BLACK MAGIC AND THE ACADEMY: MACUMBA AND AFRO-BRAZILIAN “ORTHODOXIES”

Kelly E. Hayes

B LAC K M AGIC A N D TH E AC A DE M Y : M AC U M BA A N D A F RO - BR A Z I L IA N “ ORTHOD OX I E S ”

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2007 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.0018-2710/2007/4604-0001$10.00

new year’s eve tribute to yemanjá

Every New Year’s Eve in Rio de Janeiro, hundreds of

Cariocas

dressedhead-to-toe in white converge along the city’s miles of beachfront to honorYemanjá, the Afro-Brazilian goddess of the sea.

1

From the moment the lastrays of the sun dissolve into the horizon until they crest again the followingdawn, small, autonomous groups migrate to the beach bearing flowers,candles, food, and drink. They come to praise and petition the sea goddess,into whose warm and salty embrace they will launch offerings of flowersand other small gifts. It is one of Rio’s most enchanting customs, attractingbelievers and nonbelievers alike—the latter drawn to the proceedings, asthe journalist Alma Guillermoprieto has observed, “for the same reasonsthat agnostics elsewhere celebrate Christmas: because it is a lovely andmeaningful part of their tradition.”

2

Come dawn the beach is choked with the remnants of these offerings,seaside altars of bedraggled gladiolas and still-flickering candle stubs, asthe municipal cleaners, armed with rakes and plows, begin their daily rite.A significant percentage of the sanitation force’s effort involves disposing

1

The local term for inhabitants of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

2

Alma Guillermoprieto,

The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now

(New York: Knopf,1991), 152.

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284

of the ritual remains of these and other Afro-Brazilian ceremonies.

3

Suchofferings may be found not only on New Year’s Day but at any season ofthe year throughout the city: planted at a crossroads, wedged into the baseof a sturdy tree, or nestled inconspicuously in the lush underbrush of one ofRio’s stately plazas. For practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions, ritualofferings of food and drink constitute an important means of interchangewith the spirit world.

Apart from every New Year’s seaside homage to Yemanjá, the publicevidence of Afro-Brazilian ritualizing is linked with a much more sinisterheritage, evoking a

frisson

of dread rather than delight among middle-class Brazilians.

4

Street-side offerings in particular are associated with“macumba”: a term used to denominate Afro-Brazilian religious cults,practices, and ritual objects, but most especially those thought to involve

feitiçaria

, sorcery or black magic. Macumba is widely considered to bean occult practice drawing on nefarious powers for nefarious purposesthrough the use of sacrificial offerings, spells, incantations, and othermagico-ritual practices. It is associated particularly with the cultivationof a set of boisterous spirit entities called

exus

, referred to by their devoteesas

povo da rua

, people of the streets. In image, story, and song,

exu

spiritsare linked with urban street life and its illicit desires—vice, lust, crime, andsensual indulgence. Deeply intertwined with Rio’s history, macumba andits characteristic spirits represent a side of urban life that many

Cariocas

are far from embracing.The discrepancy in public attitudes toward these two manifestations of

Afro-Brazilian religious praxis is significant. It points to the deep am-bivalence of the Brazilian public toward these religions, once considereddegenerate superstition that threatened the progress of the nation. Itprovokes the question of why certain Afro-Brazilian practices focused oncertain deities, such as the annual tribute to Yemanjá, have gained wide-spread social acceptance, while other practices have retained this stig-matized association with black magic and the sinister forces it is thought

3

Guillermoprieto reported that the municipal secretary in charge of public works for thecity had proposed designating certain areas of the Tijuca National Forest for this purpose(ibid., 152–53).

4

Yvonne Maggie captured both the ubiquity of these offerings and the residual fear thatthey inspire in passersby: “No one who passes through Rio de Janeiro can fail to notice the

despachos

, candles and offerings found at beaches, waterfalls and parks. These offerings mani-fest themselves insistently, despite the fact that they are manufactured in secret. Mothersdon’t let their small children approach such dangerous things. Who can forget the childishfear of seeing a candle, black chicken, snakeskin, urn with

farofa

[a food offering] red andblack cloths, bottle of

cachaça

[rum] arrayed on the corner?” The items that Maggie de-scribes indicate that the offering is for an

exu

spirit, an entity particularly associated withblack magic. See Yvonne Maggie,

Medo de feitiço: Relações entre magia e poder no Brasil

(Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1992), 21.

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to cultivate. This question is germane not only for those interested in Afro-Brazilian religions, but for scholars in general because it illustrates someof the far-reaching social and political consequences of the classificatoryschemas employed by scholars to interpret and order their data. Whilescholarship is not the only medium through which claims to religious le-gitimacy may be staked, academics often possess the requisite authority,as well as the means, to sway elite opinion. The history of the study ofAfro-Brazilian religions is an especially revealing example of this process.

macumba and classificatory schemas

I first became interested in this discrepancy in the course of my fieldwork inRio de Janeiro with a small community of macumba practitioners locatedon the sprawling, working-class periphery of the city. In choosing to focusmy study on this group, I unwittingly found myself on the nether side of adivide that, while obscure to me, seemed glaringly apparent to my middle-class colleagues and friends. They repeatedly advised me that macumbawas, if not utterly nefarious, at the very least the practice of charlatans. Iwas counseled instead to turn my attentions to candomblé, particularlythe form associated with the traditional houses of Bahia. My Brazilianinterlocutors considered candomblé an authentic religion, one whose pureAfrican ancestry made it worthy of serious study. This African ancestrywas forcefully symbolized by the

orixás

, African deities at the heart ofcandomblé practice. By contrast, macumba, the Afro-Brazilian traditionassociated with Rio, was felt to have been corrupted in the cosmopolitanenvironment of the erstwhile Portuguese imperial capital, losing the in-tegrity of its African heritage and degenerating into little more than blackmagic. For many Brazilians like my friends and colleagues, the depravityof macumba was both symbolized and confirmed by the prominence ofthe

exu

spirits. Uncultured at best and criminal at worst,

exu

spirits, likemacumba itself, are associated with the lowest levels of the Cariocansocial order.

Searching through the scholarly literature for data on macumba, I en-countered the same set of prejudices, buttressed by similar arguments.The most prominent accounts of Afro-Brazilian religions centered oncandomblé of Bahia, customarily represented as the reconstitution of anAfrican tradition fractured by slavery and displacement. Those elementsthat deviated from a putatively African model were minimized, ignored,or dismissed as aberrant. In much of this literature, the term “macumba”was used to refer to an especially syncretistic, impure, or degraded variantof the Afro-Brazilian tradition associated with the city of Rio de Janeiroand black magic.

In a separate (but at times convergent) literature, “macumba” was alsodistinguished from “umbanda,” the label given to an eclectic set of beliefs


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and practices influenced by the theories of the nineteenth-century Frenchspiritist-philosopher Allan Kardec. Umbanda seemed to have emergedin Rio in the early decades of the twentieth century, and by the 1950s itsadvocates had established a flourishing cottage industry of conferences,federations, and publications dedicated to its promotion and doctrinalcodification. In much of the literature on umbanda, macumba was charac-terized as

baixa espiritismo

(low spiritism) whose practitioners cultivatedinferior spirits for morally questionable purposes like securing a lover’sfidelity, exacting vengeance, or ensuring personal gain—practices deni-grated as black magic. Integral to macumba were rituals of blood sacrifice,drumming, and other vestiges of a “primitive” or “uncivilized” Africanpast—a past from which many umbanda practitioners sought to distancethemselves.

The conflicting opinions about what, exactly, constituted macumba alsofound expression in disputes over the term’s etymology. Some scholarslinked macumba to a Bantu language and a certain type of percussivemusical instrument. Given the centrality of percussion in African andAfrican-derived religions, this may account for the use of the term inreference to the ritual practices of Bantu-speaking slaves and their de-scendents, who were especially prominent in Rio from the late eighteenthto the mid-nineteenth century.

5

Others associated the term with commu-nities of runaway slaves.

6

While each side offered suggestive linguisticparallels as evidence, it remained unclear, as Diana Brown concluded inher study of umbanda, whether the term “macumba” “was ever closelyidentified with a specific set of practices by those who practiced them;whether . . . it acquired meaning as a generic reference to diverse practices;or whether . . . it may have also acquired its generic usage as well as itspejorative implications at the hands of upper sector nonpractitioners.”

7

Although there was little agreement in the various literatures aboutthe meaning of the term, its linguistic origins, or the specific practices itdenoted, macumba’s deviant status was a point of widespread accord. Thiswas expressed in the close association made between macumba and the

5

See, e.g., Edison Carneiro,

Candomblés da Bahia

, 8th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: CivilizaçãoBrasiliera, 1991). Scholars of slavery agree that the vast majority of Africans—as high as98 percent by some accounts—destined for Rio between 1795 and 1852 were Bantu-speakingpeoples from West-Central and East-Central Africa; see Mary Karasch,

Slave Life in Rio deJaneiro, 1808–1850

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

6

Marcos Aurélio Luz and Georges Lapassade argued that macumba was derived fromthe term

mocamba

, meaning the house of runaway slaves. They saw macumba as relatedboth linguistically and historically to the resistance of slaves and their descendants to whitehegemony (Georges Lapassade and Marcos Aurélio Luz,

O Segredo da Macumba

[Rio deJaneiro: Paz e Terra, 1972], xxiv).

7

Diana Brown,

Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil

, Morningside ed. (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1994), 25.


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illegitimate in its various incarnations. Most often this took the formof accusations of

feitiçaria

, or black magic—an allegation that once wasapplied to all African-derived religions in Brazil. This association with

feitiçaria

, and the reprehensible behavior that it ostensibly promotes,encompassed within itself a cluster of related notions: immorality, themanipulation of supernatural forces for selfish or destructive purposes,and the cultivation of malevolent spirit entities. At other times, macumba’sillegitimacy was expressed as impurity, corruption, and degradation, orin accusations of charlatanism and debauchery. Not surprisingly, thosepersons whose spiritual practices were labeled macumba were subject tovarious forms of social control intended to police, cure, or otherwise con-trol the deviance that, by close association, so thoroughly invested them.

To summarize the argument that I develop below: from obscure originsthe term “macumba” came to designate that set of spirits, practices, andreligious goals classified as illegitimate by a diverse set of actors inthe struggle to assert the legitimacy of their own set of spirits, practices,and religious goals. In an environment in which Africanity was suspect andChristianity served as the unquestioned model for what constituted “re-ligion,” this struggle was articulated within a shifting set of alliances andconflicts between masters and slaves, blacks and whites, politicians andpriests, government and church officials, and scholars and cult leaders.

