The Making of Brazil's Black Mecca: Bahia Reconsidered
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The Making of Brazil's Black Mecca: Bahia Reconsidered
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611862942 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2018 |
| Series: | Ruth Simms Hamilton African Diaspora |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 332 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
PART 1
Historical Constructions of the Meanings of "Blackness" in Bahia
The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation
J. Lorand Matory
Melville J. Herskovits argued that African Americans in virtually every American nation "retained" some greater or lesser cultural "memory" of the African past. Assuming that the cultures of the West African Fon, Yorùbá, and Ashanti (as reconstructed in the "ethnographic present") represented the extant "base line," or starting point, of African-American cultural history, Herskovits' "ethnohistorical" method posited that less-acculturated African- American groups instantiated the earlier historical stages of the more acculturated African-American groups. Thus, for example, spirit possession in the Brazilian Candomblé, could be taken to demonstrate the African derivation of "shouting," or the behavior of those "filled with the Holy Spirit," in black North American churches. No less, the Candomblé, could be taken to represent an earlier stage of black North Americans' gradual syncretic adaptation, accommodation, and acculturation. Dozens of scholars have usefully employed similar methods in the study of African cultural "memory" and adaptations. This study revises Herskovits' cultural history of the African diaspora and proposes, at the Afro-Latin American locus classicus of Herskovitsian studies, some non-linear alternatives to Herskovits' and others' visions of diasporas generally.
The Jeje-Nagô, or Fon- and Yorùbá-affiliated temples of the Brazilian Candomblé religion are a locus classicus in the study of memory, retention, and continuity as the mechanisms of community formation and cultural transmission in the African diaspora. They are cited more often and with greater certainty than any other African- American institution as proof that African culture has "survived" in the Americas. The formal and lexical parallels between the Jeje-Nagô Candomblé, and the contemporary religions of the West African Fon and Yorùbá are indeed impressive, as trans-Atlantic researchers M. J. Herskovits, Roger Bastide, Pierre Verger, Mikelle Smith Omari, Robert Farris Thompson, Margaret Drewal, Deoscóredes and Juana Elbein dos Santos, and I have agreed.
One of the sharpest implicit challenges to the Herskovitsian project has come from a leading figure in cultural studies. Although Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic borrows extensively from the anthropological and Herskovitsian lexicon (using terms as syncretism, creolisation, ethnohistory, and even black Atlantic itself), Gilroy overlooks these debts and appears to dismiss the question of the diaspora's cultural and historical connection to Africa as "essentialist." Instead, Gilroy describes the African diaspora primarily in terms of what he calls "discontinuous" cultural exchange among diverse African-diaspora populations. Drawing examples primarily from the English-speaking black populations of England, the United States, and the Caribbean, Gilroy argues that the shared cultural features of African diaspora groups generally result far less from shared cultural memories of Africa than from these groups' mutually influential but culturally neutral responses to their exclusion from the benefits of the Enlightenment legacy of national citizenship and political equality in the West.
Gilroy usefully gives new salience to the role of free black Atlantic travelers and of cultural exchanges among freed or free black populations in creating a shared black Atlantic culture and shared black identities that transcend territorial boundaries. This approach is foreshadowed in Brazilianists' study of the ongoing, two-way travel and commerce between Brazil and Africa. Yet the Brazilianists who briefly attend to the cultural consequences of that travel and commerce on Brazil have tended to assume their preservative or restorative effects on the memory of an unchanging African past, rather than their transformative effects on both Brazil and Africa.
The case to be discussed in this essay — that is, the historical connections between Africa and what is often described as the most "purely African" religion in the Americas — will demand a reunion of these models of the African diaspora. It suggests that greater space be given to African agency (which is neglected in Herskovits' and Gilroy's models) and to African cultural history (which is neglected in Gilroy's alone). Both African agency and African culture have been important in the making of African diaspora culture, but, more surprisingly, the African diaspora has at times played a critical role in the making of its own alleged African "base line" as well.
