Search Results

The ritual aesthetics of Afrobrazilian religions such as Umbanda and Candomblé exhibit a great range of diversity. This chapter explores the possibility that the diverse aesthetics of Afrobrazilian religion reflect and express divergent stances toward contested issues of race and identity in Brazil, while constituting markedly different experiences of spirituality and the sacred. The chapter suggests that we approach Afrobrazilian religious aesthetics through a “politics of the senses.”

Divine healing, more than glossolalia, is the most universal gift of the Spirit in Latin American pentecostalism. Less than half of pentecostal informants in Belém, Pará, Brazil, regularly spoke in tongues, but most claimed that Jesus or the Holy Spirit had cured them. The disease of poverty predisposes the dispossessed of Brazil and Latin America to accept pentecostal cura divina (divine cure or faith healing) and libertação (exorcism or deliverance). Poverty and illness are necessary, but insufficient, preconditions for conversion. Reaching a health crisis and perceiving a divine cure are also necessary. Church altar calls for healing are supplemented by testimonials and prayers from relatives, friends, and neighbors. Typically, the afflicted first try cheaper, easier home remedies; then medical aid; then curandeiras (folk healers), saints of Catholicism, or Umbanda spirits of African-Brazilian religions; finally paying the high price demanded by pentecostalism of accepting Jesus in exchange for a cure.

Glowczewski comments here on an experimental process of anthropological restitution. She designed the performance Cosmocouleurs for the exhibition The Beast and Adversity (Geneva, 2015) to invite the audience to share a feeling of cinema-transe. She asked Clarissa Alcantara – a Brazilian performance artist, philosopher and also squizoanalytical therapist trained in Deleuze and Guattari studies- to dance while she followed her projecting Umbanda rituals that she filmed in 2013 and 2015 (in Florianopolis, Brazil. Images made during a session of Exu where the participants dance in a state of incorporation by Orixás and other entities were moving on the dancer who in the process experimented another form of incorporation. The second part of the text is a transcription of a conversation between the anthropologist and the spirit Vó Cirina (Grandma Cirina), an old Black woman (Preta Velha) incorporated in Abílio Noé da Silveira, the babalorixá of the Tenda Espírita Vó Cirina in Florianópolis (Brazil), who accepted the process of the Geneva performance. First published in 2017.

Ronaldo Rego is a multimedia artist from Rio de Janeiro. As a priest in the African-influenced religion of Umbanda, Rego chooses to base his art almost exclusively on themes from this faith. The chapter begins with an examination of some of the prints and sculptures he has produced for secular audiences. The chapter then explores how Rego identifies with Brazil’s black population, both ethnically and artistically, due to his choice of subject matter and position within the African religious universe. Rego focuses on a collective past and identity, which is common to modern black artistic production. Because Brazilian scholars do not apply the same racially-based line to Afro-Brazilian art as American academics, several curators have included Rego, a white artist, in their national and international exhibitions. This chapter reveals the complex relationship between religious expression and artistic liberty in conveying blackness.

This chapter introduces the setting for the book’s analysis, the multi-faith and multi-ethnic religious community in greater Porto Alegre, Brazil. The community practices three Afro-Brazilian religions: Batuque, Umbanda, and Quimbanda. The chapter explains the phrase “Afro-gaucho religious community” before it discusses the book’s central interpretive framework: musical boundary-work. By combining ethnomusicology and symbolic boundary theory, this framework helps to describe the Afro-gaucho religious community’s use of ritual music to cross and purify the three religions. Musical boundary-work signifies the creation, interpretation, and use of music to reinforce, bridge, or reshape boundaries for social, spiritual, political, or other purposes. The chapter also outlines the history of scholarship on Afro-Brazilian religions, their music, and their presence in southernmost Brazil, as well as symbolic boundary theory and its use in ethnomusicology. The chapter concludes with an overview of the ethnomusicological research methods used and the author’s interactions with the community.

This chapter and the next chapter chart the unidirectional movement of musicians and drum rhythms from Batuque to Umbanda and Quimbanda. This supports the book’s point that Afro-Brazilian practitioners of Batuque have historically managed to control the syncretizing of Batuque with Umbanda and Quimbanda, while practicing all three religions and accepting converts. The present chapter also connects levels of musical competency with the local term “foundation,” meaning religious wisdom and magical power. The chapter compares the musical careers and resulting hierarchy of professional musicians, contrasting three exemplar musicians who appear throughout the book.

