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Candombl in pink, green e and black. Re-scripting the Afro-Brazilian religious heritage in the public sphere of Salvador, Bahia
Candombl , the Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession cult that will be discussed in this e essay, has been intensively studied by anthropologists. From the rst ethnographic explorations in late nineteenth-century Salvador by Nina Rodrigues (1935) to the post-modern musings of Muniz Sodr (2002) on the contemporary signicance of e candombl , the tendency has been to highlight the African genius that animates the e cults rituals and practices. However, the focus is invariably placed on what is distinctive and singular about the cult, stressing how it differs from the world in which it operates rather than how it is part of that world. The temple (terreiro) is often portrayed as a universe on its own. In the pages that follow, I will argue that this approach obscures candombl s thorough insertion into Bahian society, as well as the intricate ways in e which Bahian society is involved in the making of the cult. To underline my proposition that a study of candombl should no longer be conned to the temples of Salvador, I e propose to start in an appropriately unconventional place: a fancy beauty parlour called Beleza Pura (pure beauty) in a well-to-do neighborhood in Salvador. It was there that Emerson had alerted me to an upcoming event in the famous terreiro of a priestess called M e Stella. Emerson was my hairdresser, a guy in his early a thirties, born in the Bahian capital of Indian parents and raised in Madras, but happy to be back in Brazil. Brazileirssimo1 is how he liked to describe himself. At the occasion of my second haircut he had already confessed that he was from candombl . It struck e me that he wasnt very secretive about his being an adept of the cult. He made no attempt to lower his voice, nor did he look around nervously, as is often the case when candombl is talked about in public places. e Take, for example, his friend Toninho, who I also happen to know. Toninho worked in a photography shop on Rua de Chile, the place where I would take my lms to be developed. We knew each other from some gay bars that we both frequented, and for months he had seen me coming to pick up pictures related to the candombl universe e (candombl merchandise, statues of the orixas,2 altars, celebrations, and so on). While e we had even discussed some of the technicalities of these photographs and he had

1 2

The expression could be translated as utterly Brazilian. Orix s are the spiritual entities around which the cult is centred. a

Social Anthropology (2005), 13, 1, 326. 2005 European Association of Social Anthropologists DOI: 10.1017/S0964028204001077 Printed in the United Kingdom

commented on the ones that he liked, he had never given me a hint that he was an adept of the cult. Only when I met him during a celebration in the terreiro of Pai Jo o in the a Federacao (a popular neighbourhood) did I learn about this fact. It appeared that he was connected to the terreiro as an og -of-the-knife, meaning that he was in charge a of the killing of sacricial animals. So you have found out about our ek di, Emerson joked when I told him about e my encounter [ek di being the female counterpart of the oga]. I laughed. The image of e Toninho butchering goats and chickens with a knife hardly qualied for the attempted feminisation. Then again, his depilated eyebrows and highly fashionable outts seemed incompatible with his ritual tasks. After having met him in the terreiro of pai Jo o, a Toninho started to inform me about upcoming events in the world of candombl when e we met in the shop. He would always do so in a highly discrete manner making sure none of his colleagues or clients could hear our conversation. Ha muito preconceito, he said when I asked him about his caution. There is a lot of prejudice. It was Emerson who urged me to go to the upcoming event in M e Stellas terreiro. a He gave me a newspaper, saying that I should read the announcement. Come to the opening night, he said. It would be very interesting for my research. Toninho would also be there, and I might get to know some of his other friends. At home, I read that there was going to be a Semana Cultural de Heranca Africana na Bahia (Cultural Week of the African Heritage in Bahia), and that a host of national and international specialists in candombl would be present. I clipped the announcement because it e was such a typical example of the rather servile way in which Salvadorian journalists reproduce the discourse of the citys leading terreiros, copying and translating Yorub a terms, respectfully distinguishing between the religious traditions of the Angola, Jeje and Ketu nations so as to educate the general public, and stressing the solemnity and importance of all that happens in the candombl universe.3 e I left the clipping on my desk, a bit in doubt as to whether or not I should go. From what I read, this was going to be yet another utterly boring coming-together of Salvadors candombl elite people who organise a never-ending cycle of (often highly e self congratulatory) seminars, debates and fairs. But then again, my hairdresser was a nice guy, and I gured it would be a good opportunity to meet Toninho and his other friends. When I got stuck in a trafc jam in S o Goncalo do Retiro, the peripheral a neighbourhood in which the terreiro of M e Stella is situated, I began to realise that my a assumptions about the upcoming event had been wrong. Things might well be different this time. What must have been hundreds of cars were trying to make it to the opening night of the Semana Cultural da Heranca Africana na Bahia, impatiently honking their horns, clogging up ill-lit roads and oodlighting street vendors, who ran from one car to the next selling cashew nuts, beer and silicone bra-strings. Policemen were all around, trying to control the trafc and monitoring the crowds, who entered the central square of the terreiros compound in a steady stream. The candombl elite was there. I recognised some of the dreadlocked activists from e Oxumar , a candombl house with an activist prole, chic ladies with expensive afroe e print frocks and turbans and men dressed in Nigerian fashion, with wide, colourful

For an analysis of newspaper reports on candombl in Bahian newspapers and the shifts in topics e over time, see Joc lio Teles dos Santos (2000: 68ff.) e

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pants, kaftan-like shirts and little hats in matching prints. I soon spotted some of the intellectuals and anthropologists who always show up at these events (the latter probably commenting on my eternal presence in their eld-notes). I also identied some of the girls from the terreiro choir, who all boasted new, elaborately braided hair-dos and wore identical wine-red dresses. The rest of the audience must have been made up of a signicant portion of the clients, members and afliates of the Il Ax e e Opo Afonj temple and judging from their plastic sandalias a great number of a people from the local neighbourhood. As always, the place was full of gays, people like my hairdresser Emerson (who had alerted me to the event) and his friends, having an evening out, paying their respects to the temple, meeting up with friends and irting a bit with strangers. On a raised platform behind a long table decorated with African fabrics, rafa, palm leaves and dried pumpkins on a string, sat M e Stella de Oxossi, high priestess a of Il Ax Opo Afonj , with her honoured guests. The priestess was all dressed up e e a for the occasion. Her white turban, many coloured necklaces and white crinoline dress sparkled in the spotlights an exotic, queen-like gure, overshadowing the elderly gentlemen in ties and suits who sat to her right and left: Gilberto Gil, the minister of culture in the newly elected, leftist Lula government; Imbassahy, the mayor of Salvador; and two well known anthropologists, Julio Braga and Vivaldo da Costa Lima. The latter was reading out loud an article he had written for the occasion: something about the Ob s of Xango, a council of twelve ministers a honorary function this a particular terreiro has introduced in the internal temple hierarchy. Da Costa Lima had made it his task to highlight the authenticity of that move with detailed ethnographic accounts from Africa. It went on and on and on, a stream of words that no one really listened to, but that, as a play of sounds Portuguese mingling with African sufced to convey that Bahias link with Yoruba culture was being celebrated here. When Gilberto Gil nally took over the microphone, the chatting and muttering audience quietened down. The new minister in the Lula government own in by helicopter specially for the occasion, Emerson told me reminded the audience that he too was an oba, a minister of Xango. Accepting his new job in Braslia, he said, had been greatly facilitated by the fact that he had already been a minister at this primary, that is, the spiritual level long before achieving his current position as a minister of state. He praised Xango, that great saint, and expressed his deepest respect and the respect of all the ministers and members of parliament in Braslia to M e Stella, to the a community of Ax , to the Roma Negra that is Salvador, to this Bahia, the blessed e land of the Orix s. Time and again, he received a standing ovation from the audience. a Television cameras pushed forward, trying to get as close as possible to the speaker. People in the audience took pictures as well. A guy in front of me was recording the event on his digital camera. Peeking over his shoulder on to the little LCD-screen he held in front of him, I could see how he immediately zoomed in on M e Stella and a Gilberto Gil. Just once he widened the focus, but immediately corrected the image by going back to a frame that showed only the priestess and the minister. The opening of the Semana Cultural de Heranca Africana na Bahia ended with a presentation of Xango Awards to people whose outstanding support for the community of candombl deserved to be highlighted. It turned out to be a veritable e celebrity show as artists, scholars, actors and television personalities from within the community of Ax handed over the sculpted statues to artists, scholars, actors and e television personalities from society at large.