8

Over time, loosely classified under the rubric of macumba came to be anarray of groups that in some way confused the categories employed to de-lineate “legitimate” forms of Afro-Brazilian religiosity—categories thatthemselves were embedded in specific understandings of religion.

The term “macumba” has straddled an uneasy—and shifting—faultline between competing classificatory strategies as several generationsof Brazilians have wrestled with the relationship of religion to magic,magic to Africanity, and Africanity to the nation. From this perspective,it is exactly macumba’s indeterminacy, its ability to change content inaccordance with fluctuating social and academic concerns, that accountsfor its conceptual relevance. Any attempt to affix an original, primary, orstatic meaning to “macumba” obfuscates the term’s strategic function asa boundary marker within larger classificatory projects. In this article Idiscuss three such projects, showing how macumba served to determinelegitimate forms of religious expression, establishing the boundaries ofreligious authenticity, propriety, and morality.

9

I follow a chronological

8

To paraphrase Peter Fry’s elegant summation in his introduction to Beatriz GóisDantas’s

Vovó Nagô e Papai Branco: Usos e abusos da Africa no Brasil

(Rio de Janeiro:Graal, 1988), 15.

9

I use the term “project” to indicate the confluence of various discourses at a particularhistorical moment, either as a result of a loose consensus or in the formulation of a singleauthor.


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sequence, beginning with the late nineteenth century and the typologicalcategories articulated within Brazilian legal discourse as governmentofficials attempted to define what spiritual practices constituted legitimatereligion and, thus, were permissible under the religious freedom statue ofthe 1890 Constitution. I then consider the intellectual discourse on what,from the 1930s, came to be known as Afro-Brazilian religions, focusingin particular on Arthur Ramos’s analysis of macumba. Finally, I examinethe work of Roger Bastide, perhaps the most influential scholar of Afro-Brazilian religions. In the course of several books, Bastide synthesizedthe divergent understandings of macumba found in earlier legal and intel-lectual discourses and integrated them into a comprehensive sociologicaltheory of Afro-Brazilian religious development. Bastide’s treatment ofmacumba was the product of a much larger process in the course of which,over the past one hundred years, the interested claims of officials, elites,scholars, and informants overlapped to produce distinct models of Afro-Brazilian orthodoxy—with profound legal and social implications for thosewhose perspectives remained outside the loop.

It is important to remember that throughout the nineteenth and well intothe twentieth century, Afro-Brazilian religions were not generally con-sidered religions at all, but superstitions borne of ignorance, illegitimateforms of magic, or offenses against public morality and the social order.Practitioners were subject to persecution by civil authorities, and theirritual objects were periodically confiscated in police raids.

10

Throughoutthis period, lurid news accounts portrayed these religions as depraved and

10

Nonetheless, elites—high-ranking government officials, society ladies, politicians,lawyers, and so forth—seem to have clandestinely procured Afro-Brazilian cult leadersfor spiritual services, precisely because of the magical powers attributed to them. In Rio deJaneiro in the early 1900s, the journalist Paulo Barreto, writing under the pen name João doRio, reported witnessing “high society ladies” in secret consultations with black “sorcerers”(João do Rio [Paulo Barreto],

As Religiões no Rio

[Rio de Janeiro: Garnier, 1906], 25–26).In the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Ramos, Edison Carneiro, and Ruth Landes similarly noted thatpoliticians and high-ranking government officials were widely known to be clients of well-known cult leaders. Because of these relationships, well-connected Afro-Brazilian religiouscommunities rarely suffered from police repression to the same degree as those lacking highlyplaced friends—a factor that may have contributed to the consolidation of the position of

ogan

(a largely honorary position usually occupied by influential men) in cult houses. SeeArthur Ramos,

O negro Brasileiro

, 5th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Graphia, 2001); Edison Carneiro,

Ladinos e crioulos: Estudos sobre o negro no Brasil

(Rio de Janeiro: Civilização, Brasiliera,1964); Ruth Landes,

The City of Women

, introduction by Sally Cole, 1st New Mexico Pressed. (Albuquerque: New Mexico Press, 1994), and “A Woman Anthropologist in Brazil,” in

Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences

, ed. Peggy Golde (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1986), 119–39. See also Vivaldo da Costa Lima, “O Candomblé da Bahiana década de trinta,” in

Cartas de Édison Carneiro a Artur Ramos: De 4 de Janeiro de 1936a 6 de Dezembro de 1938

, ed. Waldir Freitas Oliveira and Vivaldo da Costa Lima (SãoPaulo: Corrupio, 1987), 39–73; Roger Bastide,

The African Religions of Brazil: Toward aSociology of the Interpenetration of Cultures

, trans. Helen Sebba (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1978), 131–32.


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their adherents as prone to the most obscene acts of violence, immorality,and criminality—characteristics that still typify the portrayal of ma-cumba in the popular press today. A deeply rooted sense among elites ofthe primitivity of Brazil’s black populations and their cultural forms con-tributed to a climate of official illegitimacy that varied from periods ofrelative tolerance to outbreaks of virulent repression.

Against this backdrop, advocates for Afro-Brazilian modalities like can-domblé and umbanda argued for the legitimacy of their chosen variantby distancing it from the negative stigma once associated with all Afro-Brazilian religions. The formulations of elite patrons and scholar-advocateswere disseminated in a variety of media, including newspaper articles andradio spots, conference proceedings and position papers, and literary andacademic tomes. Candomblé and umbanda thus are better understood asideal types: models that are “historically determined and linked to pro-cesses of legitimation by the cults and their spokespeople.”

11

Central tothese processes, I argue, was the category of macumba, which came to rep-resent the illicit, the abject, and the deviant, against which—and by virtueof which—legitimate forms of religion could be identified. In this way,two distinct models of orthodoxy were forged from an eclectic and ever-changing religious field, granting social and political benefits to the prac-titioners of some forms of Afro-Brazilian praxis while denying them toothers.

12

One result of this process today is that certain Afro-Brazilian practices,such as the annual seaside offering to Yemanjá, have been embraced bythe public as part of a legitimate, and much beloved, tradition, while othersare considered macumba, that is, an illegitimate form of black magic.And because little in the academic or popular literature has considered thepoint of view of macumba practitioners themselves, these understandingshave long gone unchallenged.

13

Indeed, such is the stigma that even todayadherents will disavow any connection to macumba in the presence of

11

Stefania Capone,

La Quête de l’Afrique dans le candomblé: Pouvoir et tradition auBrésil

(Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1999), 27. On this point, see also Dantas;

Vovó Nagô

;Rachel Harding,

A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

12

This is most apparent in the prestige enjoyed by a handful of candomblé centers inBahia. As a result of a long historical process of interconnections with scholars, politicians,and other elites, these centers served not only as classic anthropological field sites but havebecome part of the cultural patrimony of Bahia, functioning as tourist attractions and sites ofofficial patronage, as well as the beneficiaries of local policies of tourism development.

13

There are some exceptions, notably the work of Liana Trindade. See Liana Trindade,

Exu: Símbolo e função

(São Paulo: FFLCH/USP, 1985), “Exu: Reinterpretações individual-izados de um mito,”

Religião e Sociedade

8 (July 1982): 29–36, and “Exu: Poder e magia,”in

Oloorisa: Escritos sobre a religião dos orixás

, ed. Carlos Eugênio Marcondes de Moura(São Paulo: Editora Ágora, 1981), 1–10.


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outsiders, although they often use the term among themselves to describetheir spiritual practices. Typically this is done in an ironic manner that atonce recognizes “macumba” as a term of opprobrium and subtly affirmsan alternate reading of the practices designated by it.

religion versus magic: categories of the legitimate

and the illegitimate

In Brazil, the palpable concern to differentiate legitimate from illegitimatereligious practices took definite shape in the context of the legal, social, andpolitical changes that culminated in the final abolition of slavery (1888),the overthrow of the monarchy (1889), and the establishment of the FirstRepublic (1889). Although a full discussion of this period is not possiblehere, in sum these transformations raised profound questions about howto regulate the relations between former slaves and their former masters,the future of the Brazilian nation, and the relation of race to socialprogress.

14

Influenced by the latest European theories of race elaboratedby Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and Gustave Le Bon, Brazilian elites at theturn of the nineteenth century were preoccupied with the social conse-quences of African degeneracy for the nation, particularly for its ability tomodernize. Especially perturbing to these elites were the spiritual practicesof the blacks and lower classes, felt to reflect their primitive mental stateand credulity, but also with the potential—in the form of black magic,or

feitiçaria

—to wreak social havoc. A typical newspaper report of thisperiod denounced the debauchery and immortality perpetuated by “cleverAfricans,” who attracted “married women seeking remedies to ensure thattheir husbands remain sexually attracted to them, slaves requesting ingre-dients [for a potion] to lessen the wrath of their owners, women seekingadvice on the ways to attain happiness, and even businessmen desiringsuccess in their endeavors!”

15

By threatening established social hierarchies—of, for example, husbandto wife and master to slave—the activities of Afro-Brazilian sorcerers werea source of concern for landowners, church officials, civil authorities, andother elites. Not only were these sorcerers beguiling the public with charmsand potions, but they represented a folk expertise that competed with theemerging disciplines of medicine and psychiatry that had begun to beestablished in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in the latter half of the nineteenth

14

Several others have treated this subject in greater depth than is possible here. See, e.g.,Paul C. Johnson,

Secrets, Gossip and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 4; Thomas Skidmore,

Black into White:Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

15

Dale Graden, “ ‘So Much Superstition among These People!’ Candomblé and theDilemmas of Afro-Bahian Intellectuals, 1864–1871,” in

Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics:Bahia, 1790s to 1990s

, ed. Hendrik Kraay (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1998), 57–73, quote on 63.

