos Santos, however, argues that the candomblé priesthood has
certainly not adopted the political rhetoric of the black movements or is ‘racialising’ its
politics vis-à-vis society at large (2000: 120). If anything, says the author, the priesthood
seeks to capitalise on the political support and legitimacy that the project of black
emancipation has obtained over the last decades. It never loses sight, however, of the
final aim, which is the further legitimation and reinforcement of their religion (2000:
198).
As the opening of this article shows, the venerable procedure of establishing
relationships with power-holders (many of them white) to enhance power and prestige
is still very much in use. This might be taken as another sign that there are clear limits
to attempts by the black movement to reclaim the terreiro as a site that somehow
organically belongs to them. This tendency of the priesthood to establish links with,
or even accommodate, whites also comes to the fore in an article called ‘A cor do axé.
Brancos e negros no candomblé de São Paulo’, by Vagner Gonçalves da Silva and Rita
Amaral (1993). The authors vividly describe the kind of tensions that may arise due to
the simultaneous appearance of a racialised political discourse within the temple walls,
and an increasing number of whites in temples and temple hierarchies. It is a somewhat
sad story as, in conflicts over power, prestige and priestly favours, both groups can
be found to stress the value of (stereotypical) characteristics attributed to them. Thus,
black initiates claim to have more access to axé, the magical-religious life force of
candomblé, and glorify their prowess in dancing and rhythm, whereas white initiates
capitalize on their social standing, education and economic power. On the theological
level, the authors notice the emergence of re-interpretations of candomblé cosmology
and ritual practice that accommodate, explain or justify the presence of whites in
candomblé. For example, in the new theological discourse, orixás – popularly thought
of as ‘black’ and ‘African’ anthropomorphic figures – become abstract and universal
‘energies’ (Gonçalves da Silva and Amaral 1993: 120). In a similar fashion, a white
candomblé priest in Salvador told me that the orixás are so ancient that they precede
the racial division of humankind. Such developments have far from crystallised, though.
The theological difficulties arising from the ascendancy of whites in the temples, and
the rhetorical acrobatics this fact necessitates, are well illustrated by Mae Stella’s words
in an introduction to the life-history of a French anthropologist, Gisele Cossard, who
became a priestess of candomblé and opened up a temple in Rio de Janeiro. In an obvious
attempt to accommodate both Cossard and the project of re-africanising candomblé
Mãe Stella highlights the fact that the anthropologist/priestess was a diplomat’s daughter
and born in Tangiers, Morocco:
Gisele Cossard, this French girl, was called by the orixá from birth on, which is surprising, given
the fact that she is a European woman by birth and descent. Many other places could have served
as her cradle due to the profession of her father. However, she was born on the very border of
Europe and Africa: she saw the light, for the first time, in Morocco, a place where African culture
is strong and active, first and foremost in its musical traditions. It is therefore only natural that
this ‘francesa africana’ was called for by the saints in their plenitude (Mãe Stella, in Dion 1998: 7).
Conclusion. Scripts and roles
I have given three examples of the circulation of candomblé imagery through various
circuits in the public sphere. It is now time to conclude with a discussion of what is
gained by studying candomblé as a set of symbols and practices on the move, rather
than an enclosed universe in Bahian society.
What I have argued is that way beyond the temples of candomblé scripts are
being written for (an imagined) candomblé community to perform, and that they
are about topics as diverse as tolerance of gay life styles, black emancipation or
ecological consciousness.20 The notion of a continuous re-scripting of the cult raises
two sets of questions that need to be addressed. The first set pertains to the fact
that so many different scriptwriters developed an interest in candomblé. For not only
gays, ecologists and black activists have picked up candomblé as their ‘thing’, but
20 This observation is highly reminiscent of processes that have been described by Beatrice Goı́s
Dantas in her acclaimed study Vovo nagô e papai branco. Usos e abusos da África no Brasil (1988).
The ‘scripts’ that Dantas analysed were written in the 1930s and 1940s by white intellectuals who
sought to highlight the ‘purity’ and ‘Africaness’ of one particular tradition (nagô) in the highly
heterogeneous candomblé universe. Her research in a terreiro in Bahia’s neighbouring state of
Sergipe revealed that, to a great extent, these scripts had been picked up to be performed by the cult
members. By analogy with Dantas’s findings, we might say that at the beginning of the twenty-
first century, there is a host of script writers for candomblé. The Bahian anthropologist Ordep
Serra, in a venomous, book-long critique of Dantas’s work, accused the author of denying any
agency to the candomblézeiros (Serra 1995). While acknowledging the interactions and exchanges
between Bahian intellectuals and the candomblé priesthood, Serra rejected the suggestion that
candomblézeiros were influenced by intellectuals to the extent that Dantas’ analysis (in his reading
of the book) suggested. He stressed the authentic contributions of priests and black intellectuals to
the reformations of the cult, opening a discussion that resonates well with the current debates on
race in Brazil, yet will not easily come to a conclusive end. Serra’s critique – however one wishes to
evaluate it – does remind us to ask ourselves how the political agendas of some candomblé priests
might coincide with those of the scripts-writers.
feminists, progressive Catholics, labour unionists, tourists, artists and conservative
populist politicians are equally busy re-scripting the Afro-Brazilian religious heritage,