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All the while, M e Stella remained seated, nodding her turbaned head appreciatively a when the merits of the winners were proclaimed, and distributing vague smiles to no one in particular. At one point she whispered something into the ear of Gilberto Gil, who was sitting to her right. She also communicated something to the mayor of Salvador, who was sitting to her left. But that was for us to see, not to hear, for she never addressed the audience. No word of welcome and no word of gratitude. Nothing. Not a single word came from her lips. Shes very humble is what Emerson told me when I asked him about her not saying a word. I knew what he was talking about. People would always tell me, time and again, that M e Stella is such a humble woman. Common, a plain humilde e simples were the terms they would use. But that was not what I was looking at during this opening night. Amid the hollow phrases and worn out clich s e that make up the soundscape of ofcialdom, M e Stella remained silent, a veritable a queen of the sacred, radiating a power and potency that put ministers, mayors and academics in the shade. I have tried to give a avour of my research sites to introduce you to the topic I want to discuss in this article: the circulation of candombl (its symbols, aesthetics, e rhythms, philosophies and cosmovisions) through various circuits of Salvadors public sphere. The fact that in present day Salvador candombl has made it to the worlds of e fancy hairdressers, politicians, entertainers, celebrities and intellectuals cries out for its history to be told: the story of how a primitive creed and worrisome reminder of the continuous presence of African culture in the state of Bahia became transformed into a highly esteemed part of the cultural heritage; how the solace and ultimate relief of the poor and desperate became a venue at which the high and mighty show off their dedication to Bahias age-old traditions; and how an invisible presence that was whispered about in the shadowy corners of public life became a hyperexposed phenomenon in the spotlight of public attention. That history will have to be told elsewhere, however. In this essay I want to focus on the consequences these transformations ought to have for the study of the cult. My description of the events in the temple of M e Stella indicates that the a boundaries between candombl and society at large are highly permeable: in Salvador e candombl is all over the place and conversely, society at large is seeking and nding e access to the temples. This observation is strikingly at odds with the way the cult is described in much anthropological work (Landes 1947; Carneiro 1948; Bastide 1958; Verger 1981; Santos 1986). Time and again one nds candombl described as e a closed universe, shrouded in mystery, guarded by secrecy and accessible only through initiation. In line with this vision, the classical anthropological project is to study candombl in its own terms. In this article I will argue that such a project is a highly e problematic endeavour. As more and more groups have taken an interest in the cult, and more and more re-readings and re-interpretations of candombl s cosmology and ritual e practices have started to circulate, it is increasingly difcult to decide which terms could be labelled candombl s own. Likewise, as more and more groups claim to belong to e the candombl universe, and adopt practices and beliefs derived form the cult, it is e increasingly difcult to argue that anthropologists should subscribe to the claims of the priesthood that they, and they alone, are to decide what qualies as the real and authentic candombl . e An alternative (or I should rather say complementary) approach to the study of candombl that I deem worth exploring takes the absence of an ultimate or essential e

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candombl as a starting point for investigation. Keeping in mind Talal Asads (1993: e 31 ff.) warning never to lose sight of the fact that statements as to what constitutes the essence of a religion are inextricably tied up with, and work in the service of, specic congurations of power, I will take a sceptical stance towards any group that claims to represent the one-and-only candombl . An exploration of the candombl that gures in e e the discourses and practices of the Bahian gay movement, the green movement and the movimento negro allows for the suggestion that the cult can very well be approached as a set of symbols-and-practices-on-the-move, forever transforming and metamorphosing owing to its travels, defying all attempts at xation, and at all times obstructing the classical project to study candombl in its own terms. e

Wo r k i n g i n t e m p l e s , t a l k i n g t o p r i e s t s a n d h av i n g oneself initiated
The suggestion that to study candombl is to study the circulation of symbols and e practices in new settings, implies a thorough break with the way the cult has been studied in the exemplary and highly inuential work of anthropologists such as Ruth Landes (1947), Edison Carneiro (1948), Roger Bastide (1958), Pierre Verger (1981) and Juana Elbein dos Santos (1986). For these authors and many of their followers three methodological points of departure stand out as somehow indispensable for any successful research into the cult: (i) the designation of the temple as the prime locus of research; (ii) the designation of the priests as the prime exegetes of the cult and the prime interlocutors of the researcher; and (iii) the idea that a methodology akin to initiation itself is the via regia to knowledge about the cult. The pressure to adopt these methodological directives is considerable. Time and again, I was asked by colleagues in the eld (as well as by priests and cult adepts) which particular temple I was studying, and whether or not I was on the initiation track already. My insistence on wanting to study the public appearances of candombl elicited comments such as the one from the e priest who said, Oh, I see, you want to interview me about the supercial things ! While I have no wish to discredit the merits of this particular approach (I am all too aware how much I depend on the classic monographs to make up for the many gaps in my knowledge), I do think that this tends to reproduce a very particular construction of the cult. And what is worse, if one is to remain within the methodological triangle templepriestinitiation, one is very likely to reproduce the blind spots that come with this particular construction, hiding from view events such as the one described above or dismissing them as supercial things. Allow me to elaborate my critique. Ill begin with the fact that the temple is designated as the prime site of research in most studies. This terreiro is the place, the universe, in which the anthropologist has to position him/herself in order to be able to study the cult from within. It is not an easy accessible place as it is guarded by all the defence mechanisms of a cult with a long history of persecution. Much research energy therefore goes into nding ones way into the temple, overcoming resistance and building up rapport with the priests and cult adepts. This may count as one of the reasons why candombl researchers who nally e succeed in getting in tend to focus on the treasures they nd inside: that is, candombl s e rich mythology, its elaborate rituals, its highly complex rules and regulations, its use of Yorub as a liturgical language and its particular cosmology. As a result of this focus, a

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however, the cult is time and again portrayed as something wholly other, an encapsulated exotic world on its own, a closed and somehow timeless religious universe within Bahian society. Curiously enough, the fact that syncretism has played (and continues to play) such a prominent role in the formation of the cults practices and beliefs has been noticed by all researchers, but this has not diminished the othering of the cult. Roger Bastide, for example, while fully acknowledging the transformative impact that history, society and culture have had on the cult, announced in Candombl s da Bahia that he e purported to study candombl as an autonomous reality which certainly comprises e elements from different origins, but which nevertheless forms a coherent whole that can be studied on its own (Bastide 1958: 28). In addition, this world-on-its-own is often understood as essentially African. Pierre Verger, in both his anthropological and photographic work, extensively highlighted African survivals in Bahia, and one only needs to open Juana Elbein dos Santos classic Os nago e a morte (1986) to get the message that one is about to study an African rather than a Brazilian phenomenon: all the cult terms even names such as Xango, Orix and Exu, with which all Bahians are familiar are written in italics and a according to Yoruba spelling rules as they have been laid down by specialised institutes in Nigeria (1986: 26, note 1). Xango, Orix and Exu are thus transformed in exotic a ` ` ` a beings called Sango, or`s` , and Esu. This focus on candombl s separation and otherness has blinded many researchers e about what we might call the Brazilianness or Bahianness of candombl that is, the e striking similarities between this cult and the other religious denominations with which it has to compete in what Brazilian scholars refer to as the mercado dos bens de salvacao (market of salvation goods). For example, I found it quite astonishing that in the vast literature on candombl , very little has been said about the baroque nature of its rituals e and aesthetics (but see Montes 1998). Similarly, the famous break with syncretism by the aforementioned M e Stella and other leading priestesses in Salvador, made public a in a manifesto in 1984, and the consequent re-africanisation of the cult is too often and too easily understood as a successful erasure of a catholic mindset in candombl . e The second point to be commented upon is that, in the classical approach to the study of candombl , the priests are the main interlocutors of any researcher.4 This e is not only because they are the obvious experts on religious matters. In candombl , e secrecy is a major concern and breaking secrets invites divine punishment, making many cult adepts very hesitant to talk. Priests are often the only people authorised to talk with outsiders. As will become clear, the candombl priesthood has a political e agenda of its own and priests tend to have very outspoken ideas about how candombl e should be represented to the outside world. For example, priests tend to support the idea of candombl being a closed universe, governed by its own laws and rulings, and e accessible only after long years of initiation. This particular representation links up well with their vested interest in making a clear distinction between the real or authentic candombl of the temple and the copied forms, devoid of any religious signicance, e that are now circulating in the public sphere. Many priests also support or at least pay lip service to the Africanisation of the cult, tending to stress all that contributes to this particular image, and negating all that is in conict with it. In addition, most

For an elaborate discussion and deconstruction of anthropological work in candombl temples, e see Valter Goncalves da Silva (2000).