This chapter, building on the previous chapter, traces how musicians have brought prayers and drum rhythms from certain traditions of Batuque (called nations) into others and from Batuque into Umbanda and Quimbanda. It first explains the structure of Batuque celebrations and the different sequences for calling divinities among Batuque nations (i.e., sub-traditions, denominations). It then recounts a history of Batuque practitioners of African descent in the Cabinda Nation who began practicing Umbanda and may have brought to it the drumming practices of Batuque. The chapter then explores the flow of rhythms across Batuque nations and into Umbanda and Quimbanda, and the resistance of Batuque musicians to musical influences from Umbanda and Quimbanda. Finally, it considers the history of Afro-Brazilian religions in southern Brazil, explained in Chapter 1, to understand the community’s reasons for controlling musical syncretism among the religions.

This chapter explains the music of Umbanda used in ritual contexts and argues two main points about structure and innovation in Umbanda. First, because Umbandists actively compose devotional songs, prayers, and hymns used in ceremonies, the corpus continually develops largely from the bottom up. By contrast, Batuque practitioners value preserving Batuque’s ritual music and consequently its African roots. Second, the sequence of rites and accompanying music in Umbanda resembles Spiritism more closely than those of Batuque, described in Chapter 4. Umbanda ceremonies consist of four sections: opening, arrival, works, and closing. To explain these points, this chapter presents the songs of Umbanda in the common order of public rituals and highlights contexts, functions, and meanings for practitioners.

This chapter discusses transformations in Quimbanda ritual, music, and performance practices since the 1970s. It connects these changes with the doctrine of spiritual evolution in Umbanda and struggles for religious freedom and civil liberties in Brazil. These started during Brazil’s return to democracy from military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s, devotees began sacrificing animals in Quimbanda rituals, changed the wardrobe and behavior of the spirits, composed and disseminated new sung prayers, developed new drum patterns, and began sharing the song-leading and accompaniment duties, which used to be the responsibility of religious and musical leaders. This increasingly egalitarian approach to musical participation has, however, caused tensions between laity and musical leaders over authority and musical authorship. These power conflicts extend from religious houses to the recording industries in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.

This chapter and the next chapter examine musical representations of ethnic spiritual heritages as performed by Brazilians of African and Romani descent in Porto Alegre, where they are minority populations with a history of systematic discrimination. The eclectic nature of Umbanda has fostered as much musical as theological creativity, providing a flexible framework for charismatic leaders to reinvent rituals and accompanying music in attempts to empower their ethnic communities and support social activism. The present chapter examines a worship house’s day-long celebration dedicated to honoring black ancestors and celebrating black resistance to oppression. The event included an extended Umbanda ceremony with music from multiple parts of Africa and Brazil, which articulated a Pan-Africanist consciousness for the sake of empowering Afro-Brazilians.

This chapter analyzes an unconventional Umbanda ceremony that transpired within a Romani-Brazilian cultural festival in a prominent public park. The event sought to commemorate the underappreciated and disenfranchised lives of Roma in Porto Alegre. The Umbanda ceremony embraced imagery of the Gypsy from Andalusia filtered through the internationally popular aesthetics of the Gipsy Kings, flamenco dance, and Latin-American popular song. As is the case in most Umbanda rituals, the spirit possession performances during the two celebrations, described in this chapter and the last, drew on broadly recognizable dress, movement, and behavior associated with particular ethnic groups. The chapter concludes that Umbanda, with all its stereotyped imagery of ethnic spiritual heritages, provides Roma and Afro-Brazilians a potent vehicle through which to assert their affinities with transnational ethno-racial identities with the hopes of social gains in a local context.

This chapter investigates John of God’s healing practices and beliefs and their place in the Brazilian religious arena. The author argues that they derive from a hybrid set of beliefs from popular Catholicism, Kardecist Spiritism, and Umbanda (a Brazilian religion that itself blends Catholicism, Kardecist Spiritism, and African and Amerindian religions). The chapter explains the arrival and dissemination of French Kardecist Spiritism in Brazil, and then explores Kardecist Spiritism’s concepts of illness and healing, which are used to explain healings (and also their absence) at Casa de Dom Inácio, John of God’s “spiritual hospital.” Subsequently, it addresses Kardecist Spiritism’s historical relationship with Umbanda, the Catholic Church, and biomedicine in Brazil, and the ways in which the law has persecuted psychic healers, including John of God. Finally, it examines John of God’s charismatic authority and his hybrid religious practices.