The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations PDF
Preview The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations
ROGER BASTIDE - “The a a African Religions pa ei Brazil Toward a Sociology of the: Interpenetration of Civilizations. : Translated by HELEN SEBBA cae “Inconn testably the fin est analysi ) i ea tS “Afr ro- -Amer rican be lief system ever do ne. =e W: Mi inte, fas The African Religions of Brazil JOHNS HOPKINS STUDIES IN ATLANTIC HISTORY AND CULTURE RICHARD PRICE AND FRANKLIN W. KNIGHT, GENERAL EDITORS The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical Introduction Richard Price The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony O. Nigel Bolland Languages of the West Indies Douglas Taylor Peasant Politics: Struggle in a Dominican Village Kenneth Evan Sharpe The African Religions of Brazil Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations ROGER BASTIDE Translated by HELEN SEBBA THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS BALTIMORE AND LONDON This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of The Tinker Foundation Incorporated. Originally published in Paris in 1960 as Les Religions Afro-Brésiliennes: Contribution à une Sociologie des Interpénétrations de Civilisations Copyright © 1960 by Presses Universitaires de France English translation copyright © 1978 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, xerography, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-5421 ISBN 0-8018-2056-1 (hardcover ) ISBN 0-8018-2130-4 (paperback ) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data will be found on the last printed page of this book. Contents Foreword by Richard Price Acknowledgments xui Introduction to the Translation by Duglas T. Monteiro Introduction pm The Dual Heritage The Importation of Portugal and Africa to America O New Social Frameworks for Afro-Brazilian Religions O Slave Protest and Religion v The Religious Element in Racial Conflict A Two Catholicisms 109 A N Survivals of African Religion 126 D A Black Islam in Brazil 143 Conclusions: Religions, Ethnic Groups, and Social Classes 155 o A Sociological Study of the Afro-Brazilian Religions 171 Geography and the Afro-Brazilian Religions 173 How the African Religious Sects Function 220 Problems of the Collective Memory 240 Problems of Religious Syncretism 260 Two Types of Disintegration 285 The Birth of a Religion 304 The Catholic or Protestant Black: Assimilation or Reinterpretation? 343 vi CONTENTS 16. Conclusions 375 Notes 407 Glossary 469 Index 483 Foreword At the time of his recent death, Roger Bastide left an unusually rich scholarly legacy—some 28 books (not counting their many translations), 337 journal articles, 80 chapters in edited volumes, 70 conference papers, 37 forewords or introductions, and 250 book reviews.! Of these, The African Religions of Brazil, first published in 1960, is the masterwork. In introducing this translation, I will try to sketch in with some very quick strokes something of the place of this book in the total oeuvre. Bastide, already the author of two books on the sociology of religion,’ left France for Brazil in 1938 at the age of forty, intending to study dreams and mental illness among the poor urban black population. Arriv- ing at the still-young University of São Paulo (which during those exciting years played host as well to many other foreign scholars, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Gurvitch, Fernand Braudel, and Melville Hersko- vits), Bastide carved out a special niche for himself in the turbulent intel- lectual life of this rapidly expanding metropolis. While engaged in the personal adventure of discovering what he soon realized was, for him, a whole new world, Bastide wrote about it, prolifically, producing a stream of critical essays and reviews for the daily newspapers and intellectual journals, on Brazilian poetry and novels, on painting, architecture, and sculpture.? Within the university, Bastide patiently effected what M. I. Pereira de Queiroz has called “a genuine revolution” in the methods and concepts of Brazilian sociology, a reorientation that has been carried for- ward with vigor by his students and colleagues; later in his stay, he was responsible for introducing the discipline of social psychiatry into the Brazilian medical schools.* But all the while, Bastide was patiently con- ducting his pioneering fieldwork on the spiritual life of Afro-Brazilians, focusing particularly on the candomblé of Bahia, and devoting a span of time to empirical investigation that set him quite apart from most of his French ethnological contemporaries. Shortly before his death, Bastide wrote that his arrival in Brazil had vii Vill FOREWORD provoked in him a crise de conscience, an intellectual and spiritual crisis. Approaching the world of candomblé “with a way of thinking [une mentalité] shaped by three centuries of Cartesianism . . . an ethnocentric mode of thought, . . . I [realized that I] would have to ‘convert’ myself to a new way of thinking if I ever hoped to understand it.”º Elsewhere he wrote that “the sociologist who studies Brazil no longer knows what set of concepts to use. The ideas he has learned in Europe or North America are no longer valid”; Cartesian distinctions between past and present, sacred and profane, the living and the dead, no longer hold.® Bastide argued forcefully for the “Brazilianization” of the social scientist’s perspective. After praising Herskovits’s work in demonstrating the nonpathological, institutionalized nature of Afro-Brazilian trance, he noted: On the other hand, Herskovits risked locking Afro-Brazilian data into an international system of explanation [functionalism] which, like all interna- tional systems, will one day be rejected as a distortion of reality... . Few years will pass in Brazil before blacks become aware of their need to create an Afro-Brazilian science themselves, based on their own ex- perience.” For Bastide, one entrée into this new world of Brazil was through the study of poetry; the other was through the candomblé. Near the end of his life, thinking back on his own rites of initiation into candomblé, Bastide gave thanks to the members of the cult group, who had somehow understood his intense need for new “cultural nourishment.” In a personally revealing passage whose gustatory metaphors defy my translation skills, he wrote: Je serai jusqu’a ma mort reconnaissant á toutes les Mai de Santo qui m'ont considéré comme leur petit enfant blanc, les Joana de Ogum ou bien les Joana de Yemanja, qui ont compris mon désir de nourritures culturelles nouvelles, et qui ont . . . senti que ma pensée cartésienne ne pourrait sup- porter ces nourritures nouvelles en tant que vraies nourritures, non en tant que relations purement scientifiques, qui restent a la superficie des choses sans se métamorphoser en expériences vitales, seules sources de compré- hension, sans qu'elles les répétrissent d'abord pour me les rendre assimil- ables, exactement comme les mamans noires roulent entre leurs mains fatiguées les aliments de leurs bébés pour en faire une petite boule qu'elles mettent amoureusement dans la bouche de leurs enfants.* Bastide believed that this “conversion,” as he called it, permitted him “to rethink candomblé . . . from the inside rather than the outside, and to effect a fundamental shift in my logical categories.”® Emerging from this “crisis,” Bastide moved on to the second subjective station of what he calls “the spiritual itinerary” leading to The African Religions of Brazil: his “enchantment . . . which has never disappeared,” stemming from his reali- zation that candomblé, far from being a mixture of folkloric traits (“up- rooted survivals, deprived of their vigor”), expressed a rich and subtle
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