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priests want it recognised that their creed is a religion not a cult, or a sect or a religious practice. Here too, one must conclude that the political agenda of the priest works against the anthropologists instruction to keep in mind Talal Asads (1993) well argued warning not to essentialise religion as a universal given. Although the expertise and knowledge of the priesthood is clearly a crucial source of information, the work of the anthropologist is not in my opinion served well by going along with what priests deem supercial and profound, or real and copied forms of candombl . A preferable starting point for anthropological investigation should be the e thought that nobody can claim to be representing the real candombl . The candombl e e that gures in the imagination of clients and workers in an expensive beauty parlour (which takes on the aspect of astrological sign reading) is certainly not the same as the candombl that gures in the imagination of a priest(ess) and his/her initiates in e a temple on the outskirts of Salvador. Yet it is not up to the anthropologist to enter qualications about which is the more profound or authentic. The fact that priests do make such qualications, and that some colleagues/anthropologists are in the business of legitimising them as we saw in the opening of this article are ethnographically interesting facts that ought to be studied. Yet these qualications are certainly not to be adopted as ones own understanding. A third recurrent characteristic of classic candombl studies is that a methodology e akin to initiation itself is the via regia to knowledge about the cult: the researcher needs to immerse him/herself in the daily practices of a chosen temple, submit him/herself to the religious regime and with time will begin to understand the ins and outs of the candombl universe. Thus, Juana Elbein dos Santos wrote: e
Because the Nago religion is constituted by the experience of initiation, during which knowledge is obtained through the lived experience of interpersonal and group relationships, through transmission and absorption of a force [forca], and a gradual development of symbolical and complex knowledge about all the collective and individual elements of the system at all levels, it seems that the perspective that we call an understanding from within imposes itself almost inevitably (dos Santos 1986: 17).

This methodological directive adopts the sacerdotal notion of a gradual and timebound mystical revelation, as well as sacerdotal tropes of depth and superciality. The description with which I have opened this article, however, has made clear that a research trajectory that urges one to dig deeper and deeper into the inner world of the temple tends to neglect the fact that on the surface candombl is mutating in e ever-newer forms and making its appearance at ever-newer places. In other words, a methodology akin to initiation is unable to capture the candombl of Salvadors middle e classes, the candombl of the local newspapers, the candombl of poor neighbourhoods, e e the candombl of gays, black activists and politicians of all kinds and statures, the e candombl of the cultural scene and the entertainment industry, or the candombl of e e the tourist. Such a methodology also leads one away from an investigation of all the myriad connections, exchanges and dialogues between these circuits and the temples. Following my critique of the classic approach, I suggest that we expand our eld of investigation to take in all those circuits in which candombl is doing its thing, rather e than prioritise one particular circuit the temple as the site of the real or authentic candombl , one particular voice the priest or initiand as the prime articulator of e how one should understand the meanings of candombl , and one particular method e initiation as the preferred inroad to knowledge about the cult.

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Obviously, I am not the rst anthropologist to advocate an alternative approach to the study of candombl . In an overview of Brazilian scholarship on the subject in the e 1990s, Monique Augras lamented the ongoing production of purely descriptive studies of the cult. In her conclusion she noticed a new development, which is interested in the way candombl is inserted in Brazilian society (Augras 1998: 100). Peter Fry (1982), e Beatriz Gos Dantas (1988), Yvonne Maggy (1992), Patricia Birman (1995), Vagner Goncalves da Silva (1995; 2001), Stephania Capone (2000), Rita Amaral (2002), Paul Christopher Johnson (2002) and Joc lio Teles dos Santos (2000) are just some of the e anthropologists who have pointed out the permeable character of the temple walls.5 My proposal is to radicalise the lines of thought that have been set out by these scholars. Rather than continue to think about candombl as a religious cult, that needs e to be described in its generic particularities, I would rst and foremost think of it as an important symbol bank that enters into exchange relationships with ever wider circuits of Bahias economy of representation (Keane 2002).6 These exchange relationships between candombl and the worlds of literature, the arts, entertainment, science and e politics can be traced back to the 1930s, when candombl began to play an increasingly e important role as a marker of Bahian identity. In the wake of an emergent Brazilian nationalism that sought to re-imagine the nation as a unique mix of the white, Indian and African races, a positive re-evaluation of the Afro-Brazilian heritage became possible. Afro-Brazilian cultural practices such as samba and capoeira became popular all over Brazil, and the beauty of Afro-Brazilian religious practices began to be appreciated. Bahias (largely white) cultural elites were eager to prot from this renewed interest, and began to explore the rich cultural heritage of the overwhelmingly black population of their home state. Undoubtedly, one of their motives was to upgrade the image of Bahia, which at the time was considered a poor, decaying and utterly provincial outpost in the Brazilian federacy. Candombl proved to be a sheer bottomless source of inspiration. e Time and again, writer Jorge Amado turned to candombl in his literary renditions e of Bahian life,7 as did his contemporaries, the sculptor Caryb and the songwriter e Dorivall Caymmi. In the late 1960s, a new generation of Bahian artists united in a counter-cultural movement that came to be known as the Tropic lia Movement, and a that included such gures as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, discovered candombl e and started to explore its mysticism and spirituality. From the 1970s, this celebration of Bahias Afro-Brazilian heritage received the full back-up of the Bahian state, as tourism boomed and Bahia sought to promote itself on the tourist market as an exotic and mysterious holiday destination. The divulgation of candombl imagery, aesthetics, e rhythms and myths now accelerated at an unprecedented pace. Candombl virou moda e (Candombl became fashionable), as the often repeated phrase has it, and appeared in e ever newer settings and guises.

Interestingly enough, with the exception of Santos, they have all been working outside Bahia, which is considered the cradle of candombl tradition and orthodoxy. One is tempted to suggest that e places like Rio de Janeiro and S o Paulo allow a more adventurous approach to candombl than a e the close-knit congregations of anthropologists and priests in Salvador. Meyer adopted the term representational economy from Keane to capture the ways in which practices and ideologies put words, things and actions into complex articulation with one another and suggests that the notion of representational economy is useful for grasping tensions about the relations among, and value of, certain cultural expressions in Ghanas new mediascape (2004: 94). For an overview, see Hamilton (1967).

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Stressing the circulation of items from the candombl symbol bank and the e transformations and re-evaluations that they undergo as they move from one setting to the next means that religion becomes one of the many gestalten in which candombl e makes its appearance, next to commodity, entertainment, art and tourist spectacle. This approach fruitful examples of which I have found in the work of Armando Salvatore (1997) on the Muslim public sphere and Birgit Meyer (2004) on the pentecostalisation of the public sphere in Ghana highlights the permeability of the boundaries between the temples of candombl and society at large, and urges one to take notice of the e continuing circular movements to which candombl is liable: symbols, ideas and e aesthetics migrate from the terreiro to the public arena, where they adapt to new formats and styles and nd new publics. These publics then start to produce their own understandings (and fantasies) as to what the cult is all about and begin to interact with the religious community, taking their own particular interpretations back into the temple.8 A further advantage of this approach is that it treats candombl as forever in the e making. It allows the researcher to stay away from those endless discussions about what is pure, what is degenerate, what is real and what is fake in candombl . e Instead, it urges one to consider these attempts at xation as moves in a political eld where several groups claim the truth. Understanding candombl within an economy of e representation also implies a reexive move on the part of the researcher: candombl e research and studies are part and parcel of the circular movements in which candombl e is made and re-made, dened and re-dened, re-scripted and re-performed. Finally, this approach allows the study of candombl to speak to larger issues, such as the changing e role of religion and tradition in the emergent public sphere in Brazil and elsewhere. To explore this alternative approach to the study of Bahian candombl , and assess e how it might further our understanding of the Afro-Brazilian religious heritage, I will limit my analysis in this article to three circuits in which items from the candombl e symbol bank can be found circulating: the gay scene, the discourse on ecology and the movimento negro. This focus allows me to give more detailed and ethnographically substantiated answers to the following questions. Why is it that groups with widely different political agendas have adopted elements of candombl to articulate their cause? e What is it that these adopted elements are supposed to do in their new settings? How are these elements moulded to serve the various projects in which they are now inserted? And how is it that these transformed elements, re-worked and re-signied in the public sphere, work their way back into the terreiro and link up with (or mess up) the political agendas of the candombl priesthood? e

Candomble in pink
I was alerted to the adoption of candombl symbols by the emergent gay scene in e Salvador during the Gay Pride Parade of 2003. This Parada Gay opened with an ode to Exu, a god of the Afro-Brazilian pantheon. Surrounded by muscled go-go-boys

Salvatore (1997) has argued that with the creation of a modern public sphere in Egypt, religious knowledge and modes of discipline have had to be remade in public forms, in accord with standardised and marketable communication patterns.