The following revision of diasporic cultural history is based on the premise that Africa is historically "coeval" with the American cultures of which Herskovitsians and their allies describe it as the "past," the "base line," the "provenience," the "origin" and the prototype. The further premise of this revision is closer to the original sense in which Fabian employed this term. The West Africanist ethnographers and folklorists whom African-Americanists have tended to cite for information on the "African origins" of New-World practices are no more external to the politics of statecraft and knowledge in colonial Africa than are African-Americanists from the racial politics of the post-slavery Americas. Not only traveling black pilgrims, businesspeople, and writers but traveling white anthropologists, folklorists, and photographers, as well as their publications, have long been vehicles of transformative knowledge in the production of what Thompson and Gilroy call the "black Atlantic" culture.
I will argue that, aside from the introduction of the "culture" concept (made famous by Franz Boas and the likes of his student, Melville J. Herskovits), the greatest impulse behind the respectful study of African culture in the Americas occurred at the hands of Africans or, properly speaking, through a dialogue among West Africans and African-American returnees to colonial Lagos, now in Nigeria. I will argue that, to this day, neither African-American lifeways nor the scholarly discussion of them escapes the influence of the Lagosian cultural renaissance of the 1890s. Yet few scholars are aware of its fundamental influence. Various literatures have masked its principles as characteristics of a primordial African culture, taken them for granted as natural dimensions of cultural memory, or mistaken them for the arbitrary preferences of Euro-American scholars.
THE BLACK ATLANTIC NATIONS: EXPLAINING THE SUCCESS OF THE YORÙBÁ
The Atlantic perimeter hosts a range of groups profoundly influenced by western African conceptions of personhood and of the divine. Their religions include Candomblé, Umbanda, Xangô, and Batuque in Brazil, as well as "Santería," or Ocha, and Palo Mayombe in Cuba and in all the American countries where Cubans and Caribbean Latino music have traveled. These are religions of spirit possession, divination, and healing that also define peoplehoods called "nations," which link them with specific places in Africa. For example, there is a nation avowing Yorùbá origins called "Lucumí" in Cuba, "Nagô" or "Quêto" in Brazil, and "Nago" in Haiti. There is a nation avowing links to the Ewe- and Fon-speakers called "Arará" in Cuba, "Jeje" or "Minas" in Brazil, and "Rada" in Haiti. And then there is the Congo, or Congo/Angola, nation found in Cuba, Brazil and Haiti. In the Americas, well into the late nineteenth century, such black Atlantic nations have brought their citizens together as work crews, manumission societies, Catholic lay brotherhoods, and rebel armies. Today, they are held together — often with tremendous success — by obedience to shared gods, shared ritual standards, shared language, and, in some sense, a shared leadership.
Since the nineteenth century, one such Afro-Latin nation has risen above all the rest — preeminent in size, wealth, grandeur, and international prestige. It is studied, written about, and imitated far more than any other, not only by believers but by anthropologists, art historians, novelists, and literary critics. The origin and homeland of this trans-Atlantic nation is usually identified as Yorùbáland, which is now divided between southwestern Nigeria and the People's Republic of Benin on the Gulf of Benin. Though the equivalence among, for example, the Cuban Lucumí, the Brazilian Nago, the Haitian Nagô, the French West African Nagot, and the British West African Yorùbá was not fully evident in their names, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century ethnographers clearly assumed that unity in a way that I will argue was consistent with the interests of a powerful class of black "ethnicity entrepreneurs."
The dominant narration of African religious history in the Americas comes down to us through Melville J. Herskovits and his legion of followers. It is the story of slaves and of their descendants, who — separated by time, distance and cruel fate from Africa — heroically remember and preserve their ancient ancestral culture. Among the most successful were slaves in Bahia, Brazil, and their descendants, who, in the late twentieth century, practice what partisan observers call "purely African" rituals and sing in what such observers call "perfect Yoruba." According to this narration of history, the descendants of the Yorùbá — members of the "Nagô," or "Quêto," nation — were so successful at preserving their primordial heritage that certain "houses," or temples, call themselves "purely African" or "purely Nagô."
