Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (review)

It is something of a tradition for anthropologists of all hues and nationalities who study Afro-Brazilian religion to become themselves absorbed into its generous institutional structure, either as full-blown priests, as ritual office holders, or simply as one of a multitude of ordinary people who know the identity of their guardian saint or orisha, recognize their power and authority and typically interpret fortune and misfortune in terms of the interference of these orishas and/ or the workings of spells by their supposed earthly enemies. There are also more romantic attachments that establish propinquity to an idealized Africa. This, for example, was the experience of Roger Bastide who was able to pronounce, significantly in Latin, "Africanus sum." In a way it was also the experience of Bastide's fellow countryman, anthropologist and photographer Pierre Verger, who felt as much at home in Bahia as in Benin, where he registered aesthetic and cultural similitude though his wonderful photography and detailed ethnography. Verger, however, never abandoned his French Cartesian tradition and in a sorrowful interview shortly before his death, lamented the fact that he had been unable to free himself enough to be able to experience trance.

J. Lorand Matory approaches the Candomblé of Bahia as part of a long personal journey that began before he was born "literally and metaphorically" at Howard University, where both his parents taught. It blossomed into a growing celebration of a transatlantic black identity. Like Verger he has lived and researched on both sides of the Atlantic, establishing a vast network of friends in West Africa, Brazil and the United States and amassing admirable erudition on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet as anthropologist he is closer akin to Melville Herskovits, whom he cites with regularity and admires for having been motivated to "redeem African Americans from what he calls the 'myth' that we lack a cultural past and are therefore inferior to whites." Indeed, there is a strong continuity between Herskovits and Matory; they even share the same theoretical adversaries, such as Franklin Frazier and Ruth Landes. Matory seems to take Herskovits' side in his famous disagreement with Franklin Frazier over the africanness or not of matrifocal families with multiple husbands/fathers and concomitantly men with successive wives in Bahia of the 1930s. Herskovits, of course, put all this down to a "survival" of African polygamy, while Frazier thought it had to do more with contemporary Brazilian urban poverty. He also finds plenty of reasons to criticise Ruth Landes, whose City of Women¹ Herskovits had done his best to disqualify in a stinging review in 1948.²

There are strong reasons for understanding Matory's book as a redemption of Melville Herskovits, substituting his by now discredited diffusionism with a closely argued case for the agency of African slaves and their descendants in building and maintaining institutions based on what they understood as African authenticity. To make his point he takes to task a generation of Brazilian anthropologists, critical of Herskovits, who interpreted the production and permanence of African traditions in Brazil in terms of the complex inter-relationships between religious leaders, local political elites and of course the anthropologists who wrote about them. His argument is redolent of that of Brazilian anthropologist Ordep Serra who in 1995³ published a critical essay of Beatriz Goes Dantas' book Vovó Nagô e Papai Branco: Usos e abusos da África no Brasil,⁴ which shows how "African purity" varies from place to place and that the strength of the most traditional religious houses of Salvador has much to do with their close association with anthropologists, and members of the economic and political elite. Like Serra, Matory reads Dantas as attributing such importance to the anthropologists that the religious leaders themselves pale into insignificance. In all fairness, Dantas never denied the agency of the religious leaders, much to the contrary. She observed, correctly, that the most traditional Candomblé houses had benefitted from the...