Download or read book Black Atlantic Religion written by J. Lorand Matory and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a "survival," or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world. With counterparts in Nigeria, the Benin Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad, and the United States, Candomblé is a religion of spirit possession, dance, healing, and blood sacrifice. Most surprising to those who imagine Candomblé and other such religions as the products of anonymous folk memory is the fact that some of this religion's towering leaders and priests have been either well-traveled writers or merchants, whose stake in African-inspired religion was as much commercial as spiritual. Morever, they influenced Africa as much as Brazil. Thus, for centuries, Candomblé and its counterparts have stood at the crux of enormous transnational forces. Vividly combining history and ethnography, Matory spotlights a so-called "folk" religion defined not by its closure or internal homogeneity but by the diversity of its connections to classes and places often far away. Black Atlantic Religion sets a new standard for the study of transnationalism in its subaltern and often ancient manifestations.
Download or read book The Formation of Candomble written by Luis Nicolau Parés and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formation of Candomble: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil"
Download or read book Sacred Leaves of Candombl written by Robert A. Voeks and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Hubert Herring Book Award, Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies Candomblé, an African religious and healing tradition that spread to Brazil during the slave trade, relies heavily on the use of plants in its spiritual and medicinal practices. When its African adherents were forcibly transplanted to the New World, they faced the challenge not only of maintaining their culture and beliefs in the face of European domination but also of finding plants with similar properties to the ones they had used in Africa. This book traces the origin, diffusion, medicinal use, and meaning of Candomblé's healing pharmacopoeia—the sacred leaves. Robert Voeks examines such topics as the biogeography of Africa and Brazil, the transference—and transformation—of Candomblé as its adherents encountered both native South American belief systems and European Christianity, and the African system of medicinal plant classification that allowed Candomblé to survive and even thrive in the New World. This research casts new light on topics ranging from the creation of African American cultures to tropical rain forest healing floras.
Download or read book Initiation Into Candombl written by Zeca Ligiéro and published by . This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Candomble is an African-Brazilian religion that has over two million adherents throughout Brazil, but also in the Americas and in Europe. Despite the popularity of Candomble, many people still confuse the religion with a cult, or perceive it as part of other religions, such as Spiritualism, Umbanda, or even non-orthodox Catholicism. Candomble is an independent religion with a composite philosophical base derived from a number African cultures, and has its own corpus of orally-transmitted texts, ancient rituals, and organic lifestyle. Initiation into Candomble takes the reader through the foundational ideas and practices of this composite religion, guided by an author who is not only a scholar but also a practitioner of Candomble.
Download or read book Queering Black Atlantic Religions written by Roberto Strongman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Queering Black Atlantic Religions Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body, the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production, Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black, trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche, soul, and gender as multiple, removable, and external to the body.
Download or read book A Refuge in Thunder written by Rachel E. Harding and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-19 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[An important] detailing of the development and evolution of a major institution of the African Diaspora [and] of Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian identity." —Sheila S. Walker The Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé has long been recognized as an extraordinary resource of African tradition, values, and identity among its adherents in Bahia, Brazil. Outlawed and persecuted in the late colonial and imperial period, Candomblé nevertheless developed as one of the major religious expressions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. Drawing principally on primary sources, such as police archives, Rachel E. Harding describes the development of the religion as an "alternative" space in which subjugated and enslaved blacks could gain a sense of individual and collective identity in opposition to the subaltern status imposed upon them by the dominant society.
Download or read book The City of Women written by Ruth Landes and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the landmark study of candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion of Bahia, Brazil.
Download or read book Searching for Africa in Brazil written by Stefania Capone Laffitte and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Nagô (Yoruba) cult in the northeastern state of Bahia. In contrast to other researchers, Capone foregrounds the agency of Candomblé leaders. She demonstrates that they successfully imposed their vision of Candomblé 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.