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11

in panther-print briefs, outrageously dressed transvestites, pink balloons and rainbow banners, a famous black singer sung his praise. Enormous loudspeakers blasted her voice over the many thousands that had gathered on Campo Grande in the centre of the Bahian capital. When I asked some friends whether the hymn was indeed sung in Yorub which was difcult to make out because the speakers distorted the sound a considerably they were somewhat irritated. What? Huh? Yes. They obviously felt I was bothering them with unimportant details, things only an anthropologist would want to know, on a jubilant and exciting moment for the gay community. Nevertheless, someone had decided that the Parada Gay should begin with an ode to Exu. The more obvious reasons why this particular deity qualied to begin the march are not very hard to gure out. I have already argued that candombl has become the e dominant marker of Bahian identity. Highlighting the Bahia-ness of the parade would therefore mean including items from the candombl symbol bank. More specically, e Exu is the messenger between human beings and gods, and in Afro-Brazilian thought his support is crucial to open the roads towards the realisation of ones goals. Pleasing the god with praise and offerings is the procedure required to obtain his blessings. Hence the hymn that marked the beginning of the march and the twenty-or-so priestesses that walked in front of the parade in full attire, scattering on the streets the traditional popcorn (pipoca) used to placate the Afro-Brazilian gods. In addition, Exu has some particularities that resonate well with gay concerns. Being the messenger between human beings and orix s (the deities of the Afro-Brazilian a pantheon), Exu is constantly being called upon to assist his worshippers in the pursuit of their dreams. He is therefore considered to be a genuine connoisseur of human desire and that emphatically includes sexual desire. The fact that Exu is usually represented as a devilish gure with an impressive and lustfully erect cock (which seems the appropriate word here) is certainly no coincidence. In more fashionable readings, popular with contemporary artists and poets, Exu is made to symbolise the contradictions of modern urban life: he is lord of the city streets and the patron of the marginal and the powerless. Contradiction, marginality, streetlife: these too are concepts that resonate with the life experiences of many Bahian gays. There is, however, more to the connection between homosexuals and candombl . e When afterwards I discussed the presence of candombl imagery at a gay pride parade, e none of my friends expressed any surprise. They took for granted the strong connections between the Afro-Brazilian cult and homosexuality. They would say things like of course, all the priests are bichas [effeminate, passive homosexuals] and that the temples are cheio de bichas [full of bichas]. The presence of homosexuals in the candombl e temples is hard to miss, and anthropologists have discussed their presence at length. Patricia Birman, in an interesting discussion as to what might attract bichas to the temples of the cult in Rio de Janeiro, highlighted an afnity between the desire to be bicha and the available spectrum of alternative gender roles within candombl . e Possession trance, she argued, offers an (often irresistible) opportunity for bichas to have their male bodies invaded by female orix s such as Ians or Oxum or female spirits a a such as Maria Padilha or Cigana. Given the conviction in candombl that possession e implies the annihilation of self, which is subsequently replaced by the invading spirit, the practice allows bichas not just to dress up like women but to become the women of their dreams. In other words, she showed how bichas put a religious practice of divine possession at the service of the gender bending they were looking for (Birman 1995). In addition, Fry pointed out that once the terreiro got to be known as a place where

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bichas go, this designation became something of a self-fullling prophecy: real men started avoiding the temples for fear of being accused of being bichas, and gay men started frequenting the temples to realise themselves as bichas, to hunt other men or to hide from hostile families (Fry 1982). What is interesting about the Parada Gay, however, is that it hardly qualies as an example of bichas seeking refuge and the possibility of self-realisation in the sheltered connes of the candombl temple. On the contrary, what we see here is the spectacle e of gays moving into the public sphere, adorning themselves with the signs and symbols of candombl .9 (The adoption of this English word gay is a signicant move towards e an identity label, as bicha primarily refers to sexual practice and, as such, seems a less totalising designation of self.) Once alerted, one can nd candombl imagery adopted in many other public sites e of gay life in Salvador. Anchor Marujo, for example, is a popular lower-class gay bar, named after a well-known entity from the Afro-Brazilian pantheon, Marujo. This spirit of a drowned Spanish sailor often takes possession of people and is notorious for the way he brags about his sexual exploits, his heavy drinking and his foul-mouthed language (Santos 1995: 126). The bar boasts a little altar with his statue, some offerings and burning candles. It had always struck me how in the setting of a gay bar, the worshipped sailor spirit, dressed up in an immaculate white uniform, seamlessly merges with the global gay icon who appears in pornography and lms of the Querelle-de-Brest type. In reverse, the way that orix s are being represented in a Rio de Janeiro-based magazine is a highly suggestive of the way gym/sauna aesthetics are entering a religious iconography; Rio is a city famed for its corpolatria, and these orix s are all heavily muscled. a Another public site in Salvador where both candombl and gays are strikingly e present is Korin Efan, a carnival club or afox . Korin Efan organises weekly rehearsals e that are a curious mixture of terreiro de candombl and gay dance club. Sacred songs and e rhythms are performed to stir up the spirit of the almost exclusively gay audience, many of whom are cult adepts or even priests (one of them always comes in full regalia). There is a lot of irting, and on the dance oor everyone has great fun mimicking possession, mocking the authoritarian behaviour of priests and exaggerating the dances of orix s and a caboclo-spirits. Candombl com cerveja, is what a friend used to call these meetings: e candombl with beer. e Ema Toma Blues, a successful theatre production by a transsexual actor/actress called Valeria, provides a last example of how candombl makes its appearance in gay e localities. The show follows the life story of a transvestite, Ema, with the usual sequence of starry ambitions, broken dreams, nightly drinking sprees and endless cigarettes. As she lost her voice, Ema sought as many Brazilians would solace in religion, rst with the Catholics (who are revealed as a bunch of horny hypocrites), then with the Pentecostals (who take her money and advise her to start play-backing). It was only when candombl enters the scene that Emas life takes a positive turn. In her dreams, e the orix Xango appears in the shape of a negao maravilhoso (gorgeous big black stud a would be an adequate translation here), who gives her back her voice and restores her to fame. Given the well established and long standing relations between gays and candombl , e it is hardly surprising that elements of the candombl universe migrate to the localities e

But see Wafer (1991).