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century. In 1890, lawmakers emended three provisions to the Penal Codeexplicitly prohibiting the practice of medicine, dentistry, pharmacology,and homeopathy without legal certification, as well as the activities of

curandeiros

(popular healers), feiticeiros (sorcerers), fortunetellers,diviners, card readers, and spirit mediums.16

This established a legal framework within which various popularspiritual practices were declared illegitimate offenses against publichealth and made subject to the official apparatus of punishment and ex-tirpation.17 Because the Constitution of 1890 established the separationof church and state, those practices classified as legitimate forms of re-ligious expression were protected from official interference. While inpractice this meant activities centered on or sanctioned by the CatholicChurch or civil authorities, the constitution did not define exactly whatconstituted a legitimate form of religious expression. Further legislationadopted in 1893 recognized as legitimate only those religious associationsthat were registered with civil authorities and did not promote “illicit orimmoral” ends.18 Here again, what constituted illicit or immoral ends wasleft unspecified.

The net result was the creation of a complex legal, bureaucratic,and regulatory apparatus by which the activities of individuals accusedof violating the Penal Code could be judged to be legitimately religiousor not and punished accordingly. Knowledge was central to this system:knowledge about various spiritual techniques, knowledge about a diversearray of ritual practices and their intent, and knowledge about the cere-monial use of confiscated objects—in short, an intimate, yet objectiveknowledge such as could be produced by a dispassionate, learned spe-cialist. In the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,a range of disciplinary specialists contributed to the production of knowl-edge about Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices, including medical doctors,psychiatrists, forensic scientists, police detectives, judges, criminologists,and anthropologists.

high and low spiritism: legal discourse in rio de janeiro

In a study of legal proceedings involving accusations of feitiçaria andcharlatanism in the city of Rio de Janeiro from 1890 to 1940, Yvonne

16 Article 156 prohibited “the practice of any medicine, dentistry or pharmacology, homeo-pathy, hypnotism or animal magnetism without necessary legal certification.” Article 157 pro-hibited “the practice of spiritism, magic and its sorceries, the use of talismans and cartomancyto arouse sentiments of love or hate, the promise to remedy curable or incurable illnesses; insum to fascinate and subjugate public credulity.” Article 158 prohibited “administering or pre-scribing any natural or prepared substance as a curative for internal or external use, thus per-forming or exercising the office denominated as curandeiro” (religious healer). See Maggie,Medo de feitiço, 21–22.

17 For a more extensive discussion of this process, see Johnson, Secrets, 81–83.18 Maggie, Medo de feitiço, 43–44.

Black Magic and the Academy292

Maggie detailed this process at work.19 She traced the development of aspecialized body of knowledge whereby bureaucrats and officials differ-entiated legitimate from illegitimate religious practices. Archival evidencedrawn from fifty years of legal proceedings indicated that what was con-sidered legitimate changed significantly over time but was always deter-mined relationally in opposition to a perceived connection to (a) feitiçaria,or black magic, understood as the use of the spiritual for maleficent ends, or(b) charlatanism, understood as the false or deceptive use of the spiritual.

Maggie concluded that the existence of feitiçaria itself was never inquestion, nor was the intent to eradicate it. Rather, the system functionedto establish a hierarchy in which the spiritual practices of certain groupswere favored over others. The most telling example of this process wasthe case of espiritismo (spiritism or spirit mediumship), outlawed under the1890 provisions to the Penal Code. In the course of her archival research,Maggie observed that in the period after 1927, the category of spiritismbegan to be differentiated into baixa espiritismo (low spiritism) and altoespiritismo (high spiritism). While the former was connected especiallywith Africanity, as indexed by the presence of African spirits or Africanritual practices like drumming and animal sacrifice, the latter was describedas the cultivation of “higher” spirits through techniques of “concentration”rather than African rituals. “Candomblé” and “macumba” were the desig-nations used to refer to African-oriented spiritual practices; both wereclassified as forms of low spiritism.

The records indicated that in the course of judging those who had beenaccused of violating the Penal Code, the court called on specialists toanalyze ritual objects confiscated by the police in order to determinewhether they had been employed in the practice of low spiritism or highspiritism. Customarily, the distinctions between these categories werearticulated not only in terms of degree of Africanity, but as black magicand white magic, that is, ritual practices oriented toward either malevolentor beneficent ends. While the use of the term “magic” differentiated thesepractices from those categorized as religion, in the period after 1927, onlythose defendants whose practices were determined to pertain to the cate-gory of low spiritism, or black magic, were subject to official discipline.

Maggie theorized that this differentiation between low and high spiritismreflected the growing social acceptance of Kardecist forms of spiritism,which had become popular among the middle and upper classes in Rio inthe late 1920s.20 To summarize a lengthy and uneven historical process,

19 Ibid.20 On Kardecism and spiritism in Brazil, see David Hess, Spirits and Scientists: Ideology,

Spiritism and Brazilian Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991),and Samba in the Night: Spiritism in Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).Roger Bastide discussed Kardec and spiritism in the context of the development of umbanda(Bastide, African Religions, 313–42), as did Brown (Umbanda, chap. 2).

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History of Religions 293

proponents of Kardecism eventually achieved legal and social legitimacyby claiming that they cultivated more “evolved” spirits for beneficent ends,distancing themselves from the “lower,” African-based spirit practices ofcandomblé and macumba. The presence of Kardecist advocates among theelite eventually led to the removal of the entire category of spiritism fromthe Penal Code in 1942.

Maggie’s work demonstrated how the legal regulation of Afro-Brazilianand other popular religions proceeded through a classificatory system inwhich elite formulations were central. Intersecting at various points withthis legal-bureaucratic system, scholars contributed to shaping the dis-course by serving as court experts called in to determine the nature ofritual objects that had been confiscated by the police, but also in more in-direct ways. More specifically, scholarly accounts helped confer legitimacyon particular modalities of Afro-Brazilian religion in two ways: (a) bygranting them the elite imprimatur of science, and (b) by systematizingthem to accord with various criteria of legitimacy. In these works, as inthe court cases analyzed by Maggie, the criteria of legitimacy changed overtime, yet legitimacy was articulated always in opposition to illegitimacy.This meant that categories like black magic and charlatanism constitutedimportant foils against which claims to legitimacy could be established.

Such a perspective helps explain a marked preoccupation in the scholarlyliterature with identifying legitimate and illegitimate forms of Afro-Brazilian praxis and a tendency to define the former by differentiating itfrom the latter. In the next section, I examine this process in the academicdiscourse on candomblé. Here we also see the term “macumba” used asa marker of black magic and charlatanism—but in a quite different way, foramong most scholars of candomblé, legitimacy has been linked to a veryspecific notion of Africanity.

the authenticity of africa: candomblé and

afro-brazilian studies in bahia

While Maggie’s research showed how elites in Rio de Janeiro associatedAfricanity with illegitimate spiritual practices in the first half of thetwentieth century, a striking characteristic of the classic anthropologicalliterature on Afro-Brazilian religions is the equation religious legitimacywith African—and more specifically Nagô (Yoruba)—purity.21 The

21 The term “Nagô” is used in Brazil to refer to Yoruba-speaking peoples. It was used byslave traders to refer to slave cargo who departed for the New World from the Bight of Beninon the West Coast of Africa. It appears to be derived from anago, a Fon (Dahomey) term forYoruba speakers. For this derivation see Pierre Verger, Orixás: Deuses Iorubás na Africa e nonovo mundo (São Paulo: Editora Corrupio, 1981), 14; Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara, “Can-domblé: A Socio-Political Examination of African Religion and Art in Brazil,” in Religion inAfrica, ed. Thomas D. Blakely, Walter E. A. van Beek, and Dennis L. Thompson (Portsmouth,NH: Heinemann, 1994), 137.


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majority of this work was produced during a forty-year span from early1930s to the early 1970s, and it reflected a radically different understandingof Brazil’s heritage, one that explicitly valorized certain African contri-butions to Brazilian culture.

As I explain in more detail below, this transformation in the meaningof Africanity was the product of a number of factors both internal andexternal to Brazil. These included changing political, social, and eco-nomic circumstances; growing nationalist sentiment; intellectual andartistic trends that coalesced after World War I (which Brazil enteredbriefly and belatedly); and the development of new scholarly paradigms.As scholars, writers, artists, and poets increasingly turned their attentionto the various cultural expressions of Afro-Brazilians, they forged newconnections between Africanity and authenticity—connections thatdramatically transformed the classificatory schemas by which Afro-Brazilian religious legitimacy was determined. In this period, a newemphasis on African “retensions” began to supplant the late-nineteenth-century understanding of Afro-Brazilian religions as primitive fetishismor feitiçaria. In this section, I provide an overview of the 1930s beforeturning in the next section to one of that era’s leading intellectuals, ArthurRamos. Ramos argued that candomblé constituted a true religion, for ithad faithfully preserved an African tradition that in macumba had beendegraded through admixture, degenerating into black magic. This formu-lation was developed further by Roger Bastide, whose analysis of Afro-Brazilian religions is addressed in the following section.

The period under consideration here was one of tremendous change inBrazil. By the late 1920s, the Republic and the various institutions thatsustained it were crumbling. A volatile world market for Brazilian exports,industrial development, and accelerating urbanization had altered thecountry’s economic base, producing new political alignments and interests,as well as new social tensions. A series of military insurrections threatenedan increasingly weak government, and in 1930, a successful coup d’étatfinally ended the Republic. The ruling military junta quickly transferredthe mantle of governance to Gétulio Vargas, who would hold on to powerin one form or another until his suicide in 1954.22 Seeking to modernizeand unite a country fractured by regional, racial, and class divisions, Vargasconsolidated federal power and instituted an aggressive program of eco-nomic and cultural nationalism. Among the many profound shifts of theVargas era, this nationalist project provided new opportunities for blacksentering the labor market. It also helped lay the groundwork for a new

22 Except for a brief interregnum from 1945 to 1951, Vargas ruled “first as chief of theprovisional government (1930–1934), then as constitutional president elected by Congress(1934–1937), then as dictator (1937–1945), and finally as constitutional president elected bythe people (1951–1954).” See E. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil, 2nd ed. (New York:Columbia University Press, 1980), 398.


appreciation of Brazil’s unique culture and civilization—including itsAfrican legacy. At the same time, the climate of political repressionthat characterized Vargas’s long reign ensured that practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions continued to be subject to varying levels of officialharassment and were periodically accused of harboring communistsand other “subversive” elements, or of offending public morality.23 Theconstant threat of police raids, confiscation of their ritual objects, or arrestof their leaders drove most Afro-Brazilian religious communities under-ground. Throughout the Vargas years, “official marginalization coexistedwith informal, private patronage of Afro-Brazilian religions” by vanguardelites—a situation similar to that which had characterized the nineteenthcentury.24

Intellectuals, artists, and writers of the 1930s were exploring their ownforms of nationalism, turning away from the European ideas that had sopreoccupied their predecessors, and seeking inspiration in Brazil’s ownunique heritage. The modernists of the 1920s celebrated the nation’s“anthropophagic” civilization: its ingestion of diverse cultural elementsto produce an entirely new synthesis. A growing interest in vernacularculture meant that popular music, cuisine, and folklore began to be seenas worthy of serious attention, treated in scholarly collections as well asliterature, poetry, and art. Newly established radio stations broadcast sambaand other Afro-Brazilian musical forms to listeners across the nation. Evenlowly feijoada, a thick stew made of black beans and the inferior cutsof meat once reserved for slaves, was celebrated as a quintessentiallyBrazilian dish.25

Energized by these movements, a new generation of Brazilian thinkersreexamined the question of race and its relationship to the nation.26

23 Landes, for example, reported that during the time of her research in Bahia in 1938candomblés were frequently accused by government officials of being centers of communistpropaganda and that blacks and intellectuals were being scapegoated for the problems ofthe government, On just such charges of communist involvement the ethnologist Carneirohad been forced to take refuge from the police in a Bahian cult center shortly before Landes’sarrival. Landes herself was followed by secret police and was forced to leave the countryearly. See Landes, City of Women, and “Woman Anthropologist.”

