Candomblé and Umbanda in Lisbon
And now a paper I wrote in Lisbon about Candomblé and Umbanda. I add this because it explains a little further the historicity of the use of a Yoruba Religion as a political referent. I’d recommend « “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation” by J. LORAND MATORY, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1999), 41:72-103 Cambridge University Press» for further reading. Another note, this started off as a project that I was excited about because I was studying at the university where a reasearcher, Clara Saraiva, was doing work on the practice of Umbanda in Lisbon. Excited as I was at the prospect of exploring a similar process to the one in which La Regla de Ocha becomes practiced in the United States, I was instead disilusioned by the quality of the research that she had done and her tardiness in responding to my emails when I was working on a deadline. Excuses, I know, but I wish to address my self awareness that my paper lacks much well-rounded research. I chose a topic I thought I would have special access to and that there would be a significant amount of research to write about, but found that I couldn’t scratch much deeper than the superficie. Also, the opening paragraph relies on the professor’s knowledge of a text that we had discussed within his class.
Craig Foster
HIST 3001
Prof. José Neves
3 Jun 2009A History of Umbanda and the Relation of it Practice in Lisbon to Portuguese Nationalism
To fully unlock the negotiations that occur when religious symbols, identities and meanings overlap or abut against nationalist ones, an arduous process of uncovering the trace presents itself to the thorough researcher. For, as Anthony Smith writes in “The Modernist Fallacy” that national “continuities with pre-modern influences must be analysed in conjunction with modern and ‘post-modern’ trends and their interrelations revealed” the same can be said of religious communities. What this partially entails is a process of describing and uncovering how meaning is produced in religious and nationalist senses at the site of the individual in a quotidian or contemporary sense.
On top of merely “observing” the rituals, high or banal, of religious practitioners and subjects of nationalism, the researcher must try to glean from personal testimonies or observational metaphors (how one observation finds effect, and thus meaning, in another) the production of meaning that causes certain national or religious symbols and practices to persist. A second thing that is entailed is a process of describing and uncovering how these meanings are permitted/encouraged or in contrast forbidden/discouraged by people and institutions (or more generally the ideological structures) that wield regulatory power, physical or ideological, on these religious and national subjects. Another task for the researcher comes from the need to trace the historical interchange and political struggles between the high and the low, the colonizers and the colonized, the political and religious institutions and those on which they attempted to enact power. This final task comes with the end goal of providing further explanatory power to the reasons why there is the persistence of essentialist or historically-centered arguments in the post-modern constructionist world by explaining why certain discourses that have historical precedent keep their vitality in the ongoing struggle for meaning and power in the world.
For the practice of an afro-Brazilian religion, Umbanda, in Portugal, these traces and negotiations appear to be vital. For a nation still adjusting its national identity in the wake of the totalitarian control by the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar, with the added effects that followed the political structure of the European union, an identity crisis of sorts must be negotiated when the traces of nationalist discourse react with the presence of a religion imported from Brazil, a former colony, a non-European country, and a country with considerably more economic strength. In a country with a still-prominent Catholic matrix that provides the public, believers or nonbelievers, with most of their normative constructions of religious beliefs and practices, the existence on Portuguese soil of Umbanda terreiros (houses of worship) raises questions of the legitimacy of the practice of the religion and the beliefs and meanings surrounding the practice.
For an understanding of how Umbanda is even positioned to make an entry into Portuguese religious life, it is helpful to examine the conditions that secured a space within the religious space of Americas for it and other afro-Caribbean/Brazilian religions, including Candomblé in Brazil, La Regla de Ocha, Lucumi or Santería in Cuba, and Vodun in Haiti. One of the defining features of these religions is that for many years they were practiced by Black slaves and their descendants, then a few keen anthropologists eager to shed their outsider status in observing the religion, and in recent years, at least in the Brazilian case, certain celebrity entrepreneurs drawn in by a recontextualization of the religious practices within the national sphere (including, for example, Flora Gil, the wife of Brazilian musician and recently-resigned politician Gil Gilberto)., There is a wealth of literature in twentieth and early twenty-first anthropological, sociological, religious studies, gender studies and other social sciences that examines the conditions that provide a space for these religions that all share African religious practices as their referents and integrate to various degrees Roman Catholic iconography into their worship. Approaching the subject from many angles, the scholars provide varied reasoning for these religions’ vitality against the Christian hegemony of the colonizers of the new world. Amongst the many things which scholars emphasize and debate in various ways is what is the primary driving force of the persistence of these religious practices in the new world, a summary of which follows.