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of an emergent gay subculture. The presence of candombl imagery and candombl e e ritual at the Parada Gay, however, takes developments a step further. Consider the way the organiser, Marcello Cerqueira, looked back on the event:
Our gay pride parade was blessed by the gods, those gods one calls for on a moment like this: Dionysus, Bacchus, Sapho, Logum-Ed , Exu. They descended and played with the crowds, and e declared themselves in solidarity with us as they sent a rainbow to bless us all, one of the greatest symbols of nature that was like a punch in the stomach for all homophobes. 10

Here, a pre-existing afnity between bichas and the candombl universe gets publicly e translated into the idea that candombl is an exemplary religion as far as tolerance e towards sexual difference is concerned. The gods are with us, is what Cerqueira is saying. In other words, a local and particular discourse gets mapped on to a global discourse of gay rights and gay emancipation, and vice versa. It is in this reformulation of what candombl is as a religion that the transformative e consequences of the circulation of candombl imagery through various circuits of e Salvadors public sphere should be sought. In writings on the subject, one nds very clear examples of the collapse of political activism and religion. The sociologist Reginaldo Prandi, for example, speaks about candombl as a religion of the excluded. He remarks e that no social institution in Brazil, other than candombl , accepted the homosexual, e always forcing this category to hide itself from view, and then exclaims How grand and exemplary is this capacity of candombl to join saints and sinners, the soiled and e the pure, the ugly and the beautiful ! (Prandi 1996: 33). Jo o Silv rio Trevisan, a S oa e a Paulo-based historian and author of a volume on homosexuality in Brazil (2000), argues that the gay movement has a great deal to learn from the Afro-Brazilians, who have managed to overcome the adversities of their tragic history by remaining loyal to their African cultures and creeds. He suggests that
to nurture our inner life and boost our self-image, it is fundamental that we uncover from ancient times the myths that are related to us and might function as our roots. In other words, lets do some archeaological work to recuperate what was veiled during centuries of Judeo-Christian civilisation.11

In his proposed set up of what is to become a gay religious cult he rst makes his selection of useful Greek gay icons (Ganymede, Apollo, Dionysus, Achilles and Patroclus, Hercules and Iola), then ponders the usefulness of Saint Sebastian (pierced with arrows in his naked body until death by his soldiers in an indisguisable act of homoerotic sadism that attracted so many artists toward this saint from Michelangelo in painting to Yukio Mishima in literature and Derek Jarman in cinema).12 He then argues that for Brazilians in particular, candombl offers various orix s with an ambiguous e a gender, like Oxal , Ians , Logum-Ed and Oxumar .13 a a e e Another area where gay activist readings of candombl become visible is the struggle e against the Aids epidemic. Odo Aye is a documentary lm about the responses in the candombl community towards Aids. The lm has been shown at several international e

10 11 12 13

www.ggb.org.br/editorial.html, last entered 13 July 2003. Jo o Silv rio Trevisan, Historias que a escola n o conta www.athosgls.com.br/comportamento a e a visualiza. php?arcd artigo=672&arcd autor=39, last entered 20 September 2004. Ibid. Ibid.

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lm festivals, and when one reads the announcement of the lm on an American-based website one cannot but gain the impression that candombl falls a little short as an e exemplary, safe-sex-promoting religion:
Candomble understands that it has a special responsibility to respond to the Aids crisis. It believes that sex, the human body and all of its secretions have ashe [sic]. Candomble sees sex as an important source of vital pleasure in life and does not prevent anyone from having sex like we dont prevent anyone from sweating. Furthermore, Candombles rituals involve scarication and shaving. As a result of Candombles high-risk rituals and its positive attitude toward sex, worshippers felt compelled to get involved in Aids prevention. So, like needle-exchange programs, Candomble teaches techniques for cleaning ritual instruments. Its priests and practitioners pass out condoms and prevention publications at Carnival. Many of the high priests have become experts in alternative medicine. They use music to organise for social justice and to teach prevention.14

The example also highlights how the designation of candombl as a gay-friendly e religion is picked up in places that are far removed from Bahia, and starts guring in the social imagination of ever newer audiences. Pointing in a similar direction is the study called Queering creole spiritual traditions. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender participation in African-inspired traditions in the Americas (Conner and Sparks 2004), advertised in the United States with the slogan See into the heart and soul of LGBT practitionsers of vodou and Yoruba religions ! These examples may sufce to give an indication how candombl is re-read, and e becomes the tin god of both local and global gay scenes. What is important about these reformulations of candombl is that large segments of the priesthood (many of them e gay) seem to adopt this kind of thinking. Take my encounter with Pai Jo o, the priest a from the temple where Toninho, the guy from the photo-shop, is og -of-the-knife. Pai a Jo o had been recommended to me when I was looking for a priest to nd out about the a orix s that govern my head, and he had been described as being jovem e muito legal a (young and really cool). Arriving at his temple (right next to the gym of which he is the owner), Pai Jo o took me up to his altar. He rst asked me about my astrological sign a (which I thought odd), then threw cowrie shells to nd out about my orix s. After that a he suggested I could ask him some other things I wanted to know. For example, about your love life, he suggested. I told him that I was having a somewhat troublesome affair with a Baiano, and explained that I was gay. Pai Jo o immediately picked up on a that remark, saying that he had known this from the moment I came in and that he was gay as well. He then re-framed his explanations of the cult in a gay discourse, saying that we gays in particular are in need of our divine protectors because we are such sensitive people and know more than anyone else that there are things in life that we can only share with our orix , even if in reality we would have preferred to a discuss these matters with our mothers. At the end of the consultation, he disclosed

14 http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/csblac/Text/Programs/Present/Shaping/Cypriano.html, last entered 20 September 2004. While it is certainly true that safe-sex campaigns have found ample response in the candombl community (Mott and Cerqueira 1998), and while it is noteworthy within this e discussion that it is the Grupo Gay da Bahia that started the Projeto Candombl , Saude e Ax and e e this same GGB publishes a monthly magazine called Alaa: Jornal do Povo do Candombl , full of e advice and reports on the Aids crisis, I cannot but notice that candombl imaginary also endorses e unsafe sex. One friend confessed to having unsafe sex, explaining that it was not him but a spirit called Maria Padilha that had moved him into the act.

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that on entering the temple he had recognised me from Anchor Marujo, the gay bar in downtown Salvador, urged me to have a health-check at least every year and charged me a considerable sum of money for the consultation. Another good example of a priest re-producing a gay discourse is a babalorixa called Baba Ogu Dare, who hosts a website on which worried gays can check out the religious options left to them after they have come out. This Baba Ogu Dare states that:
The concept of sin is a Christian concept that does not exist in the pure religions of Africa. According to the African oduns everyone is born predestined with a fate that is already set out for him, so if a human being is born with a heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual predestination, this is already in the plans of creation. All individuals are created to fulll a role in the world. And these roles need not be the same. What has been customarily understood as natural is nothing other than the Judean interpretation of a nomadic desert tribe for whom homosexuality was negative because it interfered with its procreation.15

Many of my gay friends in Salvador reproduced this kind of thinking as well. They too stressed the absence of Christian morals in candombl . They highlighted the gender e ambiguity of Oxumar (the orix who is for six months of the year a man and for six e a months of the year a woman), and the androgynous character of Logum-Ed and Ians . e a They pointed out the great number of gay priests and revelled in gossiping about the assumed lesbian affairs of priestesses. They loved to draw attention to the fact that the great divas from MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) such as Maria Beth nia and Gal Costa a are both lesbians and initiated into the cult. They directed my attention to the evident homo-eroticism in the photography of Pierre Verger. And they emphasised how the povo de santo were partners in adversity as they had been equally persecuted in the past and were attacked today by the ever more powerful Pentecostal churches. Last but not least, many loved to go to celebrations of candombl because they knew that the place e would be cheio de bichas, that they could meet friends and irt with strangers, and generally identify with the splendour of the cult. In sum, what we nd in the public sphere is a re-reading of candombl elements e in terms of gay activism and a merging of candombl imagery with a global gay e iconography that somehow nds its way back into the cult.

Candomble in green
Not long before the Parada Gay, on the occasion of World Ecology Day (Dia Mundial do Meio Ambiente), candombl found another role to play in the public sphere. A e Salvadorian newspaper reported that:
Heavy drumming was to be heard, yesterday, at World Ecology Day, in St Bartholomew Park, where a number of organisations from the Ferrovi rio district organised a forum to pay homage to a

15

www2.uol.com.br/mixbrasil/id/entende.htm, last entered 20 September 2004. Yet another priest, Jos Luiz Lipiani, states in his Orixas, comportamento e personalidade de seus lhos (1999), that e homosexuals are generally very hurt by social prejudice. This attitude is plainly wrong; being children of God, our brothers and sisters do not deserve discrimination. If all that exists is the work of God, we should understand and accept these people as such. He understands homosexuality as a strong presence of a female orix in the being of a male body (1999: 30). a

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the inquices, orix s, voduns and caboclos, who in the religions of African origin, are the primordial a defenders of nature (A Tarde, 6 June 2003).