making sure that their particular ideological outlook gets the star part. The very diversity
of the scriptwriters suggests that an explanation of candomblé’s appeal cannot be limited
to the particularities of one or other circuit. Something in candomblé transcends these
differences, and we need to ask what this ‘something’ might be. A second set of
questions relates to the fact that the candomblé priesthood actually gets involved in
the performance of these scripts, begging the question why they would do so.
Let me start with candomblé’s appeal to so many different groups. I suggest that
the case of candomblé is a clear example of the new roles that have been designed for
‘tradition’ in the post-modern world. As we have seen, in the representational economy
of Bahia, candomblé has become an idiom of ‘autochtony’ or ‘belonging’ in a globalising
world. As such, it provides Bahian gays, ecologists, black activists and others with a
vocabulary that enables them to make the local global, and the global local. This is
hardly a revolutionary research finding. I do want to stress, however, the importance
of these local articulations of global concerns. Globalisation processes tend to bring
about feelings of alienation. In Salvador, for example, adopting the identity-label ‘gay’
implies a serious risk of becoming a stranger in one’s social and cultural world. People
increasingly take that risk, probably because an alternative gay scene is emerging, that
promises a belonging to a global community. There is no denying the appeal of such
a promise. This global community may show its contours at gay beaches where gay
tourists mingle with local guys and even generate its ‘sentiments of belonging’ in night
hours at the discotheque. (I vividly recall crowds in a lower-class gay club singing along
with Whitney Houston and Celine Dion at the tops of their voices, though none of them
actually spoke a word of English). On the whole, however, the ‘global gay community’
remains an abstract entity that for many is out of reach. Re-defining candomblé as a
gay-friendly religion may offer a fantasy frame within which one may convince oneself
(and others) that one is not ‘opting out’ of Bahia, but one is acting squarely within the
confines of Baianidade. Likewise, it is not very difficult to imagine how a Bahian scholar,
trained at the Sorbonne in Paris, finds himself seduced into portraying candomblé as
an ecological movement avant-la-lèttre: the gnashing of Muniz Sodré, whose claim to
intellectual prestige (‘I’m a doctor from the Sorbonne’) implies acknowledging western
superiority, is almost audible in between the lines of the text that I have quoted above.
Candomblé helps him to do some time-juggling – we Africans have been doing this
long before it became a petty bourgeois fashion – and helps him out of his dilemmas,
too.
An appraisal of what candomblé ‘does’ in the new circuits in which it appears also
highlights just how much candomblé is in line with the role of Catholic and evangelical
churches in the political field as it provides political activity with a religious frame. I
want to stress that the quoted gay activists who praise the orixás for blessing the gay
pride parade or ponder the possibility of founding a religious gay cult, as well as the
black activists who praise the orixás, might be far more serious and far less ironic than
a western reader might assume. Secularisation theories – whatever they are worth in
the western world – are simply useless in Bahia, where one always performs in front
of an audience of saints, spirits and gods. A political project that does not, in one
way or the other, demonstrate its alliance with the saints and advertise its tap-roots
into the sacred, will not add up to much in Bahia (hence the famous public statement
of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former Brazilian president, that he considered
himself ‘a Cartesian with a touch of voodoo’). The presence of so many politicians
at the pompous ceremony that I described at the opening of this article, as well as
Gilberto Gil’s public confession that his ministery of Xangô was ‘of a spiritual, and
therefore more important, level than his position in Brası́lia’ are good examples. Yet the
necessity of demonstrating one’s connections with the sacred also showed up in a small
gesture by UNEGRO21 activists that I once saw: they had organised a public debate in
a modern university building and began the session by publicly decorating the sterile
laminate table-tops with leaves of the Sanseveria, a plant that in candomblé is known
as the Sword-of-Ogum and is endowed with the power to chase away evil forces. Just
by putting one leaf on each table, they managed completely to transform the frame of
the occasion.
A third point that might be unpacked from the discussion is that candomblé casts
political projects in a frame of ‘victimhood’. To opt for candomblé imagery is to invoke
all kinds of emotions associated with slavery, persecution, historical injustice, the denial
of a right of existence, the suffering of the weak, the poor and the miserable, which
the history of candomblé (and of Afro-Brazilians in general) incorporates. Against
this catalogue of tragedies, however, one can always point to the perseverance of the
Afro-Brazilian faith, as well as the pride and self-esteem of the candomblé community
that has managed to survive all the hardships of its history. The appeal of this framing
for counter-movements is evident (‘their persecution is our persecution, their suffering
is our suffering’). The populist politics of the Bahian elites, however, are equally well
served by the rhetorical possibilities of victimhood, be it in relation to sentiments
regarding the federal state (‘We Bahians are always discriminated against by those
southern states’), or in attempts to create a populist image (‘You may think we live in
our golden towers, but we know of the people’s suffering too’).
As for the question of why it is that the priesthood has started to perform the
novel scripts that have been written for their religious practices, it is instructive to go
back to the opening of this article. The opening ceremony showed just how successful