24 The quote is from Johnson, Secrets, 94.25 Traditionally feijoada is served Saturdays in restaurants throughout the country, a custom

that continues today. On the nationalistic implications of feijoada, see Peter Fry, “Feijoada esoul food: Notas sobre a manipulação de símbolos étnicos e nacionais,” Para inglês ver: In-dentidade e politica na cultura Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1982) (Fry also discussedthe links between samba and candomblé in this same article); see Roberto DaMatta, O que fazo Brasil, Brasil? (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986).

26 Several authors have examined the intellectual developments of this period in regard tothe topic of Afro-Brazilians in greater detail than is possible here. I have found the followingto be particularly useful: Dantas, Vovó Nagô; Skidmore, Black into White; Mariza Corrêa,“Peles brancas/máscaras negras? Raça e gênero na antropologia” (paper presented at thesymposium “A Desafio da Diferença: Articulando Gênero, Raça e Classe,” Salvador daBahia, April 9–12, 1999); da Costa Lima, “O Candomblé da Bahia.”


Representative of this new perspective was Gilberto Freyre, whose Casagrande e senzala (translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves)was published in 1933 to national and international acclaim and quicklybecame a classic. Freyre argued that Brazil’s greatest strength—heretoforeseen as its greatest weakness—was its multiracial and multicultural civi-lization, the product of the mixture of Native, African, and Europeancultures. This so-called myth of the three races represented a signifi-cant break with previous analyses that assumed the inferiority of Brazil’snonwhite populations, and it would exercise a profound influence onnationalist thought in the years to come. By affirming the importance ofthe African contribution to Brazilian culture, Freyre’s work heralded a newperspective on Brazil’s black population.

From the pens of Freyre, Ramos, Edison Carneiro, and like-mindedothers emerged a new socioanthropological literature in which the Afro-Brazilian contribution to Brazilian civilization, history, and national de-velopment figured prominently. Their efforts both coincided with andenriched a much larger movement taking shape throughout the Americasand the Caribbean that focused on the African contributions to New Worldcultures; this movement was given intellectual coherence by anthropolo-gists like Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits.27 Many of those who wroteabout Brazil in this period, including Freyre, Ramos, and Ruth Landes,collaborated with or were mentored by one of the two. Under the influenceof Boas and Herskovits, the notion of culture began to replace race as ananalytic concept and “acculturation” became the interpretative schemawithin which to understand the civilizations that had developed under NewWorld colonial regimes.

This new approach catalyzed international interest in Afro-Brazilianreligions as a laboratory for the retrieval and study of African culturalsurvivals in the New World.28 Bahia became an important locus for suchstudies, attracting scholars from the United States and Europe whose workcontinues to comprise a major part of the English-language literature onthe subject.29 With few exceptions, the scholarship produced in this periodfocused on candomblé, which was treated as the repository of an African

27 An enterprise that included studies of African survivals in Cuba (Fernando Ortiz), Haiti(Jean Price-Mars), the wider Caribbean (Eric Williams), and other locales.

28 In a now-classic study of umbanda, Brown suggested that in subtle but significant waysthis intellectual project converged with the new nationalism taking shape under the regimeof Vargas. By identifying important elements of this distinctive Brazilian culture in its Africanheritage, the work of those scholars who focused on African survivals, in Brown’s words,“gained wide public attention and influence rather than remaining arcane and isolated scholarlyconcerns” (Umbanda, 5).

29 As noted by many others, including Brown and Dantas. Among these scholars were theAmericans Melville Herskovits, Donald Pierson, E. Franklin Frazier, and Landes in the 1930sand 1940s, and later the Frenchmen Verger and Bastide.

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cultural heritage preserved and reconstituted under the fragmenting con-ditions of slavery. In much of this literature, religious legitimacy wasmeasured by the extent to which a given community had preserved aputatively African, and more specifically Nagô (Yoruba), tradition.30 Thisemphasis on candomblé’s Yoruba heritage, often to the exclusion or min-imization of other African and European elements, had its intellectualorigins in Nina Rodrigues’s pioneering work in Bahia, which first appearedat the turn of the twentieth century and was reissued in the 1930s.31

Working more or less within this framework were a number of scholarswhose writings on candomblé became influential, including Carneiro andRamos, and later Bastide and Pierre Verger. Significantly, all were asso-ciated with a small circle of candomblé communities, including the housethat Rodrigues first studied and various of its satellites—that is, houses thathad been established by members who had been initiated there. A networkof relationships spanning several generations between scholars and infor-mants, and among scholars themselves, ensured not only that a relativelysmall number of communities served as sites for ethnographic research butalso that the accounts of privileged informants were disproportionatelyrepresented in the literature.32

As a result, many of the classic discussions of candomblé in theacademic literature were based on a particular minority of Afro-Braziliancommunities. Among other consequences, the preoccupation with Yorubapurity reinforced the claims of a small number of practitioners-informantswho themselves had a vested interest in perpetuating such a narrative.33

It excluded more heterogeneous Afro-Brazilian forms, whose very

30 See, e.g., Dantas, Vovó Nagô; Capone, La Quête; Harding, A Refuge in Thunder; MariaLina Leão Teixeira and Ismael A. Pordeus Jr., “Candomblé/umbanda: Tradições e memóriaem questão,” in Faraimará, o caçador traz alegria: Mãe Stella: 60 anos de inicição, ed. CléoMartins and Raul Lody (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 1999), 187–200.

31 Rodrigues’s O animismo fetichista was first published in sections by Revista Brasileirain 1896. In 1900, it appeared in French under the title L’animisme fétichiste des nègres deBahia. Under the direction of Arthur Ramos, a new edition harmonizing the original and theFrench version was published in 1935, with a preface and notes by Ramos. A work left un-finished by Rodrigues’s death in 1906 was later completed by Homero Pires and publishedunder the title Os Africanos no Brasil in 1932. See Nina Rodrigues, O animismo fetichistados negros Bahianos, with a preface by Arthur Ramos (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasiliera,1935), and Os Africanos no Brasil, 7th ed. (São Paulo: Campanhia Editora Nacional, 1977).

32 For a more detailed account of these interrelationships, see Capone, La Quête; J. LorandMatory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

33 Matory has argued that the emphasis on Yoruba purity as the criterion for candombléauthenticity was primarily a product of the West African “Lagosian Cultural Renaissance”brought to Bahia with Afro-Brazilian travelers and merchants in the late nineteenth century.Among other things, the value placed on Africanity helped these Afro-Brazilian merchantssell the religious goods they purchased in Africa to their Brazilian clientele. Because manyof these merchants and travelers, such as Martiniano do Bonfim, served as key informantsfor scholars, their interested claims about Yoruba purity influenced several generations ofscholarly work (see Matory, Black Atlantic Religion).


ecclecticism was seen as a mark of pollution and degradation.34 Andbecause Bahia was seen as the source of the greatest concentration ofAfrican survivals, this approach also favored the Afro-Brazilian religionsof the Northeast over those of the Southeast.

The emphasis on African survivals proved politically useful, for theclaim that candomblé represented an ancient African tradition faithfullypreserved on Brazilian soil united various constituencies in projectsadvocating its legalization. Participants of the second Afro-BrazilianCongress, for example, drafted a petition to the governor in which theydemanded that candomblé, as the religious heritage of the African slaves,be legally recognized as a true religion and its practitioners freed frompolice repression.35 Organized in 1937 by Carneiro, the conference in-cluded the participation of scholars, writers, artists, and leaders of Bahia’smost prominent candomblé communities.36 Although the petition had littleimpact on official policy, many intellectuals continued to champion thelegal recognition of candomblé. Carneiro’s efforts included the establish-ment of the Union of Bahian Afro-Brazilian Sects, which Beatriz Dantasdescribed as “the first formally organized attempt to claim and defend ameasure of legitimacy.”37 The more intellectuals and adherents focusedon African purity, the more the eclectic Afro-Brazilian forms were seen asillegitimate: examples of degeneracy, feitiçaria or charlatanism.

34 For example, the Afro-Brazilian forms called candomblé de caboclo, a term that seemsto have emerged in Bahia among practitioners of Nagô forms of candomblé as a way ofdifferentiating their practices, oriented toward the African orixás, with those of other groupswho recognized indigenous spirits called caboclos. In the struggle for legitimacy and prestige,candomblé de caboclo was considered by Nagô (Yoruba) practitioners and scholars as a highlydegraded, syncretic, and inferior form (e.g., as seen in the work of Ramos and Carneiro).Although I do not discuss candomblé de caboclo here, in many ways it has suffered a similartrajectory as that of macumba in the scholarship on Afro-Brazilian religions. Nonetheless, italmost certainly contributed to the development of umbanda and other Afro-Brazilian forms.On candomblé de caboclo, see Reginaldo Prandi, Arnando Vallado, and André Ricardo deSouza, “Candomblé de caboclo em São Paulo,” in Encantaria Brasileira: O livro dos mestres,caboclos e encantados, ed. Reginaldo Prandi (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 2001), 120–45; EdisonCarneiro, “Os candomblés de caboclo em São Paulo,” in Religiões Negroes e NegrosBantus, 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasiliera, 1981), 62–70, 133–36; Ramos,Negro Brasiliero, chap. 5.

