Preface
preface The result of more than seven years of research, this book aims to recover the historical memory of a group that is largely forgotten, both within AfroBrazilianstudiesandamong Candomblé practitioners. The prestige of the Jeje nation within Candomblé1 is still recognized among religious experts, and scholars do refer occasionally to certain aspects of its ritual practice. However, no book to date has been dedicated to an in-depth and detailed study of this “root” of Afro-Brazilian culture. This work also encompasses both the history and the anthropology of Afro-Brazilian religion. This interdisciplinary approach embraces, therefore, a number of diverse yet internally intertwined themes, including among others the construction of Jeje ethnicity in colonial Brazil, the contribution of the vodun* cults to the formative process of Candomblé, the microhistory of two Jeje terreiros,* and a selective ethnography of the vodun pantheon and ritual practice in contemporary Bahia. Another significant aspect of this study is its complementary use of both oral and written sources, in combination with an analysis of ritual behavior. Although this is not an entirely new methodology, the interface between history andethnography hasbeenlittleusedin Afro-Brazilian studies. The critical intersectionofthesevariedsourcesprovedtobequitefertileandopenedinterpretative paths that would have been impossible if I had worked with only one kindofsource.Thisexercisewasespeciallyrelevantinthereconstructionofthe historiesoftheBogumterreiroinSalvadorandSejaHundéinCachoeira,inthe Bahian Recôncavo,* both founded by Jeje Africans during the time of slavery. The framework of this study’s subject responds to linguistic criteria. One could say that the book deals with the historiography of two words: Jeje and vodun—thefirsthavingprimarilyanethnicmeaningandthesecondareligious one. These two words guided and determined the documentary research, as well as the selection of the two terreiros where the field research was conducted , given that these congregations define themselves as belonging to the “Jeje nation” and are distinguished from other nations through their worship of certain deities called voduns. To define the African geographic area where the ethnic groups known in Brazil as Jeje originated (the topic of chapter 1), I also employed essentially xii preface linguistic criteria. Here I followed the suggestion of Hounkpati B. C. Capo and adoptedtheexpression“Gbe-speakingarea,”orsimply“Gbearea,”todesignate the southern region of present-day Togo, Republic of Benin, and southwest Nigeria, where live the peoples traditionally labeled as Adja, Ewe, Fon, or a combination of these terms such as Adja-Ewe. For all these groups, the word gbe means language, and, although it is not a term used for autochthonous selfidentification , it has the advantage of not being an “ethnocentric” term that privileges the name of one subgroup to designate the whole.2 It is precisely among these peoples sharing linguistic roots since ancient times that the term vodun is used to designate the deities or invisible forces of the spirit world. The demarcation of a geographic area based on linguistic criteria results from a descriptive and analytic need, but it is important to point out that the Gbe-speaking area was always a multicultural and polyethnic society, in which the mercantile system, wars, and the slave trade contributed to populations’ movements from one area to another, which in turn contributed to this diversity .3 Cities such as Ouidah and Abomey were relatively cosmopolitan centers, in some ways comparable to the urban centers of colonial Brazil, where the same encounters of culturally diverse human groups occurred, again with economic motives connected to the slave trade. This structural similarity suggests that the collective identity dynamics of minority groups, as well as strategies of assimilation and resistance in relation to dominant groups, could have been reproduced in a similar manner both in Bahia and in the Gbe-speaking area. Fredrik Barth speaks of an “encompassing social system” in reference to the social structure or the set of social relations shared by all members of a plural society (macrosocial consensus) and also of the borders betweenethnic groups as the “maintenance of cultural diversity” (microsocial difference). He also insists on the importance of not confusing culture for ethnicity, as the latter is adynamicdevelopedfromthevalorizationofjustafewculturalelements—the diacritical signs that express difference. The persistence of ethnic groups, however, requires a “systematic set of rulesgoverninginterethnicsocialencounters”;inotherwords,theremustexist “a congruence of codes and values,” which ultimately requires and creates a “similarity or community of culture.”4 Therefore, multiethnic social systems involve a relative cultural symbiosis, a basic consensus from which difference is articulated. As I will show, Candomblé is a clear example of this dynamic of progressive institutional homogenization,accompanied by a parallel dynamic of “ethnic” differentiation based on a discrete series of ritual elements. One of the...
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