some temples have become at updating and outstretching the time-honoured politics
of creating honorary functions for influential outsiders. While publicly maintaining an
image of the religion of the oppressed (recall the peripheral location of Mãe Stella’s
temple, and Emerson saying that Mãe Stella was such a ‘humble’ woman), Ilê Axé Opô
Afonjá, the temple under discussion, manages to mobilise an impressive collection of
powerful figures. In this particular temple, there is not only an ‘ogã-ship’ on offer
to outsiders – a function that does not require a long initiation and ‘receiving’ of the
spirits through possession – but also a chair in the ‘ministry of Xangô’, an institution of
twenty-four chair holders that was created in 1937 within this particular terreiro with
the possible purpose (and definite effect) of allowing ever more influential outsiders into
its ranks. The handing out of ‘Xangô awards’ for celebrities who distinguish themselves
as benefactors of the candomblé community during the ceremony that I have described
might be seen as the new format in which this type of politics is cast.
Today, these politics seem to be motivated by a number of considerations. First,
there is a deep concern over the booming of neo-Pentecostal churches that continuously
attack candomblé, saying it is nothing less than the realm of the devil. In Bahia, a fear
of outright persecution has somewhat diminished now that the cult has been officially
21 União de Negros pela Lgualdade (Union of Blacks for Equality).
and legally recognised as one of the religions in the state. Yet the priesthood is very
much aware of the less favourable conditions of candomblé in other states such as São
Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where Pentecostal churches demonise and marginalise the
cult, as of old. The candomblé priesthood has therefore a vested interest in maintaining
the framing of Bahia as ‘the blessed land of the orixás’, just as a public display of the
links with highly influential politicians and esteemed academics helps against the threat
of neo-Pentecostal churches. The way that the community of candomblé has recently
begun to stress its dedication to tolerance [tolerância] must also be understood against
the threat of the Pentecostal churches, and might explain the ease with which priests
pick up ‘liberal’ issues such as gay rights, ecology or black emancipation.
Second, the creation of these honorary functions and the public demonstration
of the alliances a temple manages to mobilise should be understood in relation to
the attempts of the priesthood to enhance the respectability of the cult vis-à-vis a
society that still has a lot of prejudice about candomblé (recall Toninho’s reservations
towards publicly announcing his belonging to a temple). For all of its prestige, in the
popular mind, candomblé is easily linked to black magic, occult forces and witchcraft
[macumba]. The main temples seek to escape from these prejudices primarily by
adopting the anthropological distinction between religion and magic, and positioning
their beliefs in the former category (cf. Maggy 1986; Capone 2000). They have also
launched a public-relations offensive to advance this understanding of candomblé as a
religion – and seem to be quite successful. As I remarked earlier, it is stunning to see
how the two main newspapers in Bahia seem to be under a very strict (self-) censorship,
avoiding the kind of sensationalist reports about macumba that one finds elsewhere in
Brazil, always going out of their way to educate the public with very orthodox visions
of candomblé, and reproducing the solemn and sacred nature of Afro-Brazilian religion.
That there are limits to this playing along with the scripts that have been written
elsewhere is evident. Especially in the field of entertainment, the priesthood tries to limit
the use of candomblé imagery for fear of a ‘profanation’ of the cult. As the opening
night of the Semana Cultural da Herana Africana na Bahia illustrated so well, the
priests from candomblé can hardly be described as putty in the hands of others: they
are busy producing scenarios for a public form of candomblé, writing scripts to be
enacted by politicians, activists and anthropologists.
The more general conclusion this article permits – and I dare say this has relevance
beyond the study of candomblé – is that the well-established categories within which
anthropologists have sought to delineate their objects of investigation are in need of
revision. Candomblé is part of a world in which the forces of globalisation and the
mass media operate: I have shown that the walls between the temple and society at large
are highly permeable, and that at present ‘the whole world’ is involved in the making
and re-making of candomblé. In such a world, it makes little sense to try to contain
candomblé within the bounded anthropological notion of a ‘cult’.
My proposal to study candomblé as a symbol bank in Bahia’s representational
economy forces one to be aware of the multiple connections between the cult and
the circuits through which its myths, its belief-tenets, its symbols, its aesthetics and
its practices circulate. Above all, it urges one to be alert to the transformative work
of the dialogues that take place thanks to these circulations: what happens when
understandings pass through the endless communicative chains of priests talking to
anthropologists, talking to gay activists, talking to politicians, talking to initiates, talking
to talk-show hosts, and so on? Such a focus on circulation breaks with prioritising
temples and priests as the preferred sites and exegetes of the cult. Instead, it urges one to
analyse the fact that some people claim to represent the real candomblé, and that others
support or contest those claims. It urges one to investigate what resources people have
to substantiate their claims. It urges one to ponder the question of why some images
of candomblé find support, while others that are equally present become obscured.
Indeed, it urges one to consider the possibility that the continued representation of
candomblé as a closed universe is part of an internal political strategy that seeks to deal
with the permeability of the temple walls.
Mattijs van der Port

