Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cityscapes and contact zones: Christianity, Candomblé, and African heritage tourism in Brazil

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 43; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0048721x.2013.798163

1096-1151

Stephen Selka,

Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research

Abstract In this article the author explores the ways in which Catholic, evangelical, and Candomblé actors produce competing framings that shape encounters taking place in the city of Cachoeira in the Brazilian state of Bahia. The framing of Cachoeira as a site of heritage tourism – one where local religious practices are read as part of the African heritage and attractions for African American ‘roots tourists’ – obscures as much as it reveals. This is not to suggest that this framing is entirely inaccurate or to deny that many visitors themselves describe their trips to Bahia this way. But I contend that the ‘heritage frame’ masks key issues that complicate diasporic encounters in Cachoeira, particularly different understandings of heritage and religion and their relationship to black identity that African Americans and Afro-Brazilians bring to these encounters. Keywords: CatholicismevangelicalismCandombléBraziltourism Notes 1This article is based on roughly two years of ethnographic fieldwork that I have conducted in Bahia since 1999. During this time I conducted extensive interviews with religious practitioners, tourism professionals, and social activists. Much of my fieldwork involved observing religious ceremonies and meetings in the Catholic, evangelical Christian, and Candomblé community. I have worked especially closely with the members of the Sisterhood of Our Lady of Good Death in Cachoeira, which I discuss in more depth below. 2Nevertheless, Candomblé and evangelical Christianity inform each other in significant ways (Silva Citation2007). 3The capital of Bahia was transferred to Cachoeira from 1822–3 while the Portuguese held Salvador. Besides the informal nickname ‘a cidade de macumba,’ Cachoeira's official nickname is ‘the heroic city.’ 4In Bahia, one of the most visible urban transformations in recent decades was the restoration of Pelourinho, the city of Salvador's historic center. This project began in the 1970s and involved both the restoration of buildings and relocation of bodies in a neighborhood that was equated with crime and prostitution. Much of the restoration efforts focused on colonial buildings and churches, and as a result, Pelourinho was placed on UNESCO's heritage of humanity list in 1985. The renovation of the neighborhood also focused on the Pelourinho's ‘immaterial heritage,’ principally Afro-Brazilian culture. Today the neighborhood is the center for tourism in the city, and here one finds the offices of many of Bahia's institutions and organizations concerned with culture and heritage, as well as the headquarters of Afro-Brazilian cultural institutions such as Olodum and Filhos de Gandy. As John Collins (Citation2008) argues, the objective of this project was not so much to move black bodies out of Pelourinho altogether, but to showcase certain kinds of docile black bodies and their bodily habits. This re-signification of Pelourinho as a site for Afro-Brazilian culture has been contested by evangelicals in particular, as the restoration of this public space explicitly grounds Bahian cultural citizenship in the symbols and practices of Candomblé (Collins Citation2004). 5 http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/dialogue/the-slave-route/ 6Pinho (Citation2008) and Timothy and Teye (Citation2004) are notable exceptions. 7Yet several developments over the past decade have challenged the marginalization of Candomblé in Cachoeira. These developments stem from both the growing public interest in Bahia's African heritage and the increasingly strong stance that Candomblé communities have taken against religious intolerance. As I mentioned, the opening of a new campus of the federal university (Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia, or UFBA) in Cachoeira in 2006 played an important role, as the university provided a public venue for discussions of Candomblé and Afro-Brazilian culture. Indeed, some of the professors at UFRB have helped bring state recognition (tombamento) to several of Cachoeira's terreiros. In addition, in the past few years a group of Candomblé leaders have led marches against religious intolerance in Cachoeira and two of them ran for the office of alderman in 2012. Several of these leaders have also organized a weekly cultural exposition in the middle of town featuring Afro-Brazilian music and dance, something that would have been hard to imagine when I first visited Cachoeira in 1999. At the same time, Candomblé remains much more publically visible in Salvador than in Cachoeira. In 1998, for example, the Department of Tourism of the state of Bahia erected towering metal statues of the orixás in the middle of the Dique de Tororó, a man-made lake in the center of Salvador close to the municipal soccer stadium (Sansi Citation2007). In addition, countless buildings and businesses are named after orixás (e.g., ‘Restaurante Yemanjá’ and ‘Edificio Oxum Apara’) and several statues of the orixá Exu by the sculptor Mario Cravo are found around the city, including near a busy intersection in the heavily trafficked neighborhood of Rio Vermelho. Most of the terreiros still remain on the margins of the cityscape, and the marked presence of Candomblé on the landscape does not go uncontested, as seen in the dramatic story of an evangelical man who rowed out to the middle of the Dique de Tororó with a hammer to knock down the statues of the orixás (Sansi Citation2007). 8A number of places in the city that are important for Boa Morte derive from Candomblé, for example. One is the Casa da Estrela, a house along Boa Morte's procession route that is marked by a star in the pavement in in the sidewalk in front of it that has historical and ritual significance. Several locals told me that the images of Mary used in the festival were housed here when Boa Morte moved from Salvador to Cachoeira in the early 1900s, and that an exu is buried or ‘seated’ under the star. The cemetery and the riverside also play an important part in the festival. The cemetery, however, is rumored to be the setting for rituals to which the public is not allowed to witness. The riverside, however is where the food that remains after the festival – that which is not given to prisoners and the poor – is deposited as an offering to Oxum. 9This is perhaps not so much of a concern for the Yoruba revivalists who visit Bahia, since in Salvador a number of ‘re-Africanized’ terreiros have sought to eliminate Catholic syncretism (Jensen Citation1999). 10A similar point could be made about Candomblé. Although Afro-Brazilians and African Americans may be kin in the inclusive sense of this term, the latter (at least those who are not initiated) are not part of the community of povo de santo – which is organized in terms of relations of spiritual kinship – and that one enters through extensive ritual participation.