35 For the text of the petition see Dantas, Vovó Nagô, 190–91.36 For example, Mãe Aninha, the head of the candomblé house Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, not

only presented a paper on the ritual cuisine of the orixás but organized a special ceremony forparticipants outside of the house’s regular ritual schedule (after receiving permission fromthe tutelary orixá of the house). See Oliveira and Costa Lima, Cartas de Edison Carneiro, 59.This was but one example of the cooperation of candomblé dignitaries and scholars duringthis period. Matory analyzed this cooperation as an example of the various networks throughwhich the value attached to African purity and Yoruba superiority became hegemonic (BlackAtlantic Religion, esp. chap. 1).

37 See Dantas, Vovó Nagô, 190–92. The union was organized by Carneiro. Despite the con-certed efforts of scholars and intellectuals of this period, the legal and social recognition ofcandomblé would not be quickly—or easily—achieved.


arthur ramos: “macumba has invaded all spheres”

These “degenerate” religious forms were a source of special concern forRamos, one of the most prominent intellectuals of the 1930s. A medicaldoctor trained in forensic medicine and psychiatry, Ramos wrote exten-sively on various aspects of black culture in Brazil, and his work continuesto be a reference for students of Afro-Brazilian religions.38 Like his turn-of-the-century predecessors, Ramos was preoccupied with the problemBrazil’s black populations posed for national development. Unlike them,Ramos did not see Afro-Brazilians as racially inferior, but as a classeatrasada (backwards class) possessed of a “pre-logical mentality.”39

Drawing on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Ramos argued that this mentality wasnot a sign of racial inferiority but, rather, a primitive psychological statecharacterized by “magical thinking.” Such a state occurred in all racesunder a variety of conditions, manifesting itself in “the poor, children, andneurotics, as well as in dreams, art and determined conditions of psychicregression.”40 It was evident especially in the syncretistic religions thatpredominated among the least advanced segments of the population:blacks, mestiços, and lower-class whites. For Ramos, the problemhampering Brazil’s advancement was not racial inferiority per se, butclass inferiority—not the nation’s African blood, but the “magical think-ing” of its lower classes. He saw his work as part of a larger educationalintervention through which this mentality could be raised to “higherstages.”41

Just as Brazilian society embodied a spectrum that ranged from the“more advanced” classes to the “less advanced,” so too Brazilian re-ligions ranged from the more advanced—for example, Catholicism—tothe less advanced. Of the religions of the “backwards classes,” Ramosidentified Nagô candomblé of Bahia as the most advanced. By contrast,macumba of Rio de Janeiro, a religious modality that Ramos identifiedwith an original Bantu heritage that had become adulterated, representedthe least advanced.

In making this claim, Ramos built on a set of premises that had beenarticulated originally by Rodrigues (whose writings on Brazil’s Africanheritage Ramos greatly admired and was instrumental in republishing in

38 As a survey of some representative titles suggested: O negro Brasiliero (The blackBrazilian), O folclore negro do Brasil (Black folklore of Brazil), As culturas negras do novomundo (The black cultures of the new world), and Negros escravos (Black slaves).

39 Ramos, Negro Brasileiro, 30–32.40 Ibid., 32.41 Ibid., 32. Ramos was invited to set up a government Service of Mental Hygiene in the

schools of Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s. He wrote that as part of this work he was able to “pro-gressively penetrate” the macumbas and “centers of feitiçaria” of Rio’s shantytowns, andthus his own research had a “broad educational and hygienic reach” (ibid., 31).


1935).42 As early as 1896, Rodrigues had argued that the Nagô were themost advanced of the Africans brought to Brazil because of the complexmythology and organizational structure of their religion.43 Inferior to theNagô were a variety of “less advanced” tribal groups such as the Bantu,whose religion lacked a developed mythology and a hierarchical structureof authority and therefore was more prone to the degrading process ofsyncretism. Most inferior of all in Rodrigues’s schema were the religionsof the mulattos and mestiços, which, like those groups themselves, had lostany original integrity by becoming hopelessly intermixed with elementsof other belief systems.44 Where Ramos differed from Rodrigues was hisuse of the term “macumba,” absent from Rodrigues’s account, to refer toa syncretistic, Bantu-derived Afro-Brazilian tradition.

Compared to Nagô candomblé, Ramos wrote, macumba was of littleinterest to the scholar, “such is the level of its dilution, its rapid trans-formation with the civilization of the litoral [coast].”45 While candombléhad preserved a high level of African purity and thus an integrated, collec-tive system of belief and ritual, macumba had disintegrated into magic:“Macumba today is a generic term in all of Brazil that has come to desig-nate not only the religions of the Negro, but various magical practices—hexes [despachos], diverse rituals—that at times only remotely retain aconnection with the primitive religious forms transplanted from Africa.Today there are macumbas for any purpose. The work of syncretism knowsno limits. Macumba has invaded all spheres. It is at the root of popularforms of magic, which inherited much from the Negro but also has strongroots in the magical corpus of European origin.”46 According to Ramos,in the process of absorbing other influences, macumba had degenerated,retaining of its original Bantu heritage only a thin veneer of magical prac-tices, which themselves had intermixed with the folk magic of Europeancolonists and immigrants. Centered on the manipulation of the supernaturalsolely for the satisfactions of individual desires, it contrasted sharply withthe collective life of candomblé, oriented around an ancient African tra-dition that had been preserved with integrity, in its entirety.

42 In the late 1920s, Ramos held a chaired position at the Nina Rodrigues Institute in Bahia,and in 1934 he relocated to Rio in order to serve as editor of a major series of publications onthe negro in Brazil. The first volume produced in the series was Rodrigues’s O animismofetichista dos negros baianos, edited by Ramos himself and published in 1935.

43 Rodrigues initially singled out factors external to the Nagô religion as determinative—thenumerical superiority of the Nagôs or the fact that they had maintained commercial relationswith Lagos (O animismo fetichista, 25). In a later work, he revised this original hypothesisto emphasize the superior organizational structure of the Nagô cults (Os Africanos noBrasil, 215).

44 Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil, 215.45 Ramos, O negro na civilização Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Casa do Estudante do Brasil,

1971), 104.46 Ramos, Negro Brasileiro, 143–44.


Ramos argued that while religion and magic were fused in Africa, inBrazil under the destructive impact of slavery and white domination theyhad become separated: the magical function had been disengaged fromthe sacerdotal. Macumba resulted from a process of degradation of theAfrican heritage that emerged at the point at which religious leaders “ex-ceeded their sacerdotal functions and became counselors, fortune tellers,card readers, etc”—that is, attended to the romantic, economic, andpractical realities of their devotees.47 Drawing on the theories of ÉmileDurkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Henri Hubert, Ramos distinguished betweenreligion as “the belief in extra-human entities, implying an attitude [ofsubmission] in the face of these divinities” and magic as “a social phe-nomenon, comprised of acts that seek the subjection of these forces.”48

He reasoned that candomblé, organized around the veneration of Africandeities called orixás and the ritual reenactment of their complex myth-ologies, constituted a true religion—although one inferior to Christianity.Heterogeneous Afro-Brazilian forms like macumba, whose “connectionwith the primitive religious forms transplanted from Africa” was com-promised through syncretism, had degenerated into magic.49

Within Ramos’s analytical framework, religious legitimacy was framednot only in terms of purity of African origins—an approach that was suc-cessful not only in Brazil, but in other national contexts as well—but alsoin terms of collective acts of submission to transcendent gods. From thisperspective, macumba was illegitimate not only because it had absorbedoutside influences and become impure, but because in the process it becameoriented around the satisfaction of individual desires. Macumba, in short,represented the inverse of candomblé:

Macumba Candomblé

Impurity Purity(degradation of African tradition) (preservation of African tradition)

Individual acts of manipulation Collective acts of submission

Magic Religion

Ramos’s model is a cogent example of how the quest for African sur-vivals and contemporaneous theories of religion and magic converged tostructure the scholarly discourse on Afro-Brazilian religions in ways that

47 Ibid., 135.48 Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (London: Routledge,

Kegan and Paul, 1972); Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965). Quote cited in text is from Ramos,Negro Brasiliero, 153.

49 Ramos, Negro Brasileiro, 154, quote on 153.


opposed collective tradition and individual desires, purity and impurity,and candomblé and macumba. It was in the hands of Bastide, however,that this model was articulated in its most powerful—and enduring—formulation.50

roger bastide: “macumba results from social parasitism”

Although he was certainly not alone in extolling the African purity of Nagôcandomblé, the French scholar Roger Bastide attracted an internationalaudience, a factor that makes his writings particularly important. Still con-sidered a classic, Bastide’s The African Religions of Brazil is requiredreading in a number of fields including sociology, anthropology, and re-ligious studies. One of the most distinguished and prolific contributorsto the scholarship on Afro-Brazilian religions, Bastide’s work was wide-ranging and encyclopedic; indeed, few aspects of his adopted cultureescaped his analytic gaze. But it was his extensive studies of candomblé—which, as he later wrote, served as his fundamental entrée into Brazilianculture—that constituted the heart of his vast oeuvre.51 Over the courseof this work, Bastide established and refined a series of categorical oppo-sitions between candomblé and macumba that approached the status of anontological dichotomy. And it is this particular vision of the field of Afro-Brazilian religions that continues to influence both popular and intellectualaccounts of Afro-Brazilian religions.52 In this section, I sketch something

50 Others have noted this. See, e.g., Peter Fry, “Gallus Africanus est, ou, como Roger Bastidese tornou Africano no Brasil,” in Revisitando a terra de contrastes: A atualidade do obra deRoger Bastide, ed. Olga R. de Morães von Simson (São Paulo: FFLCH/USP, 1986), 31–32;and Lísias Nogueira Negrão, “Roger Bastide: Do candomblé à umbanda,” in ibid., 47–63.See also Brown, Umbanda; Capone, La Quête.