The apparently extraordinary success of the Brazilian Nagô nation at preserving its African religion is paralleled by the success of the cognate Lucumí nation in Cuba and by the success of the Fon-inspired Rada and Mina-Jeje nations in Trinidad, Haiti, and São Luis, Brazil. Scholars have conventionally explained the success of the Brazilian Nagô nation in terms of an interaction among multiple factors. However, many of the factors cited rely for their explanatory value on the imputation of general causal mechanisms, nomothetic principles, or inductive patterns that, I will argue, are not borne out by the comparative literature and are not subject to any consensus among the various authors.
Authors have credited Yorùbá/Nagô success to various factors. First, the Brazilian scholar, Raymundo Nina Rodrigues and his followers offered the principal explanation that, at the time of the slave trade, the West African "Nagôs" had possessed a more organized priesthood and a more highly evolved and therefore more complex mythology than had the other equally numerous African peoples taken to Brazil. In Rodrigues' opinion, the Jejes, or Fon, ran a close second in evolutionary complexity.
On the contrary, Robert Farris Thompson and Bunseki Fu-Kiau's discussions of Kongo cosmology suggest that what has come to be called Yorùbá religion possessed no monopoly on complexity. In any case, it is not obvious that more complex religions are more attractive to converts than are less complex religions. Christianity did not replace Greco-Roman religion because of Christianity's relative mythic complexity or the superior organization of its priesthood. Nor would such an explanation account for the spread of Buddhism and Islam. Whether simpler or more complex than Yorùbá culture, the Central, East, and southern African cultures of the Bantu speakers, including the BaKongo, are the products of a demographic and cultural expansion within Africa that dwarfs the trans-oceanic influence of the Yorùbá. By the eighth century A.D., the Bantu languages had spread from a small nucleus in what is now Nigeria to Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa. Bantu-speakers now dominate virtually the entire southern half of the African continent and have significantly influenced the music, religion and language of the Americas as well.
Verger spearheaded a less popular, non-evolutionary explanation for Nagô success, attributing the strength of Yorùbá influence to "the recent and massive arrival of this people" in Bahia and to the presence of numerous Yorùbá captives "originating from a high social class, as well as priests conscious of the value of their institutions and firmly attached to the precepts of their religion." A related demographic explanation for the spread of Nagô religion is that the arrival of the Brazilian Nagôs' ancestors in Brazil was concentrated in the nineteenth century, at the last stage of the slave trade, making them the most recent and therefore least acculturated of major African ethnic groups in Brazil. They also immigrated in huge numbers. However, studies of other African-American cultures have indicated the disproportionate influence not of the immigrant groups who were the last to arrive but those who had arrived the earliest. Moreover, the long-developing preeminence of Yorùbá/Nagô divinities in the Center-South of Brazil (Rio and São Paulo) did not depend on Nagô numerical dominance there. Though the Nagô nation is the most prestigious and imitated in the Center-South, its African ancestors had never predominated among the Africans enslaved there. Likewise, Dahomean divinities and terms prevail in Haitian religion despite the fact that Dahomeans were always a minority among Haitian slaves. Thus, students of the diaspora disagree sharply over the causal relationship between the numerical population and cultural predominance among African-American groups.
Even where the Nagôs did predominate numerically, being the most common has never guaranteed that a particular sub-culture would become as prestigious as has Nagô religion. In fact, being common is precisely what excludes many practices from the canon of elite culture in societies around the globe.