Download or read book Secrets Gossip and Gods written by Paul Christopher Johnson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging book Paul Christopher Johnson explores the changing, hidden face of the Afro-Brazilian indigenous religion of Candomblé. Despite its importance in Brazilian society, Candomblé has received far less attention than its sister religions Vodou and Santeria. Johnson seeks to fill this void by offering a comprehensive look at the development, beliefs, and practices of Candomblé and exploring its transformation from a secret society of slaves--hidden, persecuted, and marginalized--to a public religion that is very much a part of Brazilian culture. Johnson traces this historical shift and locates the turning point in the creation of Brazilian national identity and a public sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. His major focus is on the ritual practice of secrecy in Candomblé. Like Vodou and Santeria and the African Yoruba religion from which they are descended, Candomblé features a hierarchic series of initiations, with increasing access to secret knowledge at each level. As Johnson shows, the nature and uses of secrecy evolved with the religion. First, secrecy was essential to a society that had to remain hidden from authorities. Later, when Candomblé became known and actively persecuted, its secrecy became a form of resistance as well as an exotic hidden power desired by elites. Finally, as Candomblé became a public religion and a vital part of Brazilian culture, the debate increasingly turned away from the secrets themselves and toward their possessors. It is speech about secrets, and not the content of those secrets, that is now most important in building status, legitimacy and power in Candomblé. Offering many first hand accounts of the rites and rituals of contemporary Candomblé, this book provides insight into this influential but little-studied group, while at the same time making a valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religion and society.
Download or read book Sacred Art written by Henry Glassie and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred art flourishes today in northeastern Brazil, where European and African religious traditions have intersected for centuries. Professional artists create images of both the Catholic saints and the African gods of Candomblé to meet the needs of a vast market of believers and art collectors. Over the past decade, Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla conducted intense research in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, interviewing the artists at length, photographing their processes and products, attending Catholic and Candomblé services, and finally creating a comprehensive book, governed by a deep understanding of the artists themselves. Beginning with Edival Rosas, who carves monumental baroque statues for churches, and ending with Francisco Santos, who paints images of the gods for Candomblé terreiros, the book displays the diversity of Brazilian artistic techniques and religious interpretations. Glassie and Shukla enhance their findings with comparisons from art and religion in the United States, Nigeria, Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, and Japan and gesture toward an encompassing theology of power and beauty that brings unity into the spiritual art of the world.
Download or read book Dancing Wisdom written by Yvonne Daniel and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landmark interdisciplinary study of religious systems through their dance performances
Download or read book Manipulating the Sacred written by Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first art historical study of Yoruba-descended African Brazilian religious art based on an author's long-term participation in and observation of private and public rituals. At a time when the art of the African diaspora has aroused much general interest for its multicultural dimensions, Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara contributes strikingly rich insights as a participant/observer in the African-based religions of Brazil. She focuses on the symbolism and function of ritual objects and costumes used in the Brazilian Candomblé (miniature "African" environments or temples) of the Bahia region, which combine Yorùbá, Bantu/Angola, Caboclo, Roman Catholic, and/or Kardecist/Spiritist elements. An initiate herself with more than twenty years of study, the author is considered an insider, and has witnessed how practitioners manipulate the "sacred" to encode, in art and ritual, vital knowledge about meaning, values, epistemologies, and history. She demonstrates how this manipulation provides Brazilian descendents of slaves with a sense of agency--with a link to their African heritage and a locus for resistance to the dominant Euro-Brazilian culture.
Download or read book Handbook of Contemporary Religions in Brazil written by Bettina Schmidt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Brill Handbook of Contemporary Religions in Brazil provides an unprecedented overview of Brazil’s religious landscape. It offers a full, balanced and contextualized portrait of contemporary religions in Brazil, bringing together leading scholars from both Brazil and abroad, drawing on both fieldwork and detailed reviews of the literatures. For the first time a single volume offers overviews by leading scholars of the full range of Brazilian religions, alongside more theoretically oriented discussions of relevant religious and culture themes. This Handbook’s three sections present specific religions and groups of traditions, Brazilian religions in the diaspora, and issues in Brazilian religions (e.g., women, possession, politics, race and material culture).