51 As he wrote in the introduction to Roger Bastide, Estudos Afro-Basileiros (São Paulo:Editora Perspectiva, 1973).

52 There have been some notable attempts in the scholarship of Afro-Brazilian religionsto rethink this dichotomy, although they have had little impact on popular conceptions ofmacumba. Perhaps the earliest was Lapassade and Luz, O segredo da macumba. Against theBastidian view, Lapassade and Luz argued that macumba ought be understood as a form ofresistance to white domination sublimated to the symbolic realm. Macumba represents the“return of the repressed,” an expression of social and sexual liberation. As such, the spirits ofmacumba are “heroes of liberty” who express the dreams of the oppressed. Dantas was oneof the first to analyze the trope of Nagô purity in studies of candomblé, and her work hasbeen influential for a generation of Brazilian scholars concerned with how scholarly schemashave privileged certain ritual communities within a complex and heterogeneous religious field.Patrícia Birman, David Hess, and Stefania Capone, among others, have incorporated Dantas’sinsights into their own analyses of Afro-Brazilian religions in different ways. Nonetheless,that set of practices termed macumba has not received serious scholarly attention (althoughit has been addressed in the popular press), and most scholarship continues to be orientedtoward candomblé, on the one hand, or umbanda, on the other. See Capone, La Quête;Patrícia Birman, Fazer estilo criando gêneros (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1995);David Hess, “Umbanda and Quimbanda Magic in Brazil: Rethinking Aspects of Bastide’sWork,” Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions 79 (1992): 135–53.


of Bastide’s sojourn in Brazil, tracing the development of his analysis ofmacumba as it evolved over time.

Given his emphasis on the African purity of Bahian candomblé, it is sur-prising that Bastide visited Bahia only three times, each time for a periodof a few weeks, before the publication of his two major manuscripts de-voted to Afro-Brazilian religions.53 Bastide’s academic responsibilities atthe University of São Paulo, where he taught from 1938 to 1954, did notafford him the time to conduct extensive ethnographic research in farawayBahia. He relied instead on the ethnographic work and contacts of his com-patriot Pierre Verger, a photographer and self-taught scholar of candombléhimself.54

Verger and Bastide maintained a voluminous correspondence from 1947until the latter’s death in 1974, exchanging information and collaboratingon various research projects and publications. Angela Lühning, who editeda volume of this correspondence, observed that in many of their letters itwas clear that “Verger [was] acting as a kind of spokesperson and localrepresentative of the world of candomblé.”55 Indeed, it was through Vergerthat Bastide was introduced to Mãe Senhora, the head of one of the mostwell-known houses of candomblé in Bahia, Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá. In 1951,Bastide underwent the lavagem do colar (washing of the beads), a pre-liminary ritual of affiliation, thereby deepening his level of personal in-volvement and ritual ties to Opô Afonjá.56 Attesting to the significance ofthis event for Bastide, Verger wrote: “Roger Bastide integrated himselfinto the world of Bahian candomblé. He was never without his red andwhite beads, the color of [the orixá] Xangô, prepared and ‘washed’ forhim by the great Mãe Senhora. These beads were for him the material proof

53 Bastide arrived in Brazil in 1938 to head the sociology department at the newly foundedUniversity of São Paulo. He first visited Bahia in 1944 as part of an extended tour of theNortheast, returning for several weeks in 1949 and again in 1951. Between 1951 and 1954,the year he returned permanently to France, Bastide lectured in Brazil only one semester peryear, returning to France for the other semester where he worked on his thèse d’état, completedin 1958. This consisted of two volumes: Les religions Africaines au Brésil: vers une sociologiedes interpénétrations de civilisations (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960) and Lecandomblé de Bahia (rite nagô) (Paris: Mouton, 1958). After the latter was completed, Bastidecommenced his responsibilities as a university professor in France, returning to Bahia threemore times in 1962, 1973, and 1974. On Bastide’s time in Brazil, see Angela Lühning,ed., Verger-Bastide: Dimensões de uma amizade, trans. Rejane Janowitzer (Rio de Janeiro:Bertrand Brasil, 2002), 9.

54 Verger achieved notoriety in Brazil through his intensive participation in Bahian can-domblé and his many trips to West Africa, where he was initiated as a babalaõ, or master ofthe Yoruba divination system called Ifá, which had been maintained in an attenuated form inBrazil. Verger was one of few babalaõs in Brazil, a fact that added to his prestige and status.The office gradually died out in Brazil, although it was preserved in Cuban Lucumí, the re-ligious formation popularly called Santería.

55 Lühning, Verger-Bastide, 18.56 Ibid., 15–16.


of the persistence of African cultural values brought to Brazil in past cen-turies.”57 Verger’s remarks suggest that Bastide’s emphasis on Africansurvivals was not merely an intellectual commitment but had great per-sonal significance as well.

In 1958, Bastide accompanied Verger on a trip to West Africa, where thetwo attended numerous rituals in a joint effort to map the African roots ofNagô candomblé. That same year, Bastide published his influential LeCandomblé de Bahia (Rite Nagô),58 a work that owes a great deal tohis long-term collaboration with Verger. In that book, Bastide’s centralpreoccupation was to demonstrate that African culture could create aphilosophy of the universe and a conception of humans as rich andcomplex as that of Western civilization: that Afro-Brazilian cults likecandomblé were, in fact, founded on “a cosmology, a psychology and atheology” equal to, albeit different from, that of Christianity.59 This wasno modest undertaking, given the legacy of racist thought that had, overtlyor covertly, structured Brazilian society since Abolition. “Even the blackBrazilian himself,” Bastide noted, “on studying the African religions ofhis country, accepts the white point of view of the superiority of westerncivilization.”60

In order to make this argument, Bastide asserted the cultural sophis-tication of Africa itself. From this perspective, candomblé was nothing lessthan “a piece of Africa” in the New World, a “harmonious and coherentsystem of collective representations and ritual gestures” that transplantedto Brazilian soil the ancestral world of Africa and restored to the slavethe dignity lost to him under slavery.61

In claiming Africanity as the source of candomblé’s religious legitimacy,Bastide equated Africanity with a collective tradition best exemplified bythe “obvious” purity of the Nagô cults of Bahia. Like others before him,Bastide distinguished the purity of these Nagô cults from the more syn-cretistic Bantu cults. Following Ramos, Bastide felt that Bantu religion hada less-developed organizational and mythical structure and therefore hadabsorbed a great deal of outside influence, in the process admitting errorsand deviations. But the admixture had not stopped there. Elements ofpopular Catholic and Amerindian practices, as well as European spiritism,had also been absorbed over time, giving rise in Bastide’s analysis to themacumba characteristic of Rio de Janeiro: “In Rio de Janeiro, the African

57 Pierre Verger, “Roger Bastide,” Bastidiana 6 (April–July 1994): 37–38; reprinted inLühning, Verger-Bastide.

58 Translated into Portuguese as O candomblé da Bahia: Rito nagô.59 Bastide, Candomblé, 23–24.60 Ibid., 24.61 Ibid., 73, 23–24.


nations merged with one another, allowing themselves to be profoundlypenetrated by external influences—Amerindian, Catholic, Spiritist—givingbirth to an essentially syncretistic religion, macumba.”62 In this way,Bastide described macumba as an especially syncretistic, Bantu-derivedagglomeration of disparate elements typical of the Afro-Brazilian cultsof Rio de Janeiro and the Southeast, a gloss that he would use in laterwritings as well.63

In a subsequent work entitled Les religions Africaines au Brésil:Contribution à une sociologie des interpénétrations de civilisations,64

published in 1960, Bastide developed this distinction between macumbaand candomblé further. Here he argued that candomblé fused sexual,economic, and religious behavior into a comprehensive system regulatedby the mythical prototypes of the African deities called orixás—a systemin which the principle of reciprocity, or the rule of prestation and counter-prestation, served as the organizing principle. By contrast, macumba wasthe net result of the disintegration of African traditions under the hege-monic impact of capitalism. This was a process that reached its culmina-tion in the years following the Second World War in the industrializedcities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

The thrust of Bastide’s argument was that Bahian candomblé, throughits “subjacent metaphysics,” preserved precapitalistic modes of exchangeand a communitarian ethos, while macumba was a product of the newlyemerging capitalist economy that produced “social parasitism,” class ex-ploitation, and the loosening of moral boundaries: “Candomblé was andis a means of social control, an instrument of solidarity and communion;macumba results from social parasitism, from the shameless exploitationof the credulity of the lower classes, or from the triumph of immoral ten-dencies, ranging from rape to—all too frequently—murder.”65

Here, in the course of a single paragraph, Bastide linked macumba notonly with the degradation of more “authentic” forms of Afro-Brazilianpractice, but with a range of “immoral tendencies” that, in this logic, in-evitably culminates in sexual violation and homicide. Although Bastidewas, on the whole, an extremely sophisticated thinker whose views de-veloped over the course of his long career, his depiction of macumba asa debased form of candomblé populated by profligate charlatans in whichimmorality, criminality, and vice were given full reign effectively equatedmacumba with moral, social, and economic squalor. Candomblé, by con-trast, was presented as a communal utopia of reciprocity and regulated

62 Ibid., 30.63 For example, in Roger Bastide, “Macumba Paulista,” in Estudos Afro-Brasileiros.64 Translated into Portuguese in 1971 and into English in 1978 as The African Religions of

Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Cultures.65 Bastide, African Religions, 414.


desires rooted in premodern Africa. Here fidelity to African tradition pro-moted sociocultural cohesion, while the lack of fidelity to these traditionsresulted in depravity.

Interestingly, according to Bastide, much of the depravity manifestedin macumba was the result of the infiltration of whites, who “soon becamealmost as numerous as blacks.” With their capitalist values, these whites“transformed macumba not only in introducing a certain perversity, but inexploiting the credulity of the lower classes.”66 White avarice effectivelydestroyed the traditional system of reciprocity, removing macumba “evenfarther from its African origins.”67 And, because many of these whiteswere immigrants who had brought with them “magic elements” from theirown countries, these magical practices themselves were absorbed in aprocess of syncretism that knew no end.68 The inevitable result was thatthe original African heritage preserved in macumba was transformed “froma collective form to an individual one, degenerating from religion to magicin the process.”69

In Bastide’s schema, this process was indivisible from the social dis-organization that had been wrought by the rapid industrialization andurbanization of the Southeast after World War II and the nascent pro-letarianization of an urban underclass composed predominately—but notentirely—of blacks. Within the context of this urban underclass, macumbabrought together those who shared only a common condition of socialmarginality:

The economic and social insecurity of these abandoned masses, the degenera-tion of normal family life into mere concubinage, the decline from professionalmobility to unemployment and vagabondage, from African [family structures] intounrestrained prostitution or sexual parasitism—all these factors promote the meta-morphosis of religion into magic, of a communal cult into the individualism ofthe macumba practitioners [macumbeiros]. We should therefore speak of a socialrather than a cultural marginalism, which affects the whites as much as blacks, theunsuccessful immigrant or the new arrival as much as the citizen. In this marginalpopulation macumba finds its “masters” as well as its preferred clientele.70

Here, in language reminiscent of that used in the colonial period to describeAfro-Brazilian religions in general, we have all the elements of the con-temporary understanding of macumba. Not just a highly syncretistic cult

66 Ibid., 295; Bastide, “A Macumba Paulista,” 246.67 Bastide, African Religions, 299.68 Ibid.69 Ibid.70 Ibid., 303.

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of Bantu origin, macumba was cast as a system of black magic, char-acterized by sexual immorality, criminality, and vice, practiced by urbanunderclasses living on the margins of a developing, capitalist society.