Research Centre Religion and Society
Department of Anthropology
University of Amsterdam
OZ Achterburgwal 185
1012 DK Amsterdam
The Netherlands
m.p.j.vandeport@uva.nl
References
Agier, Michel. 2000. Anthropologie du carnaval. La ville, la fête et l’Afrique à Bahia. Paris: Éditions
Parentheses.
Amaral, Rita. 2002. Xirê ! O modo de crer e de viver no candomblé. Rio de Janeiro: Pallas.
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of religion. Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Augras, Monique. 1998. Tendances actuelles de la recherche sur les cultes afro-brésiliens, in Marion
Aubrée (ed.), Religions. Orthodoxie, heterodoxie et mysticisme: 87–105. [=Cahier du Brésil
Contemporain 35–6.]
Bastide, Roger. 2000 [1958]. O candomblé da Bahia. Rito Nagô. São Paulo: Editora Schwarz.
Birman, Patricia. 1995. Fazer estilo, criando gêneros. Possessão e diferencas de gênero em terreiros de
umbanda e candomblé no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: EduERJ.
Capone, Stephania. 2000. La quête de l’Afrique dans le candomblé. Pouvoir et tradition au Brésil. Paris:
Karthala.
Carneiro, Edson. 2002 [1948]. Candomblés da Bahia. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.
Connor, Randy P., and David H. Sparks. 2004. Queering creole spiritual traditions. Lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender participation in African-inspired traditions in the Americas. Binghamton:
Harrington Park Press.
Covin, David. 1996. ‘The role of culture in Brazil’s unified black movement. Bahia in 1992’, Journal of
Black Studies 27: 39–55.
Dantas, Beatrice Góis. 1988. Vovó nagô e papai branco. Usos e abusos da África no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro:
Editora Graal.
Dion, Michel. 1998. Omindarewa. Uma francesa no candomblé. A busca de uma outra verdade. Rio de
Janeiro: Pallas.
Dunn, Christopher. 2001. Brutality garden. Tropicália and the emergence of a Brazilian counterculture.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Fry, Peter. 1982. Para inglês ver. Identidade e polı́tica na cultura brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar
Editores.
Hamilton, Russell G. 1967. ‘Afro-Brazilian cults in the novels of Jorge Amado’, Hispania 50: 242–
52.
Johnson, Paul. 2002. Secrets, gossip and gods. The transformation of Brazilian candomblé. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Keane, Webb. 2002. ‘Sincerity, “modernity” and the Protestants’, Cultural Anthropology 17: 65–92.
Landes, Ruth. 1947. The city of women. New York: MacMillan.
Lipiani, José Luiz. 1999. Orixás. Comportamento e personalidade de sues filhos. Comprehender melhor
a si mesmo e a seus semelhantes através da umbanda. Rio de Janeiro: Pallas.
Maggy, Yvonne. 1986. Guerra de orixa. Um estudo de ritual e conflito. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar.
1992. Medo do feitiço. Relações entre magia e poder no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional.
Meyer, Birgit. 2004. ‘“Praise the Lord”. Popular cinema and Pentecostalite style in Ghana’s new public
sphere’, American Ethnologist 31: 92–110.
Montes, Maria Lucia. 1998. ‘As figuras do sagrado. Entre o publico e o privado’, in Lilia Moritz
Schwarcz (ed.), História da vida privada no Brasil, 63–173. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Mott, Luis, and Marcello Cerqueira (eds.). 1998. As religiões Afro-Brasileiras na luta contra a Aids.
Salvador: Editora CBAA.
Pinto, Roque. 2001. ‘Como a cidade de Salvador empreende a produção do exótico atraves do texto da
baianidade’ (Dissertação de mestrado EM sciences sociais, University of Salvador).
Prandi, Reginaldo. 1996. Herdeiras do axé. Sociologia da religiões afro-brasileiras. São Paulo: Editora
HUCITEC.
Pretto, Nelson de Lucca, and Luiz Felippe Perret Serpa (eds.). 2002. Expressões de Sabedoria. Educação,
vida e sabers. Mãe stella de oxóssi, juvany viana. Salvador: Edufba.
Risério, Antonio. 1981. Carnaval ijexá. Salvador: Corrupio.
Rodrigues, Nina. 1935 [1900]. O animismo fetichista dos negros baianos. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização
Brasileira.
Salvatore, Armando. 1997. Islam and the political discourse of modernity. Reading, NY: Ithaca Press.
Santos, Juana Elbein dos. 1986 [1998]. Os nâgô e a morte. Pàde, asèsè e o culto égun na Bahia. Petrópolis:
Editora Vozes.
Santos, Jocélio Teles dos. 1995. O dono da terra. O caboclo nos candomblés da Bahia. Salvador: Sarah
Letras.
2000. ‘O poder da cultura e a cultura no poder. A disputa simbólica da herança cultural negra no
Brasil’ (PhD dissertation, University of São Paulo).
Serra, Ordep. 1995. Águas do rei. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes.
Silva, Vagner Gonçalves da. 1995. Orixás da metrópole. Petropolis: Vozes.
2001. O antropólogo e sua magia. Trabalho de campo e texto etnográfico nas pesquisas antropológicas
sobre religiões afro-brasileiras. São Paulo: Editora USP.
Silva, Vagner Gonçalves da, and Rita Amaral. 1993. ‘A cor do axé. Brancos e negros no candomblé de
São Paulo’, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos 25: 99–124.
Sodré, Muniz. 2002. O terreiro e a cidade. A forma social negro-brasileira. Salvador: Secretaria da Cultura
e Turismo.
Trevisan, João Silvério. 2000. Devassos no paraı́so. A homossexualidade no Brasil, da colonia a atualidade.
São Paulo: Record.
Verger, Pierre. 1981. Orixás, deuses Iorubás na África e no novo mundo. Salvador: Corrupio.
Wafer, Jim. 1991. The taste of blood. Spirit possession in Brazilian candomblé. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.