Download or read book Afro Caribbean Religions written by Nathaniel Samuel Murrell and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is one of the most important elements of Afro-Caribbean culture linking its people to their African past, from Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria—popular religions that have often been demonized in popular culture—to Rastafari in Jamaica and Orisha-Shango of Trinidad and Tobago. In Afro-Caribbean Religions, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell provides a comprehensive study that respectfully traces the social, historical, and political contexts of these religions. And, because Brazil has the largest African population in the world outside of Africa, and has historic ties to the Caribbean, Murrell includes a section on Candomble, Umbanda, Xango, and Batique. This accessibly written introduction to Afro-Caribbean religions examines the cultural traditions and transformations of all of the African-derived religions of the Caribbean along with their cosmology, beliefs, cultic structures, and ritual practices. Ideal for classroom use, Afro-Caribbean Religions also includes a glossary defining unfamiliar terms and identifying key figures.
Download or read book The Demystified Candombl Trilogy written by Carlos Duarte Junior and published by CARLOS AUGUSTO RAMOS DUARTE JUNIOR. This book was released on 2023-11-09 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **Title: Demystifying Candomblé** **Author: Carlos Duarte Junior** **Description:** 🌟 Embark on a fascinating journey to unravel the secrets of Candomblé with this complete collection. Bringing together the acclaimed three volumes - "Demystifying Candomblé: A Guide for the Curious," "Candomblé and its Revisited Origins," and "Demystifying Candomblé: Getting to Know the Orixás and their Deities" - this unique work offers a profound exploration of the rich religious and cultural tradition of Candomblé. 🌟 **Volume 1 - A Guide for the Curious:** Discover the foundations of Candomblé, its practices, rituals, and beliefs. Ideal for those who wish to understand the fundamental principles of this Afro-Brazilian religion. 📜🕊️ **Volume 2 - Revisited Origins:** Travel back in time to the African roots of Candomblé and understand how this religion established itself in Brazil, resisting the adversities of history. 🌍🕰️ **Volume 3 - Getting to Know the Orixás:** Delve into the pantheon of Orixás, the deities of Candomblé, and explore their stories, symbolism, and influence on the lives of practitioners. 🌌🙌 Together, these volumes form a comprehensive guide that will captivate both the curious and enthusiasts of Candomblé. 📚✨ Author Carlos Duarte Junior shares his expertise with an accessible and engaging approach, making this work an essential reference for anyone looking to understand and appreciate the spiritual and cultural richness of Candomblé. 🧠🌍 Whether you are a researcher seeking knowledge or someone looking for a deeper connection with this tradition, "Demystifying Candomblé" is your gateway to a world of wisdom, spirituality, and respect for religious diversity. 🚪🌞
Download or read book The Formation of Candombl written by Luis Nicolau Parés and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-11-17 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interweaving three centuries of transatlantic religious and social history with historical and present-day ethnography, Luis Nicolau Pares traces the formation of Candomble, one of the most influential African-derived religious forms in the African diaspora, with practitioners today centered in Brazil but also living in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas. Originally published in Brazil and not available in English, The Formation of Candomble reveals cultural changes that have occurred in religious practices within Africa, as well as those caused by the displacement of enslaved Africans in the Americas. Departing from the common assumption that Candomble originated in the Yoruba orixa (orisha) worship, Pares highlights the critical role of the vodun religious practices in its formation process. Vodun traditions were brought by enslaved Africans of Dahomean origin, known as the "Jeje" nation in Brazil since the early eighteenth century. The book concludes with Pares's account of present-day Jeje temples in Bahia, which serves as the first written record of the oral traditions and ritual of this particular nation of Candomble.
Download or read book Divining Slavery and Freedom written by João José Reis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its original publication in Portuguese in 2008, this first English translation of Divining Slavery has been extensively revised and updated, complete with new primary sources and a new bibliography. It tells the story of Domingos Sodré, an African-born priest who was enslaved in Bahia, Brazil in the nineteenth century. After obtaining his freedom, Sodré became a slave owner himself, and in 1862 was arrested on suspicion of receiving stolen goods from slaves in exchange for supposed 'witchcraft'. Using this incident as a catalyst, the book discusses African religion and its place in a slave society, analyzing its double role as a refuge for blacks as well as a bridge between classes and ethnic groups (such as whites who attended African rituals and sought help from African diviners and medicine men). Ultimately, Divining Slavery explores the fluidity and relativity of conditions such as slavery and freedom, African and local religions, personal and collective experience and identities in the lives of Africans in the Brazilian diaspora.