The traditional understanding of these religions, fostered by early twentieth century anthropologists, were that they were syncretizations of the dominant Catholicism imposed upon the slaves by their masters with the traditional Yoruba religious practices. Later, researchers critiquing the early methodology of the early anthropologists framed the vitality of the religious practices of a form of “signifyin’ on,” the dominant religion, not as an attempt to combine the two but as a way of protecting religious belief under the forms acceptable by the powerful, but not omniscient colonial and Catholic leaders. One of the striking features of these afro-Caribbean and cognate religions is the use of the Roman Catholic saints as iconographic representations of their orixás, or spirits. While originally thought of as a clear representation of the blending of Roman Catholicism with the African religions, it was later realized that this discredited the political motivations not to incorporate Roman Catholic beliefs into their religious practices, but rather to preserve the ability to practice their religion under the imposition of Catholicism. And although this better explains the intent of early practitioners of these religions, it is not to say that the incorporation of Roman Catholic imagery in their religion left the beliefs themselves untouched, as indeed the religious practices were constantly negotiated and religious meanings recreated in relation to the Catholic hegemony and the now present Catholic symbolism in the religions themselves.
In fact, much of the impetus for claims that these religious practices represent “African memory” or preserve African ritual and religious meaning are born out of political movements of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. As anthropologist J. Lorand Matory writes, “returnees from Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, North America, the Virgin Islands, and Sierra Leone converged on Lagos during the nineteenth century and not only composed a novel African ethnic identity [Yoruba], but through a literate and politicized struggle, guaranteed that it would be respected in a unique way by generations of students of Africa and its diaspora.” Indeed, a cross-continentally mobile class of Black students composed a Yoruba ethnicity out of many smaller ethnic and political groups along and near the Nigerian coast, centered on the port city of Lagos.
Connected to in many ways, if temporally far removed from the contemporary negotiations of national identity and religious practices that will be discussed later in this paper, these black students constructed anew a historical nation but also negotiated self-identities drawing on a mix of nationalisms in the Americas and their colonial referents. Often paradoxically, these students emphasized both their knowledge of traditional African religious practice alongside their privilege of being fluent in the language of their contemporary colonizers of the Nigerian coast, English, even to the extent of Anglicizing their African or Portuguese names. In these middle-class and literate trans-continental migrants we can see not only historical examples of the ways national and religious identities can be negotiated but also understand perhaps why, over a century later, Umbanda persists in Brazilian religious life with a vital enough presence to be “imported” to Lisbon.
The twentieth century brought new political challenges to Brazil which brought new pressures to change the composition and cultural and political dynamics of afro-Brazilian religions. Because I wish to focus on the relationship of Umbanda in Lisbon with Portuguese national identity and thought, I will focus on the codification of Umbanda over Candomblé or other afro-Caribbean religions, with the caveat that Portuguese practitioners may be aware of the other religions and this may in turn influence their conception of Umbanda and its subsequent practice. The structure of Umbanda was first organized, by Brazilian, middle-class whites in the 1920s and 30s, culminating in the First Congress of the Spiritism of Umbanda. In this congress, the leaders made an attempt to purify the religion of its barbaric, black origins and reimagined the religion as a descendant of Egyptian and Indian religions that became bastardized and fetishized when it passed through Africa and the Nigerian coast. They recontextualized the spirits of the religion as Pretos Velhos, white or pure souls that had been trapped in black Africans, and thus as ethnologists Brown and Bick write, “Umbanda’s early leaders thus manifested extreme ambivalence toward Africa, on the one hand embracing the African cultural contribution, and on the other seeking to de-Africanize that tradition”. Formed in the context of the Vargas dictatorship in Brazil, Umbanda represents a negotiation by those attracted to the ritual and spiritual beliefs of afro-Brazilian religion with the dominant, racist, white-centered ideologies with an attempt to “purify” the practices of the religion to fit in with nationalist norms.
After the end of the Vargas dictatorship, various attempts at re-Africanizing the religion were made, assisted by the diffuse nature of the religion, lacking a permanent central organizing structure. These attempts at re-Africanization, alongside the reimagining of Brazilian national identity as a plurality of mixtures between ethnic identities, account for the reinstatement of Africa as a referent into Umbanda practices. It is within this part of the history of afro-Brazilian religions that Portugal must first confront Umbanda from within its national identity, when, after the end of the colonial wars and the fall of Portuguese dictatorship on the 25th of April 1974, the first Umbanda terreiros began to open their doors on the Portuguese mainland. While Portugal and Portuguese national identity had, since the independence of Brazil, kept their former colony as an important symbol of its own history and colonial legacy, the reworking of the nation as a postcolonial, European state brought with it a reimagining of the relationships between Portuguese and Brazilian nationalities. The colonial imaginary lingers, however, and the adjusting to the political changes is an ongoing process, continues its presence in the “imagined community” of the Portuguese nation.