(VAN de PORT, M.) Candomblé in Pink, Green and Black - Rescripting The AfroBrazilian Religious Heritage in The Public Sphere of Salvador, Bahia

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(VAN de PORT, M.) Candomblé in Pink, Green and Black - Rescripting The AfroBrazilian Religious Heritage in The Public Sphere of Salvador, Bahia

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

M AT T I J S VA N D E P O RT

Candomblé in pink, green

Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession cult that will be discussed in this

1 The expression could be translated as ‘utterly Brazilian’.

4 For an elaborate discussion and deconstruction of anthropological work in candomblé temples,

9 But see Wafer (1991).

10 www.ggb.org.br/editorial.html, last entered 13 July 2003.

The example also highlights how the designation of candomblé as a ‘gay-friendly

14 http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/csblac/Text/Programs/Present/Shaping/Cypriano.html, last entered 20

15 www2.uol.com.br/mixbrasil/id/entende.htm, last entered 20 September 2004. Yet another priest,

16 http://www.aguaforte.com/ileaxeogum/ossain.html, last entered 20 September 2004.

The black emancipation movements is a more obvious and logical example of a

18 Text found at the author’s website: http://www.fflch.usp.br/sociologia/prandi/, last entered

Conclusion. Scripts and roles

21 União de Negros pela Lgualdade (Union of Blacks for Equality).

Mattijs van der Port

You might also like