In condensing the worst aspects of capital development—greed, ex-ploitation, and individualism—macumba, for Bastide, “is an illustrationof what happened to the African religions during a period when traditionalvalues are being lost.”71 For Bastide, in the “octopus-like” cities of theSoutheast, the degradation of the African religions, the transformation froma communitarian system of reciprocal interactions based on a transcendentmodel to an individualistic, exploitative hodgepodge of practices orientedonly to the satisfaction of immediate desires, is complete. Religion, at leastamong the urban underclass, has become magic here, and it is among thesocially marginal that macumba is seen to find both its leaders and itsvictims.

umbanda and quimbanda

Bastide’s work also serves as a useful point of entry into a second scholarlyliterature in which macumba has played a role comparable to the one it hasplayed in discussions of candomblé. This is the literature describing anAfro-Brazilian religion that seems to have consolidated itself in Rio deJaneiro some time in the 1920s: umbanda. Like the history of candomblé,the history of umbanda is one that is intimately tied to a series of efforts onthe part of practitioners and elites to legitimate it as an authentic religion.Unlike the case of candomblé, however, claims for the authenticity of um-banda were framed not in terms of Africanity, but in terms of whiteness.

Bastide was one of the first scholars to take umbanda seriously as a newphenomenon, a product of the new social arrangements spawned by theurbanization and industrial development of the Southeast that, althoughsharing a certain heritage with macumba, was significantly different.Bastide posited that umbanda emerged from a process the direct con-verse of which had produced macumba: a process of cultural and worldreintegration among the lower classes in which “what remained of theAfrican religions” was “restructured” to accord with the values of domi-nant, white society.72 This “restructuring” took place through Kardec-influenced spiritism, in which the African gods were recast as inhabitantsof a Kardecist, hierarchical universe. As Bastide put it, umbanda “answeredthe needs of the new mentality of the more highly developed black, sociallyon the rise, who realized that macumba lowered him in the eyes of thewhites but who was nevertheless reluctant to abandon his African tradition

71 Ibid., 295.72 Ibid., 303.


altogether.”73 Or, to put it another way, umbanda reflected the ambivalenceof a rising mulatto and black working class toward their African heritage.

Despite the heterogeneity of umbanda beliefs and practices, Bastidethought that he recognized a common thread in the strategic efforts ofpractitioners to whiten umbanda and distance it from Africanity. Theseefforts ranged from the rejection of African practices of blood sacrificeand “orgiastic dancing,” to claims that umbanda was an ancient religionderived from Hindu, Egyptian, or “ancient Lemurian” civilizations, to thereinterpretation of African gods as moral principles, astral fluids, elementalforces, and so forth.74 These ideas were promoted in a series of confer-ences organized by umbanda leaders beginning in the 1940s, and by theformation of several federations whose specific aim was to codify beliefsand practices so that umbanda would be recognized as a legitimate religionnot only by the state but by Brazilian society at large.

Bastide argued that it was largely through such conferences and feder-ations, as well as a variety of popular publications, that umbanda advocatesattempted to “purify” their possession practices of the “primitivity” thatthey associated with African religions (especially practices such as animalsacrifice). Against accusations of “low spiritism,” umbanda practitionersclaimed that they cultivated only the more “evolved” spirits. These moreevolved spirits included deceased European philosophers, but also spiritsassociated with the Brazilian past: caboclos (the spirits of Brazil’s nativeinhabitants) and pretos velhos (the spirits of African slaves). At the sametime that they sought to purge Afro-Brazilian religious practices of whatthey saw as their primitive elements: drumming, animal sacrifice, and spiritsdeemed “without light” (sem luz)—labeling these as deviant or demonic—umbanda’s founders asserted that they were practicing Brazil’s true religion.This was symbolized most cogently by umbanda’s mixture of European,caboclo, and preto velho spirits: the mythical three races that Freyreclaimed had come together harmoniously to form the Brazilian nation.75

And perhaps not coincidentally, in the context of the early 1940s, thistype of claim also meshed well with the nationalism of the Vargas regime,which was attempting to form a unified Brazilian culture from a vast andheterogeneous conglomeration of states.76

73 Ibid., 319. Later interpreters such as Brown have seen this as a process strongly shapedby middle-sector whites who sought to reconfigure Afro-Brazilian religions to accord withtheir own values (see Brown, Umbanda).

74 Bastide, African Religions, 319–34.75 In his 1933 masterpiece, Casa grande e senzala, translated into English as The Masters

and the Slaves (New York: Knopf, 1956), Freyre argued that Brazil’s multiracial and multi-cultural blending was its greatest resource and that Brazil constituted a racial democracy.This “myth of the three races,” as it came to be called, undergirded elite claims that in Brazilthere was no racism, a claim that persists in some quarters to this day.

76 Brown developed this argument at greater length (Umbanda, 5).


According to Bastide, these efforts at whitening eventually would provesuccessful in legitimating umbanda as a uniquely Brazilian religion to alarger public.77 They had also resulted in the bifurcation of macumba into“Umbanda spiritism, which retained only the civilized elements, and Quim-banda magic, which was associated with demonic powers. This split madeit possible to upgrade the ancestral traditions by purging it of anythingdisgusting to modern-day man.”78 The whitened aspect of macumba thusbecame known as umbanda. And, according to Bastide, because umbandapractitioners themselves accepted the conventional notion of macumba asprimitive black magic, that which had been purged from their own prac-tices became known by the oppobrious term “quimbanda,” the opposite ofumbanda.

In this Bastidian analysis we have a two-stage operation that is corre-lated to larger processes of social dissolution and reintegration. In the firststage, macumba was the product of the social transformations wrought byurbanization and industrialization: the rupture of ethnic ties in a marketeconomy, the dissolution of the African collective memory, and the frag-mentation of African traditions under conditions of urban alienation. In asecond stage driven by the consolidation of a class-based society, theAfro-Brazilian tradition was reinterpreted to accord with the values ofmodern society, producing umbanda. And while umbanda retained onlythe socially acceptable aspects of macumba, quimbanda represented thatwhich was rejected in the process of whitening, the unassimilable residueof Africanity—the macumba of macumba.

In the work of Bastide we may distinguish several distinct valencesto the term “macumba.” Like earlier scholars, Bastide used the term todenote: (1) a syncretistic cult of Bantu origin and (2) a fragmented form ofthe Afro-Brazilian heritage closely linked to black magic and charlatanism,but he also identified it as (3) the unassimilated residue of Africanity thatcould not be reinterpreted or rehabilitated within the context of umbanda,that is, quimbanda. For Bastide, macumba was thus both prior to umbandaand, in the guise of quimbanda, its converse. What distinguished macumba/quimbanda above all, not only for Bastide but for later disciples likeRenato Ortiz, was the cultivation of a category of trickster spirits knowncollectively as exus.79

77 Brown reported that when she began her field studies in 1966, umbanda, despite growingpopularity, was still considered an inferior cousin of candomblé and was often disparagedas macumba in the social science literature. This negative opinion was shared by educatedBrazilians, who dismissed umbanda as “ignorance.” Yet by 1970, umbanda had won significantpublic and academic attention and was widely acclaimed as Brazil’s true, autochthonous re-ligion. See Brown’s preface to the Morningside edition of Umbanda.

78 Bastide, African Religions, 322.79 See Renato Ortiz, A morte branca do feiticeiro negro: Umbanda e sociedade Brazileira

(Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1978).


exu spirits

In Bastide’s work, one of the characteristics that differentiated can-domblé from macumba and umbanda from quimbanda was the role of theYoruba-derived deity called Exu. In the pure, Nagô forms of candomblé,according to Bastide, Exu was the orixá of divination and crossroads, theintermediary between the world of the gods and that of humans. A classictrickster figure—lawless, unpredictable, and capricious—Exu was alwayshonored before any of the other orixás and then dispatched so that theycould be invoked without his troublesome presence. Bastide asserted thatin these communities, Exu was reserved a special niche outside of theterreiro (religious center) proper and, although highly respected, was notcultivated in the same manner as the other orixás. Unlike these, he hadno filhos (children, or initiates)—that is, he was not cultivated throughpossession but through regular sacrifices that served to keep him satisfied(and at bay). In fact, wrote Bastide, so chaotic and unruly was Exu thatpossession by this orixá signaled pathology.80

By contrast, in umbanda and quimbanda, under the influence ofspiritism, the Yoruba trickster Exu had been transformed into a phalanxof demonlike figures inhabiting the lowest levels of the spirit hierarchy.As “spirits of the shadows,” exus formed a category of marginal spiritsespecially associated with the illicit: lawlessness, delinquency, immorality,and the unrestrained reign of the passions. As we have seen, Bastide linkedquimbanda or macumba with the satisfaction of individual desires, sym-bolized by the cultivation of these lower-level exu spirits. By contrast, hedescribed candomblé as oriented toward a collective morality rooted in thepreservation of an African tradition, a morality linked with the absenceof possession by the unpredictable Exu.

Yet there is evidence in the literature that contradicts Bastide’s carefuldistinctions. Ruth Landes, for example, reported that among the Nagôcamdomblés that she studied in Bahia, Exu the orixá had proliferatedinto various kinds of exus, often described as the “slaves” of the orixás.As she wrote: “Every god appears to have one or more Eshu [Exu]-lackeysdoing dirty work for him; the warrior goddess Yansan has a ‘gang’ of atleast seven of the ‘wildest’ and they are all female.” However, “no Eshucan be represented within the temple with the gods.”81

80 On the rare occasions when Exu did possess a devotee, this possession “was differentfrom that of other orixás by its frenzy, its abnormal, pathological character, its destructiveviolence. . . . if Exu attacks a member of the candomblé it is necessary to dispatch him, tosend him away immediately” (Bastide, Candomblé, 37–38).

