Stefania Capone

Searching for Africa in Brazil : power and tradition in candomblé

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 Nago (Yoruba) cult in the northeastern state of Bahia. In contrast to other researchers, Capone foregrounds the agency of Candomble leaders. She demonstrates that they successfully imposed their vision of Candomble 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.

The “Orisha Religion” between Syncretism and Re-Africanization

Afro-American religions are historically distinguished by their extreme fragmentation and lack of a superior authority that could impose orthodox rules and practices on its followers. Nonetheless, some religious leaders today aim for a unification of their practices that highlights the existence of a common ground in all Afro-American religious modalities. Since the early 1980s, there have been various attempts to standardize the different Afro-American religious practices on the A merican continent. The International Congresses of Orisha Tradition and Culture (also called COMTOC or Orisa World Congresses) have helped to create a wider network between the initiates of Brazilian Candomble, Cuban Santeria or Regla de Ocha, Haitian Vodu, North American Orisha-Voodoo, and Yoruba “traditional religion.”1 These attempts generate new ways of religious “creolization,” in which the syncretic work—the historical base of these types of religions—is resignified, giving preference to African or Afro-American endogenous variables instead of European or Catholic exogenous influences. In the Lucumi religion of Cubans living in Miami, the ritual borrowings of practices that originated in Brazilian Candomble are a telling example of this founding tension between unification and fragmentation within these religious phenomena.

Des batá à New York: le rôle joué par la musique dans la diffusion de la santería aux États-Unis

Pour cette intervention dans le Seminaire du CERMA, j’ai choisi de developper une partie de mon dernier ouvrage Les Yoruba du Nouveau Monde. Religion, ethnicite et nationalisme noir aux Etats-Unis (Paris, Karthala, 2005), qui met en lumiere les liens existant entre performance artistique et engagement religieux. Cet ouvrage analyse les processus de diffusion et d’appropriation, de la part des Noirs nord-americains, de la santeria, une religion d’origine africaine apportee aux Etats-Unis par l...