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Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and Tradition in Candomble

Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and Tradition in Candomble Paperback / softback - 2010

by Stefania Capone Laffitte

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Paperback / softback. New. An ethnography of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions including Candomble shows that the lines separating one tradition from another are much less fixed than anthropologists and Afro-Brazilian religious elites have maintained.
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From the publisher

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

From the rear cover

""Searching for Africa in Brazil" is a major piece of scholarship. Through careful historical research and vivid ethnographic detail, Stefania Capone demonstrates that conceptual pairs such as pure/impure, religious/magical, traditional/modernized, and communal/individualistic have long played a major role in highly self-conscious and overtly politicized representations of Afro-Brazilian religion. This is so both in regards to practitioners' discourses aimed at legitimizing their forms of practice at the expense of their rivals' and in regards to the changing views of anthropologists who sought a definitional monopoly over what could count as 'African, ' 'traditional, ' and so forth."--Stephan Palmie, author of "Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition"

About the author

Stefania Capone is a Professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre (France). She is the author of Les Yoruba du Nouveau Monde: Religion, ethnicit et nationalisme noir aux Etats-Unis.

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