Helmar Kurz

Afro-Brazilian Ritual Performance: An Alternative Modernity

Abstract

With his concept of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has illustrated how African-descendant artists create countercultures to resist a European hegemony in what is called modernity, excluding “African” practices and knowledge as “traditional” and backward. In the same way, African-American religions are not a mere survival of cultural heritage but serve as counterculture and a form of resistance against the elites’ attempts to “whiten” black people.

The Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé is an example of such a subversive potential. Historically, participants camouflaged their forbidden practices by equaling their gods to Catholic saints. It was not syncretism or hybridization but a strategy to implement their values and knowledge in the new environment. Whereas their various ritual practices primarily seem to connect humans to their African gods and ancestors through symbolic representations, African-related aesthetics, and spirit possession, they provide metacommentaries on the Brazilian reality and promote an alternative model of modernity. Contemporary importance in the Brazilian public culture illustrates the impact this strategy generated.
 

Based on ethnographic and literature research, this paper analyzes Candomblé initiation processes, ritual practices, and public ceremonies with a focus on their performativity. It discusses how they relate to the historical collective trauma of slavery and social marginalization and invert this experience toward the empowerment and agency of participants. It illustrates how Candomblé communities aesthetically create, communicate, and implement alternative modernity within their ritual practices. In this regard, it will also be necessary to investigate the healing aspect of candomblé in terms of a transformation of experience and the provision of strategies to cope with structural violence. The papers finishes with a brief outlook on the future of these practices in new diasporas, for example,
Brazilians in Germany.

Bio

Helmar Kurz studied Ethnology, Science of Religion, and Archaeology and is a research fellow and lecturer at the Department of Social & Cultural Anthropology in Muenster, Germany. His research areas are Anthropology of Religion, Medical Anthropology, Migration, Transcultural Psychiatry, Media, and the Anthropology of the Body/Senses. From 2015-2018 he engaged in the research program “Diversification of Mental Health: Therapeutic Spaces of Brazilian Spiritism” funded by DFG (German Research Foundation), resulting in his Ph.D. thesis “Voice of Good Sense: Diversification of Mental Health and the Aesthetics of Healing in Brazilian Spiritism”. He is a board member of the Association for Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM) and co-editor of the affiliated Curare: Journal of Medical Anthropology.