Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé
2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-2007-005
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoCultural histories of the “black Atlantic,” as Africa and its various diasporas are fashionably called in the academy, are less than 75 years old, but they’ve already established their own orthodoxies. It is Professor Matory’s evident pleasure to skewer many of their perceived truths and to include in his skewering those globalization theorists who suppose transnationalism began with frequent-flyer miles or DirecTV. To them he says, check the traffic flows between Brazil and Nigeria for the last couple hundred years.Prevailing “roots” scholarship (Melville Herskovits, Roger Bastide et al.) traces a unilinear movement of African religions from West and Central Africa to the New World, where they were communally reestablished by rural blacks hiding their primordial divinities behind Catholic rituals and images. Matory will have none of this. Rather than roots, he sees rhizomes running in all directions between the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa. In his model, agency is returned not to surreptitious peasants, but to a complex “ethno-class” of Afro-Brazilians acting out of enlightened self-interest. This group, which includes “international merchants as the foremost agents” but also “musicians, literati, translators, and priests, including alienated Christian missionaries and leading Freemasons,” comprised “diverse units of collective self-construction” that imagined the diaspora as a community (pp. 102 – 3).Matory describes this process of religious self-fashioning as “Anagonization,” from the term Nago used to describe Yoruba people in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas. But the universality of his argument is vitiated by this focus on an African people who constructed a national identity for themselves only late in the nineteenth century, at about the same time the “Nagos” were framing their own identity in Brazil. There are all sorts of historical and geographic contingencies (including the ease and profitability of Atlantic trade routes and the late date of Brazilian emancipation) that make the Yoruba-Candomblé case unique and thus distant from the various Kongo-derived religions or Vodou, for example. Perhaps the only other convincing example of Black transnationalism is that of the “Jeje,” whose emerging ethnic and religious solidarity in Brazil may have inspired a parallel self-fashioning among their kindred in Dahomey, a wonderful example of those rhizomes Matory suggests.For a religious culture that celebrates its “African purity,” Candomblé is also remarkable for the emergence of a matriarchal priesthood without precedent in Nigeria. Given his stress on Afro-Brazilian agency, Matory ascribes this gender anomaly to a surprising source: “Ruth Landes’s City of Women (1947), in which the author offers Candomblé as a living and time-honored example of matriarchy, available to inspire the opponents of sexism in . . . the United States” (p. 189). Matory thus allows an awful lot of agency to an Anglo-American anthropologist, especially since the ascension of priestly women involves a corollary demotion of priestly men: “Landes effectively founded the Brazilian tradition by which a temple’s commitment to excluding men from the possession priesthood became a significant measure of its ‘African purity’” (p. 191). One marvels at the power of an anthropologist to so significantly reshape the religious practice of her subject, but one also wonders if there were not other undiscussed factors in the Bahian Weltanschauung that supported such a gender revolution.Discussion of gender leads to the touchy issue of the adé or male possession priest, a ritual specialist of great importance in Yorubaland (see Matory, Sex and the Empire That Is No More, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994), who is now identified with passive homosexuality in Brazil. Matory carefully traces the evolution of the transvestite priesthood from the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo to Bahia, adumbrating questions about sexuality that were memorably aroused by Jim Wafer’s flamboyant account of spirit possession in a homosexual Candomblé temple (The Taste of Blood, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).There is a more than a bit of épater l’academie in Matory’s writing, which some will find engaging. Parts of the book are clearly addressed to a relatively small class of scholars; others will find the critique of transnational and globalization theory bracing. For either of these reasons, or for Matory’s grander project of restoring agency to the unsung entrepreneurs who shaped contemporary expressions of black Atlantic religion, this is a book that deserves to be read and discussed.But it is J. Lorand Matory who suggests this final irony: that the writer may provide the best evidence for his own thesis. Having discussed the important role that the “English Professors of Brazil” — which is to say, the Afro-Brazilian intellectuals who traveled between Bahia and Lagos at the end of the nineteenth century — played in the development of Candomblé, Matory reveals himself as their heir, growing up in a Yoruba-centric academic family, immersing himself in their religion. “I am a son of Ogum. He rules my head and molds my personality. He makes me strong like steel” (p. 246). In that his book may well become canonized by Candomblé practitioners, Matory (like Landes?) could wind up reshaping a religion whose past he has so carefully construed.
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