What we see here is how an assumed inherent reverence for the forces of nature in candombl has been projected on to a global concern for environmental issues. This e re-casting of orix s as environmental activists does not come out of the blue. Iconic a elements of the cult lend themselves to ecological interpretation: the worshipping of trees; the association of each orix with particular natural elements such as forests, a waterfalls, seas, storms and re; and the widely acclaimed knowledge of natural medicine. Ossain, I read on a website, is not only the orix of leaves, herbs, vegetation a and lord of medicine but also the patron of ecology.16 Another website presents the cult as an ecological movement avant la l` ttre, as it quotes a Bahian priestess who as e early as 1902 formulated the ecologists dictum that the abuse of nature will always rebound on the abuser:
One does not take a dried leaf from a tree if it isnt necessary; thats like killing a person. Would anyone like to lose an arm, an eye or a foot? Why pick a ower and throw it away? Candombl e is living nature. There can be no worship of the orix without earth, forest, river, sky, lightning, a thunder, wind, sea . . . Violence towards nature is violence towards the orix .17 a

As in the case of the gay activists, there are a number of well-known intellectuals to spell out the links between ecology and candombl . Antonio Ris rio writes that the e e sacralisation of nature is one of the main sources of his fascination with candombl , e and praises this cosmovision in which trees, lakes and rivers are understood as sites where the divine manifests itself (Ris rio, in Pretto and Serpa 2002: 910). Muniz Sodr , e e a leading Brazilian scholar of candombl who boasts degrees from the Sorbonne, argues e that candombl in fact preceded the environmentalist movement and can therefore be e considered a kind of proto-ecological way of being in the world. His exposition, a notable example of an attempt to make candombl precede rather than follow global e trends, merits extensive quotation:
A long time ago, in a Bahian terreiro, I had a radical ecological experience. It was on a midweek afternoon, and I took some of my friends on a visit to the compound of the terreiro. After having visited the houses, an oga (a honoric title for certain members of the cult) took us into the woods: he wanted to present one of us with a cutting from a tree. There, surrounded by vegetation, all of us witnessed how he embraced a trunk the old Apaok murmuring some words and asking a permission from the tree to break off a twig. I clearly remember this scene, probably because its simplicity stood in such sharp contrast with a discourse that is gaining strength in contemporary urban society (winning even seats in parliament) the discourse of ecology. This moment was not a reection of the idea that individuals should enter into a dialogue with their natural surroundings, nor was it connected with the liberal discourse on the preservation of our natural surroundings: it was about acting in such a way that the natural element, the tree, turns a partner of man in a play in which cosmos and world encounter each other. What I found there was a radical ecological posture far removed from the neopantheist apostrophes of petit-bourgeois ecology [apostrofes neopantestas do ecologismo pequeno-burgu s] because it wasnt the result of some individualist e voluntarism, but followed from the cosmovision of a group in which the brotherhood of man with plants, animals and minerals is an essential given. For the black community [o grupo negro], the territory, as a single whole, is a patrimony to be respected and preserved. (Sodr 2002: 167) e

16 http://www.aguaforte.com/ileaxeogum/ossain.html, last entered 20 September 2004. 17 http:/www.memorialdoimigrante.sp.gov.br/realizad Orixas.html, last entered 20 September 2004.

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Even more interesting is the example of another anthropologist, Reginaldo Prandi, who launches the come-back of a long forgotten orix , called Onil , Lady of the Earth: a e
In the present climate of a return to the world of nature and a concern with ecology, an orix a that had been almost completely forgotten is being gradually recovered. It is Onil , Lady of the e Earth, the orix who represents our planet as a single whole, the world that we live in. The myth a of Onil can be found in various poems of the If oracle, still alive in Brazil, in the memory of e a those who have been initiated into candombl for decades . . . Discretely worshipped in the old e terreiros from Bahia and in Africanised candombl s, Mother Earth raises the curiosity and interest e of the followers of the orix s, above all those who belong to the more intellectual segments of the a religion . . . For many followers of the religion of the orix s, interested in restoring the relation a orix -nature, the cult of Onil thus represents the concern with the preservation of humanity a e itself, and all that is in its world.18

Here too, we might conclude that elements from candombl lend themselves really e well to emphasising the local in the global concern for the environment. And here too, I was confronted with instances where these re-readings of what candombl is e (and does) inform peoples actions. A group of friends who wished to participate in the yearly offering to the sea goddess Iemanj made an ecological balaio, which is the a basket that is lled with presents for the goddess and then dropped into the ocean. This was not your regular basket full with the plastic combs, lipsticks, dolls, owers, curling pins and perfume bottles that bet the vain goddess, but a wholly biodegradable balaio lled with food, real owers and paper cuttings. I was assured that this ecological balaio would certainly please the sea goddess; folklore has it that gifts that return to the Bahian shores could not please Iemanj , something more likely to happen to a plastic comb or a Barbie doll than to organic matter. As with the gay activist readings of candombl , members of the priesthood show up e in the circuits where the representational economy has taken the items of the candombl e symbol bank. For instance, priests appear on television in a programme called Saude Alternativa (Alternative Health), and the video production that every visitor to the little museum on the compound of Il Ax Opo Afonj gets to see (entitled Isso e e e a nosso universo, essa e nossa crenca) is one endless sequence of images of nature (woods, animals, trees, plants and water); the voice-over explains that orix s are to be understood a as phenomena of nature, forces of life [fenomenos da natureza, forcas vitais].

Candomble in black
The black emancipation movements is a more obvious and logical example of a circuit in which candombl gets translated and mapped on to the political projects e e of others.19 Joc lio Teles dos Santos, in his rich and detailed account of the progressive entanglement of candombl and black emancipatory politics in Bahia, has shown that e until the second half of the 1970s black movements actually demonstrated a striking reluctance to approach candombl . Marxist ideology ruled the activist discourses at e that time and propagated an understanding of candombl as a sect and ultimately e

18 19

Text found at the authors website: http://www.fch.usp.br/sociologia/prandi/, last entered 20 September 2004. For the fact that there is no single such movement, see Covin 1996.

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alienating institution, all the more so because of its veneration of Catholic saints and links with catholic institutions. Moreover, the way candombl priests and priestesses e sought protective ties with white power holders was repeatedly held against them (Santos 2000: 192). By the early 1990s, however, candombl had become something of a fetish, a e cultural relic endowed with so much prestige and power that one comes under the impression that even the black movements could no longer resist its seductive spells. From the 1930s, Bahias (white) cultural elites had been celebrating candombl as the e prime marker of the Bahian cultural heritage. First came a generation that included writer Jorge Amado, sculptor Caryb and song-writer Dorivall Caymmi; then the e counterculture of the Tropic lia movement in the late 1960s (Dunn 2001). From the a 1970s onwards this celebration of the Afro-Brazilian religious heritage received the full back-up of the Bahian state, as tourism boomed and Bahia sought to promote itself on the tourist market as an exotic and mysterious holiday destination (cf. Pinto 2001). In addition, the work of Michel Agier (2000) on traditional black carnival organisations in Salvador shows that, parallel to this development, candombl imagery e was taken up in these circles as well. Radicalised by north American examples of black power and propagating the black-is-beautiful slogans of the era, they sought to reconstruct the aesthetics of negritude and gloried their African roots, nding in candombl a rich reservoir of rituals and symbolic forms. In his study of the afox s in e e Salvador, Antonio Ris rio gives an example as to what such appropriations may have e looked like:
Take the example of the afox Badau . Moa [leader of the afox s] is frank, as he states right away e e e that its participants do not understand much about candombl (we know just a little bit). But we e are eager, and we are curious, he says, adding, but those who really understand do not want to teach us. Badau has no special link with a particular temple of candombl . Nevertheless, many e e adepts and even some priestesses do march the streets with the group, for example Ialorix Omim a Baim. It is to people like her that we feel connected, Moa claries. They give us a lot of power. Badau also has a madrinha, a priestess called Dona Lili, from the Engenho Velho de Brotas e district. It is she who does the ritual works before the group sets out to march the streets, and ritually prepares the rehearsals, and so on. Before every rehearsal of Badau an offering to the e gods is made, the pad . In addition, every time that there is a big celebration, for instance a music e festival, or right before carnival, there is the matanca, the sacrice of animals. And although the chants are no longer taken from the religious repertoire, they all almost without exception deal with the religion, the orix s and its signs and symbols (Ris rio 1981: 578). a e