Other demographic factors might have contributed to the success of Nagô religion in Bahia. In nineteenth-century Bahia the Nagôs were disproportionately represented among urban slaves and among negros de ganho, that is, the slaves who freely moved about contracting work for themselves in order, then, to supply their masters with some agreed-upon portion of their income. Their freedom of movement also allowed a certain freedom to organize themselves and to commemorate their ancestral practices beyond the supervision of their masters. It should be noted, however, that these explanations appear to contradict the overall pattern of explanation dominant in the pan-American literature. The Brazilian Nagô case defies the usual view in the Afro-Americanist literature that rural isolation and poverty are the normal conditions for the "retention" of African culture.
Such contradictions may have contributed to the endurance of Rodrigues' evolutionary explanation. Rodrigues' sense that social and biological "evolution" had made the pre-slave trade Nagôs superior and thereby allowed their Brazilian descendants to preserve and diffuse their religion and identity was credible to generations of ethnographers in Rodrigues' entourage, including Arthur Ramos, Edison Carneiro, Ruth Landes, and Roger Bastide, as well as the laypeople who still unwittingly quote them.
Advocates of a third and more recent model expressly deny the explanatory relevance of African cultural history and of the ethnic demographics of Brazilian slavery. Instead, they argue that the pride of place given to the Nagô nation and the notion of its "purity" are the products of arbitrary, local invention by whites since the 1930s. To the now-conventional claims of Nagô purity and superiority, an army of anti-essentialist and social constructionist critics has replied, "Nonsense!" These religions are "purely Brazilian," if they are anything pure at all; and they owe nothing to Africa worth mentioning. Indeed, the prestige attached to the claim of "Nagô purity" is that culturally or racially European scholars consented to protect from the police only those houses that embraced the scholars' definition of Africanness, which included a disavowal of "black magic." The added consequences of this "invention of Africa" and factitious "Africanization" of the Candomblé, the argument goes, were that it unfairly devalued allegedly less pure Afro-Brazilian religious practices and that it persuaded Afro-Brazilians to content themselves with the rights of citizenship only in some imaginary, otherworldly Africa.
This new social constructionist ethnography is persuasive to many right-minded critics of Brazil, where the state now publicly endorses certain Afro-Brazilian religions and performing arts while colluding in the racist exclusion of blacks from political and economic power. The social constructionists have wrongly posited, however, that this scenario depends on the powerlessness of all blacks over every part of their lives. A more carefully drawn history will, in my opinion, reveal the role of Afro-Brazilians in creating a trans-Atlantic culture, with consequences no less revolutionary in Africa than in Brazil.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Part 1 Historical Constructions of the Meanings of "Blackness" in Bahia
The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation J. Lorand Matory 3
Carnival, Culture, and Black Citizenship in Post-Abolition Bahia Kim D. Butler 37
Racialization in the Time of Abolition: Negotiations over Freedom and the Freedom of Men and Women of Color in Bahia Wlamyra Albuquerque 51
Medicalized Motherhood as Race and Place: Bahia 1930s-1940s Okezi T. Otovo 75
O que é que a Bahia representa? Bahia's State Museum and the Struggles to Define Bahian Culture Anadelia A. Romo 91
Behold Our City: Conflicting Mid-Century Modernist Visions of Afro-Bahia Scott Ickes 121
Sweet Barbarians: Baianidade and the Brazilian Counterculture of the 1970s Christopher Dunn 139
Precarious Bahia: Colonial Narratives to the Images of Mario Cravo Neto Elane Abreu 159
Part 2 Contemporary (De-)Constructions of the Black Mecca
The Power of Whiteness and the Making of the Other: Bahia of the White Mind? Bernd Reiter 187
City of Women, No City for Women: The Gendered Twist on Black Mecca Sarah Hautzinger 207
Our Slaveland Fernando Conceição 221
The Politics of Blackness in Salvador, Bahia Gladys Mitchell-Walthour 237
Candomblé and the Magic of Bahia Miriam C. M. Rabelo Luciana Duccini 257
Now You're Eating Slave Food! A Genealogy of Feijoada, Race, and Nation Scott Alves Barton 279
Conclusion Bernd Reiter 307
Contributors 313