The City of Women

574 Pages·2006·1.72 MB·English

by  Ruth Landes

title: The City of Women
author: Landes, Ruth.
publisher: University of New Mexico
isbn10 | asin: 0826315569
print isbn13: 9780826315564
ebook isbn13: 9780585202853
language: English
Candomblé (Cult)--Brazil--Salvador--
Case studies, Salvador (Brazil)--Religious
subject
life and customs--Case studies, Brazil--
Religious life and customs--Case studies.
publication date: 1994
lcc: BL2592.C35L36 1994eb
ddc: 299/.67
Candomblé (Cult)--Brazil--Salvador--
Case studies, Salvador (Brazil)--Religious
life and customs--Case studies, Brazil--
life and customs--Case studies, Brazil--
subject:
Religious life and customs--Case studies.
Page iii
The City of Women
Ruth Landes
Introduction by Sally Cole
University of New Mexico Press
Albuquerque
Page iv
First published by the Macmillan Company, 1947
© 1947 Institute for the Study of Man, New York
Introduction © 1994 Institute for the Study of Man
All rights reserved.
FIRST UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS EDITION
All illustrations are reproduced by courtesy of the
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Landes, Ruth, 1908-1991.
The city of women / Ruth Landes; Introduction by Sally Cole.
1st University of New Mexico Press ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Macmillan, 1947.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8263-1555-0. ISBN 0-8263-1556-9 (pbk.)
1. Candomblé (Cult) Brazil Salvador Case Studies.
2. Salvador (Brazil) Religious life and customs Case studies.
3. Brazil Religious life and customs Case studies. I. Title.
BL2592.C35L36 1994
299'.67dc20 94-18707
CIP
Page v
Contents
Introduction by Sally Cole vii
Foreword xxxv
The City of Women 1
Glossary: Terms of Portuguese And Yoruban Origin 249
Illustrations follow page 10
Page vii
Introduction
Ruth Landes in Brazil:
Writing, Race, and Gender in 1930s American
Anthropology
Sally Cole
In the 1980s anthropologists challenged the scientific authority and
objectification of their subjects in ethnographic writing (Clifford and
Marcus 1986). More recently, scholars and writers have situated the
debate in the context of postcolonial and feminist critiques of
anthropology, condemning the discipline's effective erasure of critical
theoretical writing about race and gender (Abu-Lughod 1991;
Harrison 1991, 1992; hooks 1990; Lutz 1990; Mohanty 1991; Morgen
1989; Trinh 1989; Wolf 1992). Professional ethnography has typically
been characterized by a style of writing that Jonathan Spencer calls
"ethnographic naturalism," "the creation of a taken-for-granted
representation of reality through the use of certain standard devices
such as free indirect speech and the absence of any tangible point of
view" (1989: 152).
1 Increasingly, historians are recognizing that the emergence of
scientific ethnography was not inevitable or natural but was the
product of the hegemonic processes of canon making by influential
individuals and powerful institutions. Scientific ethnography came to
dominate the field by marginalizing other types of writing, theorizing,
and anthropology. Rethinking ethnography has encouraged a fresh
reading of the history of anthropology and especially of the
development of the professional scientific monograph.
Ruth Landes' The City of Women, marginalized during the making of
the disciplinary canon, warrants contemporary rereading as an early
ethnography of race and gender. The book is a study of the women-
led Afro-Brazilian spirit possession religion, candomblé, in the
ancient seaport city of Bahia in northeastern Brazil. Landes conducted
field work in Brazil during 1938 and 1939 and published
Page viii
her study through the New York publisher, Macmillan, eight years
later in 1947. Written in descriptive prose and dialogue, The City of
Women is based on Landes' experiences with female and male ritual
specialists and on her observation of cult rites and ceremonies.
Landes' remarkable study is a testament to the vitality and dignity of
the candomblé practitioners, who helped give meaning to the lives of
Afro-Brazilians living in the poverty and under the military repression
of Brazil in the 1930s. Landes also wrote The City of Women as a
personal memoir of her year in Brazil, making herself one of the main
characters in the book. Favorably reviewed as a "very intelligent
travel work" (Honigman 1948) and a "tourist account" (Mishnun
1948) on the one hand, The City of Women was rejected as
unscientific by the anthropological profession (Herskovits 1948) on
the other. When the book appeared in 1947, the field of anthropology
was working to expand its institutional base in universities,
professionalize its ranks of practitioners, and cultivate its
respectability as the ''science of culture" (Gordon 1990; Yans-
McLaughlin 1986). In the three decades between 1930 and 1960,
'culture' replaced 'race' as the discipline's central pqradigm. Within
this new framework, anthropologists catalogued cultural traits and
represented cultures in scientific monographs. In this professional
context, The City of Women was problematic, for Ruth Landes'
theoretical interests lay in questions of race, gender, and sexuality.
She inserted her own experience and relationships into the text. She
refused to produce an ethnographic portrait of candomblé (and Afro-
Brazilian culture) as homogeneous, integrated, and static, the then-
standard appraoch among her professional peers. Instead, she
described internal conflicts, dialogues, and contestations of meaning
in a context of change and fluidity, and she situated Afro-Brazilian
culture in the pastthe history of colonial and nineteenth-century
slavery and of the urbanization and proletarianization of Brazil. These
characteristics, which located the book on the margins of
anthropology in its day, are the very reasons we have for turning to it
again at the end of the twentieth century.
Page ix
Afro-Brazilian Spirit Religions
Beginning in 1538 and over the next three centuries an estimated three
and a half million slaves were brought from Angola, the Congo, and
West Africa to labor for the Portuguese colonization of Brazil. From
their African homelands, they brought a rich ceremonial life centred
on beliefs in powerful spirit beings (orixás) who visit the human
world through specially designated human priest-mediums.
Perfunctorily baptised in Roman Catholicism upon their arrival and
left to their own devices in their plantation quarters, slaves freely
interpreted Iberian Catholic imagery in the context of their African
beliefs. The result was the birth of Afro-Brazilian religions that were
neither African nor Iberian but a blending of the two that took diverse
regional forms. In Bahia, the Afro-Brazilian religion is known as
candomblé.
Following the abolition of slavery in 1888, freed slaves migrated to
cities in search of wage employment. The period following slavery
was a time of uncertain social and economic status for African
Brazilians. Some scholars have suggested that the re-emergence and
fluorescence of candomblaé cults in Bahia by the turn of the century
represented the efforts of former slaves, who were now the urban
poor, to establish a new cultural identity through an assertion of
cultural continuity with their slave history (Eco 1983: 106). By the
1930s there were an estimated 100 to 150 candomblé cult centers, or
terreiros, in Bahia, each sanctified by one of a pantheon of orixás,
each led by its own high priestess or priest (mãe de santo or pai de
santo) and core of initiates, the spirit mediums (filhas de santo), and
each observing its own ceremonial festival days, rituals, and practices.
Ruth Landes concentrated her studies on two of these terreiros,
Engenho Velho and Gantois.
The social and political turmoil of the 1930s was reflected in the