"Searching for Africa in Brazil" is a learned exploration of
tradition and change in Afro-Brazilian religions. Focusing on the
convergence of anthropologists' and religious leaders' exegeses,
Stefania Capone argues that twentieth-century anthropological
research contributed to the construction of an ideal Afro-Brazilian
religious orthodoxy identified with the Nago (Yoruba) cult in the
northeastern state of Bahia. In contrast to other researchers,
Capone foregrounds the agency of Candomble leaders. She
demonstrates that they successfully imposed their vision of
Candomble on anthropologists, reshaping in their own interest
narratives of Afro-Brazilian religious practice. The
anthropological narratives were then taken as official accounts of
religious orthodoxy by many practitioners of Afro-Brazilian
religions in Brazil. Capone draws on ten years of ethnographic
fieldwork in Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro as she
demonstrates that there is no pure or orthodox Afro-Brazilian
religion.
Challenging the usual interpretations of Afro-Brazilian
religions as fixed entities, completely independent of one another,
Capone reveals these practices as parts of a unique religious
continuum. She does so through an analysis of ritual variations as
well as discursive practices. To illuminate the continuum of
Afro-Brazilian religious practice and the tensions between exegetic
discourses and ritual practices, Capone focuses on the figure of
Exu, the sacred African trickster who allows communication between
gods and men. Following Exu and his avatars, she discloses the
centrality of notions of prestige and power--mystical and
religious--in Afro-Brazilian religions. To explain how religious
identity is constantly negotiated among social actors, Capone
emphasizes the agency of practitioners and their political agendas
in the "return to roots," or re-Africanization, movement, an
attempt to recover the original purity of a mythical and
legitimizing Africa.
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