81 Ruth Landes, “Fetish Worship in Brazil,” Journal of American Folklore 53, no. 210(October–December 1940): 261–70, quote on 263.

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Landes went on to say that whereas the other orixás were employed insocially approved ways such as ensuring a healthy childbirth, “Eshu is em-ployed secretly to arrange a rendezvous, to force a seduction, to disruptor even mend a marriage. ‘Mothers’ of the renowned fetish temples denyemploying Eshu, indicating that they consider themselves above pettyinterests, but they all know what formulas to use with him and they un-doubtedly resort to him privately.”82 Landes’s findings indicated that theproliferation of Exu into a variety of lawless exu spirits—a process thatBastide associated with umbanda/quimbanda—had occurred in some ofthe most “orthodox” houses of Bahian candomblé by the late 1930s andprobably much earlier.83 But perhaps more significantly, her observationssuggested that Exu was intimately involved with rituals of a sort Bastidesurely would have identified as black magic: arranging rendezvous, forcingseductions, and disrupting marriages. As we have seen, for Bastide suchrituals had no place in candomblé, which was oriented toward communaltradition and collective morality, not the petty satisfaction of individualdesires.

conclusion

Did Bastide simply ignore evidence that would have compromised hisattempt to portray candomblé in ways that accorded with a scholarlymodel of religious legitimacy? I think that he was too careful and prin-cipled a scholar for that. Rather, the example of Exu highlights severalaspects of the scholarly project. First, there are blind spots within anyclassificatory schema—those dimensions of social life that are renderedinvisible because they do not conform to a theoretical model, or becausesuch a model draws analytic attention elsewhere.

Second, there are sociopolitical dimensions to any scholarly analysis:the ways that theory making intersects with the social commitments ofscholars and their informants. As I have tried to show, Bastide’s analysiswas part of a much larger process through which certain Afro-Braziliantraditions, long disparaged as black magic or primitive superstition, gainedsocial legitimacy through the constant displacement of illegitimacy. Thisprocess developed over the course of several generations out of themutually reinforcing discourses of various actors, including scholars, re-ligious leaders, and informants, whose interests overlapped at certainpoints. In a context in which Afro-Brazilian religions were suspect, prac-titioners attempted to establish their own community’s authenticity, ex-pand their sphere of influence, or bolster their reputation and prestige by

82 Ibid., 263–64.83 Landes’s fieldwork was conducted in 1938.


claiming the purity of their religious heritage. Scholars concerned to makesense of the heterogeneous field of Afro-Brazilian religions, establish theirown reputations, or gain access to a particular community incorporatedthese claims into their own analyses—sometimes critically and sometimesuncritically.

Third, theory making not only explains human behavior but createsknowledge and apportions power in ways that carry real-world con-sequences. Due to the status of writing as a privileged medium ofcommunication, the scholarship on Afro-Brazilian religions has shapedcontemporary ritual practice as communities look to and model them-selves after the “authentic” traditions described in anthropological texts.Leaders and practitioners alike proudly display these works on their shelvesand consult them on matters of practice.

I have argued that in an environment of competition for religiouslegitimacy, advocates for certain Afro-Brazilian religions such as can-domblé and umbanda were successful in establishing these traditions associally legitimate—largely through a process of differentiating them fromthose practices they denigrated as primitive, syncretistic, corrupt, immoral,evil, and so forth. Although the terms of denigration changed over time,the net result has been the stigmatization of a certain set of religiouspractices, spirits, and goals that is grouped under the rubric of macumba.Because of their association—in terms of imagery and comportment—withthe devil, exu spirits in particular have become metonymic of macumbaand the evil that it is widely thought to cultivate.

Drawing on the traditions and testimony of a relatively small circle ofinformants, scholars like Bastide, Ramos, and others presented candombléin ways that (a) conformed to an academic model of religion by (b) dis-tancing it from the characteristics associated with the illegitimate categoryof feitiçaria, or black magic. While these advocates for candomblé typi-cally described macumba as impure because it had lost the integrity of itsAfrican roots and degenerated into black magic, advocates for umbandaargued the opposite: macumba, from their perspective, was too African.Their legitimizing strategy focused not on Africanity but on “whitening”:emphasizing the European origins, spirits, or values of umbanda and dis-tancing it from anything they considered primitive, but especially Africanpractices like animal sacrifice. Although they differed on what constitutedmacumba, both camps were in agreement on its illegitimate status as blackmagic.

The differences in these legitimating strategies may be related to thedifferent regions in which they emerged. The literature on candomblé wasfocused on the Northeast, particularly the city of Bahia, a former center ofsugar production that had absorbed a large influx of Africans. Throughoutthe slave era and afterward, many of the city’s large population of Africans


and their descendents maintained ties to the West Coast of Africa, regularlytraveling there to trade or undergo religious training. Some of these Afro-Bahian merchants and travelers, like Martiniano do Bonfim, served as keyinformants for scholars. By contrast, in the southeastern city of Rio deJaneiro, the influence of European religions and philosophies on Afro-Brazilian traditions was much greater. As capital of Brazil from 1763 until1960, Rio was an important center of elite power throughout the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, receiving a constant flow of European ideas,fashions, attitudes, and products.

While the term “macumba” has been used most often in the scholarlyliterature to refer to “impure” or markedly heterogeneous cult groups, asanyone who has conducted fieldwork in Brazil quickly realizes, hetero-geneity and innovation are central—rather than aberrant—features of thereligious field. Although practitioners seek to affirm the legitimacy of theirpractices by linking them to an unbroken tradition that they hold as authori-tative (often rooted in Africa), in practice cult groups tend to reflect theidiosyncrasies of their founders. Thus it is not unusual to find two or moregroups that claim fidelity to a specific African tradition, yet whose prac-tices are significantly different.84

Claims of authenticity represent an important strategy in the fierce com-petition for clients, participants, resources, and reputation among cultleaders that characterizes the Afro-Brazilian religious field. Very often, thisauthenticity is gauged in terms of purity. As we have seen, this concernwith purity can overlap with similar concerns among scholars, who in thiscase measured purity in terms of fidelity to a putatively Yoruba tradition.This achieved one of its most persuasive formulations in the works ofBastide. Yet claims to authenticity also may be staked by implicit or ex-plicit contrast to illicit, immoral, or inauthentic practices, that is, to blackmagic.

In this context, accusations of magic were, and continue to be, a standardmeans of claiming one’s legitimacy in opposition to the nefarious prac-tices of others. Given the fluid nature of Afro-Brazilian religions, thefailure or success of a cult center depends largely on its leader’s ability toattract and retain a clientele, and claims of authenticity are central to thisprocess. Against this backdrop, accusations of magic constitute the mostcommon strategy for discrediting a rival while (implicitly) asserting one’sown authenticity. Recall that throughout the nineteenth and into the twen-tieth century the system for prosecuting individuals whose spiritual prac-tices contravened the Penal Code was based on individual accusations.

84 For example, the community studied by Dantas claimed fidelity to a Nagô heritage, yetthe ritual praxis of the group was significantly different than that of the more well-knownNagô houses of Bahia.


It therefore reflected individual power struggles—not institutionalizedpractices, but the decentralized, heterogeneous field of Afro-Brazilianpraxis in which practitioners competed with each other for clients andreputation.

The scholarly discourse on Afro-Brazilian religions produced betweenthe 1930s and the 1970s was forged in a similar environment. Becausethe oral traditions of a small number of religious communities furnished thedata for the “interpretative work” of a majority of scholar-advocates, thesubjective discourse of informants was transformed into a scientific andobjective discourse.85 Typically, researchers like Rodrigues, Carneiro,Ramos, Bastide, and Verger established close personal ties with a particularcommunity.86 By taking for granted the claims of their informants that theythemselves did not practice magic although others did, scholar-advocatesestablished their analytical models on the self-presentation of a select few.And because accusations of sorcery made sense within a larger intellectualframework in which religion was seen as the polar opposite of magic, thesociopolitical dimension of such accusations was largely ignored.

Consequently, despite a history of disparate meanings, the term“macumba” today is a pejorative designation for those Afro-Brazilianreligious groups or practices that are believed to traffic in black magic—those forces that threaten public notions of order, stability, and the social“good.” As I have tried to show, the opposition between religion and magicis discursive, not practical: the result of a continuous process of identityformation in which “magic” is progressively displaced onto another. Whatseparates the two is the degree to which those groups who claim to practicereligion have achieved a measure of social legitimacy by distancing theirown practices from accusations of magic. It should come as little surprisethat both Bastide and Ramos relied primarily on newspaper articles andpolice reports for their data on macumba—not on ethnographic work withmacumba practitioners.

From this perspective, it is not coincidental that, from early on,macumba has been equated with black magic. Just as scholars havedesignated “magic” as the illegitimate underside of that set of practices

85 Dantas, Vovó Nagô, chap. 4; Capone, La Quête, 29; Harding, A Refuge in Thunder, 65;Fry, “Gallus Africanus Est.”

86 The phrase in quotes is from Harding, A Refuge in Thunder, 65. Many of these scholarsunderwent the initial stages of initiation or other rituals that marked their affiliation. Forexample, Rodrigues and Ramos served as ogans at Gantois (a largely honorary positionreserved for influential male members of the community), Bastide performed the lavagem docolar at Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, Verger was considered a filho-de-santo (initiate) at Opô Afonjá,and Carneiro may have served as an ogan at Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá (according to Landes,Carneiro was ogan at Opô Afonjá, but Dantas reported that Carneiro himself said that he wasnever confirmed as an ogan but was disputed between Engenho Velho and Opô Afonjá [seeDantas, Vovó Nagô, 174]).


labeled “religion,” so the category of macumba has represented that stig-matized domain in contrast to which particular forms of Afro-Brazilianreligious praxis like candomblé have established their legitimacy andclaimed a place as praiseworthy constituents of a distinctive nationalculture. This ought to remind us that scholars and scholarship are part ofa much larger system of knowledge production that has real-life conse-quences for both the knower and the known. The academic quest to define,order, and categorize can reinforce other classificatory processes thatapportion power and prestige in determinate ways. In the New Year’shomage to Yemanjá in Rio de Janeiro, we see a tangible example of thisprocess.

Indiana University—Purdue University, Indianapolis

BLACK MAGIC AND THE ACADEMY: MACUMBA AND AFRO-BRAZILIAN “ORTHODOXIES”

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