What these examples suggest is that, next to the occult powers for which candombl has e always been known (and feared), the cult accumulated so much prestige, coming from many different directions, that it became a powerful icon in itself. It seems reasonable to suggest that the political potential that candombl had acquired could no longer e be negated by black activists, who indeed started to undertake attempts to claim the cult as a somehow unalienable part of an Afro-Brazilian, rather than Bahian, heritage. Moreover, when leading terreiros in Salvador publicly broke with syncretism in order to restore their true African roots (which happened with the publication of a manifesto in 1984), a new lecture of candombl as a site of African resistance in a hostile environment e becomes visible. Ris rio writes that in Brazil, candombl functioned as a kind of peaceful and e e sacred Quilombo, a centre of cultural resistance and of the ethnic and social identity of blacks, saving them from total loss of their Africanness [desafricanizacao total]

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(1981: 83). David Covin reports that in the early 1990s, the Bahian-based Movimento Negro Unicado included in its action programme the aim to work for freedom of culture and religion for Afro-Brazilians by restoring culture production to the cultural and religious spaces of the black population, and systematically ghting its commercialisation, folklorisation and distortion. (1996: 48). Santos gives many more examples of the rhetoric that now came to dominate the black emancipatory discourse:
Both the Afro-Brazilian people and their religion were always victims of serious attacks over the centuries by the Catholic church and ever more virulent in recent times by the Protestant churches, with the objective well known by the black community of eradicating from its conscience the experience and the sacred world-view [of its African past] [in Santos 2000: 76].

Impressionistic and all too brief as it may be, this description allows for the observation that the approximation of the black movements and candombl came about through e the manifold and complex exchanges between various circuits. And just as we have seen with the pink and green readings of candombl , these black readings enter in e circulation and move back into the temples. In the rhetoric of the leading temples in Salvador that support the break with syncretism and embrace the re-africanisation of candombl , elements of a black e emancipatory discourse can certainly be pointed out. Some of these temples have initiated social programmes and neighbourhood schools aimed at the enhancement of the auto-estima (self-worth) and conscientizacao (consciousness-raising) of Afro Brazilians. Joc lio Teles dos Santos, however, argues that the candombl priesthood has e e certainly not adopted the political rhetoric of the black movements or is racialising its politics vis-` -vis society at large (2000: 120). If anything, says the author, the priesthood a seeks to capitalise on the political support and legitimacy that the project of black emancipation has obtained over the last decades. It never loses sight, however, of the nal aim, which is the further legitimation and reinforcement of their religion (2000: 198). As the opening of this article shows, the venerable procedure of establishing relationships with power-holders (many of them white) to enhance power and prestige is still very much in use. This might be taken as another sign that there are clear limits to attempts by the black movement to reclaim the terreiro as a site that somehow organically belongs to them. This tendency of the priesthood to establish links with, or even accommodate, whites also comes to the fore in an article called A cor do ax . e Brancos e negros no candombl de S o Paulo, by Vagner Goncalves da Silva and Rita e a Amaral (1993). The authors vividly describe the kind of tensions that may arise due to the simultaneous appearance of a racialised political discourse within the temple walls, and an increasing number of whites in temples and temple hierarchies. It is a somewhat sad story as, in conicts over power, prestige and priestly favours, both groups can be found to stress the value of (stereotypical) characteristics attributed to them. Thus, black initiates claim to have more access to ax , the magical-religious life force of e candombl , and glorify their prowess in dancing and rhythm, whereas white initiates e capitalize on their social standing, education and economic power. On the theological level, the authors notice the emergence of re-interpretations of candombl cosmology e and ritual practice that accommodate, explain or justify the presence of whites in candombl . For example, in the new theological discourse, orix s popularly thought e a of as black and African anthropomorphic gures become abstract and universal energies (Goncalves da Silva and Amaral 1993: 120). In a similar fashion, a white

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candombl priest in Salvador told me that the orix s are so ancient that they precede e a the racial division of humankind. Such developments have far from crystallised, though. The theological difculties arising from the ascendancy of whites in the temples, and the rhetorical acrobatics this fact necessitates, are well illustrated by Mae Stellas words in an introduction to the life-history of a French anthropologist, Gisele Cossard, who became a priestess of candombl and opened up a temple in Rio de Janeiro. In an obvious e attempt to accommodate both Cossard and the project of re-africanising candombl e M e Stella highlights the fact that the anthropologist/priestess was a diplomats daughter a and born in Tangiers, Morocco:
Gisele Cossard, this French girl, was called by the orix from birth on, which is surprising, given a the fact that she is a European woman by birth and descent. Many other places could have served as her cradle due to the profession of her father. However, she was born on the very border of Europe and Africa: she saw the light, for the rst time, in Morocco, a place where African culture is strong and active, rst and foremost in its musical traditions. It is therefore only natural that this francesa africana was called for by the saints in their plenitude (M e Stella, in Dion 1998: 7). a

Conclusion. Scripts and roles

I have given three examples of the circulation of candombl imagery through various e circuits in the public sphere. It is now time to conclude with a discussion of what is gained by studying candombl as a set of symbols and practices on the move, rather e than an enclosed universe in Bahian society. What I have argued is that way beyond the temples of candombl scripts are e being written for (an imagined) candombl community to perform, and that they e are about topics as diverse as tolerance of gay life styles, black emancipation or ecological consciousness.20 The notion of a continuous re-scripting of the cult raises two sets of questions that need to be addressed. The rst set pertains to the fact that so many different scriptwriters developed an interest in candombl . For not only e gays, ecologists and black activists have picked up candombl as their thing, but e
20 This observation is highly reminiscent of processes that have been described by Beatrice Gos Dantas in her acclaimed study Vovo nago e papai branco. Usos e abusos da Africa no Brasil (1988). The scripts that Dantas analysed were written in the 1930s and 1940s by white intellectuals who sought to highlight the purity and Africaness of one particular tradition (nago) in the highly heterogeneous candombl universe. Her research in a terreiro in Bahias neighbouring state of e Sergipe revealed that, to a great extent, these scripts had been picked up to be performed by the cult members. By analogy with Dantass ndings, we might say that at the beginning of the twentyrst century, there is a host of script writers for candombl . The Bahian anthropologist Ordep e Serra, in a venomous, book-long critique of Dantass work, accused the author of denying any agency to the candombl zeiros (Serra 1995). While acknowledging the interactions and exchanges e between Bahian intellectuals and the candombl priesthood, Serra rejected the suggestion that e candombl zeiros were inuenced by intellectuals to the extent that Dantas analysis (in his reading e of the book) suggested. He stressed the authentic contributions of priests and black intellectuals to the reformations of the cult, opening a discussion that resonates well with the current debates on race in Brazil, yet will not easily come to a conclusive end. Serras critique however one wishes to evaluate it does remind us to ask ourselves how the political agendas of some candombl priests e might coincide with those of the scripts-writers.

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feminists, progressive Catholics, labour unionists, tourists, artists and conservative populist politicians are equally busy re-scripting the Afro-Brazilian religious heritage, making sure that their particular ideological outlook gets the star part. The very diversity of the scriptwriters suggests that an explanation of candombl s appeal cannot be limited e to the particularities of one or other circuit. Something in candombl transcends these e differences, and we need to ask what this something might be. A second set of questions relates to the fact that the candombl priesthood actually gets involved in e the performance of these scripts, begging the question why they would do so. Let me start with candombl s appeal to so many different groups. I suggest that e the case of candombl is a clear example of the new roles that have been designed for e tradition in the post-modern world. As we have seen, in the representational economy of Bahia, candombl has become an idiom of autochtony or belonging in a globalising e world. As such, it provides Bahian gays, ecologists, black activists and others with a vocabulary that enables them to make the local global, and the global local. This is hardly a revolutionary research nding. I do want to stress, however, the importance of these local articulations of global concerns. Globalisation processes tend to bring about feelings of alienation. In Salvador, for example, adopting the identity-label gay implies a serious risk of becoming a stranger in ones social and cultural world. People increasingly take that risk, probably because an alternative gay scene is emerging, that promises a belonging to a global community. There is no denying the appeal of such a promise. This global community may show its contours at gay beaches where gay tourists mingle with local guys and even generate its sentiments of belonging in night hours at the discotheque. (I vividly recall crowds in a lower-class gay club singing along with Whitney Houston and Celine Dion at the tops of their voices, though none of them actually spoke a word of English). On the whole, however, the global gay community remains an abstract entity that for many is out of reach. Re-dening candombl as a e gay-friendly religion may offer a fantasy frame within which one may convince oneself (and others) that one is not opting out of Bahia, but one is acting squarely within the connes of Baianidade. Likewise, it is not very difcult to imagine how a Bahian scholar, trained at the Sorbonne in Paris, nds himself seduced into portraying candombl as e an ecological movement avant-la-l` ttre: the gnashing of Muniz Sodr , whose claim to e e intellectual prestige (Im a doctor from the Sorbonne) implies acknowledging western superiority, is almost audible in between the lines of the text that I have quoted above. Candombl helps him to do some time-juggling we Africans have been doing this e long before it became a petty bourgeois fashion and helps him out of his dilemmas, too. An appraisal of what candombl does in the new circuits in which it appears also e highlights just how much candombl is in line with the role of Catholic and evangelical e churches in the political eld as it provides political activity with a religious frame. I want to stress that the quoted gay activists who praise the orix s for blessing the gay a pride parade or ponder the possibility of founding a religious gay cult, as well as the black activists who praise the orix s, might be far more serious and far less ironic than a a western reader might assume. Secularisation theories whatever they are worth in the western world are simply useless in Bahia, where one always performs in front of an audience of saints, spirits and gods. A political project that does not, in one way or the other, demonstrate its alliance with the saints and advertise its tap-roots into the sacred, will not add up to much in Bahia (hence the famous public statement of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former Brazilian president, that he considered

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himself a Cartesian with a touch of voodoo). The presence of so many politicians at the pompous ceremony that I described at the opening of this article, as well as Gilberto Gils public confession that his ministery of Xango was of a spiritual, and therefore more important, level than his position in Braslia are good examples. Yet the necessity of demonstrating ones connections with the sacred also showed up in a small gesture by UNEGRO21 activists that I once saw: they had organised a public debate in a modern university building and began the session by publicly decorating the sterile laminate table-tops with leaves of the Sanseveria, a plant that in candombl is known e as the Sword-of-Ogum and is endowed with the power to chase away evil forces. Just by putting one leaf on each table, they managed completely to transform the frame of the occasion. A third point that might be unpacked from the discussion is that candombl casts e political projects in a frame of victimhood. To opt for candombl imagery is to invoke e all kinds of emotions associated with slavery, persecution, historical injustice, the denial of a right of existence, the suffering of the weak, the poor and the miserable, which the history of candombl (and of Afro-Brazilians in general) incorporates. Against e this catalogue of tragedies, however, one can always point to the perseverance of the Afro-Brazilian faith, as well as the pride and self-esteem of the candombl community e that has managed to survive all the hardships of its history. The appeal of this framing for counter-movements is evident (their persecution is our persecution, their suffering is our suffering). The populist politics of the Bahian elites, however, are equally well served by the rhetorical possibilities of victimhood, be it in relation to sentiments regarding the federal state (We Bahians are always discriminated against by those southern states), or in attempts to create a populist image (You may think we live in our golden towers, but we know of the peoples suffering too). As for the question of why it is that the priesthood has started to perform the novel scripts that have been written for their religious practices, it is instructive to go back to the opening of this article. The opening ceremony showed just how successful some temples have become at updating and outstretching the time-honoured politics of creating honorary functions for inuential outsiders. While publicly maintaining an image of the religion of the oppressed (recall the peripheral location of M e Stellas a temple, and Emerson saying that M e Stella was such a humble woman), Il Ax Opo a e e Afonj , the temple under discussion, manages to mobilise an impressive collection of a powerful gures. In this particular temple, there is not only an og -ship on offer a to outsiders a function that does not require a long initiation and receiving of the spirits through possession but also a chair in the ministry of Xango, an institution of twenty-four chair holders that was created in 1937 within this particular terreiro with the possible purpose (and denite effect) of allowing ever more inuential outsiders into its ranks. The handing out of Xango awards for celebrities who distinguish themselves as benefactors of the candombl community during the ceremony that I have described e might be seen as the new format in which this type of politics is cast. Today, these politics seem to be motivated by a number of considerations. First, there is a deep concern over the booming of neo-Pentecostal churches that continuously attack candombl , saying it is nothing less than the realm of the devil. In Bahia, a fear e of outright persecution has somewhat diminished now that the cult has been ofcially

21 Uni o de Negros pela Lgualdade (Union of Blacks for Equality). a

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and legally recognised as one of the religions in the state. Yet the priesthood is very much aware of the less favourable conditions of candombl in other states such as S o e a Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where Pentecostal churches demonise and marginalise the cult, as of old. The candombl priesthood has therefore a vested interest in maintaining e the framing of Bahia as the blessed land of the orix s, just as a public display of the a links with highly inuential politicians and esteemed academics helps against the threat of neo-Pentecostal churches. The way that the community of candombl has recently e begun to stress its dedication to tolerance [tolerancia] must also be understood against the threat of the Pentecostal churches, and might explain the ease with which priests pick up liberal issues such as gay rights, ecology or black emancipation. Second, the creation of these honorary functions and the public demonstration of the alliances a temple manages to mobilise should be understood in relation to the attempts of the priesthood to enhance the respectability of the cult vis-` -vis a a society that still has a lot of prejudice about candombl (recall Toninhos reservations e towards publicly announcing his belonging to a temple). For all of its prestige, in the popular mind, candombl is easily linked to black magic, occult forces and witchcraft e [macumba]. The main temples seek to escape from these prejudices primarily by adopting the anthropological distinction between religion and magic, and positioning their beliefs in the former category (cf. Maggy 1986; Capone 2000). They have also launched a public-relations offensive to advance this understanding of candombl as a e religion and seem to be quite successful. As I remarked earlier, it is stunning to see how the two main newspapers in Bahia seem to be under a very strict (self-) censorship, avoiding the kind of sensationalist reports about macumba that one nds elsewhere in Brazil, always going out of their way to educate the public with very orthodox visions of candombl , and reproducing the solemn and sacred nature of Afro-Brazilian religion. e That there are limits to this playing along with the scripts that have been written elsewhere is evident. Especially in the eld of entertainment, the priesthood tries to limit the use of candombl imagery for fear of a profanation of the cult. As the opening e night of the Semana Cultural da Herana Africana na Bahia illustrated so well, the priests from candombl can hardly be described as putty in the hands of others: they e are busy producing scenarios for a public form of candombl , writing scripts to be e enacted by politicians, activists and anthropologists. The more general conclusion this article permits and I dare say this has relevance beyond the study of candombl is that the well-established categories within which e anthropologists have sought to delineate their objects of investigation are in need of revision. Candombl is part of a world in which the forces of globalisation and the e mass media operate: I have shown that the walls between the temple and society at large are highly permeable, and that at present the whole world is involved in the making and re-making of candombl . In such a world, it makes little sense to try to contain e candombl within the bounded anthropological notion of a cult. e My proposal to study candombl as a symbol bank in Bahias representational e economy forces one to be aware of the multiple connections between the cult and the circuits through which its myths, its belief-tenets, its symbols, its aesthetics and its practices circulate. Above all, it urges one to be alert to the transformative work of the dialogues that take place thanks to these circulations: what happens when understandings pass through the endless communicative chains of priests talking to anthropologists, talking to gay activists, talking to politicians, talking to initiates, talking

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to talk-show hosts, and so on? Such a focus on circulation breaks with prioritising temples and priests as the preferred sites and exegetes of the cult. Instead, it urges one to analyse the fact that some people claim to represent the real candombl , and that others e support or contest those claims. It urges one to investigate what resources people have to substantiate their claims. It urges one to ponder the question of why some images of candombl nd support, while others that are equally present become obscured. e Indeed, it urges one to consider the possibility that the continued representation of candombl as a closed universe is part of an internal political strategy that seeks to deal e with the permeability of the temple walls.
Mattijs van der Port Research Centre Religion and Society Department of Anthropology University of Amsterdam OZ Achterburgwal 185 1012 DK Amsterdam The Netherlands m.p.j.vandeport@uva.nl

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