Because the phenomenon of Umbanda is Lisbon is a relatively new one, there has not been as much time as in Brazil for a large body of academic literature to be built around the subject. Nevertheless, the literature that has been produced raises some interesting questions and points to some important ways that the practice of Umbanda in Lisbon confronts and combines with Portuguese national identity. The first ideas that I wish to address here are those provoked the reports that of all of the legitimate mães and pais de santo, or leaders of individual Umbanda terreiros within the country, all of them are former emigrants from Portugal to Brazil, where they were initiated in the religion and subsequently brought it to Portugal with them when they returned. This provides a link between national identity and religious authority, and Clara Saraiva writes, “the first waves of Brazilian immigrants to Portugal included charlatan pais or mães de santo who used their nationality as an authoritative claim to practice such cults.”
In this summary of some of initial immigrants who brought the religion to Portugal in the wake of the revolution, Saraiva emphasizes the constructive nature of religious authority dependent on “claims” of authenticity. However she also uncritically labels the initial Brazilian mães and pais as “charlatan” without giving clear reference to what allows her to appellate them with this delegitimizing term. In writing as such, Saraiva provokes many questions not only to the state of the practice of Umbanda in Portugal but also to how Portuguese national identity influences the epistemology of these cults. From my discussions with the researcher herself on an outdoor cafeteria at my university (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), I learned that Clara herself is a Portuguese woman who migrated to the United States and subsequently returned to Portugal. As she herself is of Portuguese nationality, her own use of language to legitimize or delegitimize the religious practices speaks to the issues raised by the confrontation of an afro-Brazilian religion in Lisbon when written about by a person of Portuguese nationality. For her, only those pais and mães de santo of Brazilian nationality are charlatan, attesting to the particular renegotiations of the religion and national identities that occur around the practice of Umbanda.
While Saraiva may be uncritical in her own reproduction of some of the privileging of Portuguese nationalism as a legitimizing factor in the religious practice of Umbanda in Lisbon, she does address in her article some of the concerns present when legitimizing identities in one social sphere, this case Portuguese national identity, lend or transmit their legitimacy to another social sphere, production of religious meaning within Candomblé in Lisbon. Explaining the apparent self-exclusion of Brazilians from the religious practices, Saraiva writes “[Brazilians] state that the Portuguese would look down upon them if they were known to frequent Umbanda or Candomblé cults so they prefer to avoid this possibility”. Again, there is a deficit of critical thought in the article as to whether these particular Brazilian informants were attracted to Umbanda while in Brazil, nor is there any discussion about how the Brazilians adapted their religious practices in Portugal. Instead, the simplicity and brevity with which the Brazilians’ exclusion from the cult practices is mentioned leaves their voices mostly silent and privileges the Portuguese mobility within the religious sphere. She marks the Brazilians as weary of any Portuguese “looking down upon them,” ignoring any power that small religious groups, because of their lack of a central authoritative control, may provide agency and power on a individual or collective scale to produce meaning that escapes the norms of Portuguese national society.
Because individuals of Portuguese national identity may more legitimately master the negotiations of the exoticisms of Umbanda against and the Catholic norm of Portugal, they can offer more resistance to the an outside representation of their selves as being illegitimate members of both Portuguese society but also, jarringly, the religious space of Umbanda terreiros. It is in this sense that one can observe a sort of neocolonialism occur in Portuguese religious life. Although, as Saraiva notes, “Brazil always appears as the mother-land, the origin of the Umbanda cults,” it is not Brazilian informants that can legitimately teach the knowledge produced by the religion to Portuguese nationals in Lisbon but instead Portuguese informants who discovered these religions in their time abroad in Brazil. If the revolution of 25th of April, 1974 ended for the most part any official Portuguese political and economic colonialism, there still linger attempts at a cultural colonialism, with the former colonies remaining as places for Portugal to unlock the meaning and secrets of what its legacy gave to the peoples who now inhabit its former colonial lands. This is a productive process that rewrites the history to suit certain ideologies that allow this search for Portuguese legacy to continue, as is seen with the reemphasis on the affinities of Umbanda with Roman Catholicism, as well as the use of Brazil as a symbol of the paradisiacal origins of the religion but with Brazilians themselves marked as incompatible to the realities of the legitimate practice of Umbanda within the space of the Portuguese state.
Returning to the specific idea that Brazilian mães and pais de santo were charlatan or illegitimate leaders of the religion in Lisbon, another startling undercurrent can be gleaned from the way the Umbanda religion is studied in Portugal. A case might be made for the charlatanism of these leaders with the proof that they and their terreiros no longer have a presence in Portuguese society and thus they were in fact unsuccessful diviners and leaders. This relies on a certain prejudice that equates religious meaning and legitimacy with the number of people who follow the religion, resulting in the ability of a researcher such as Saraiva to claim “the greater the number of filhos de santo [followers] attracted by the force of the cult leader, the greater is his/her ability to manipulate the magical powers.” The use of this criteria to judge the effectiveness of a mãe or pai de santo exists, perhaps, because the number of members of a terreiro is a more quantifiable aspect that reflects the abilities of the leader than are personal and intangible qualities of the effectiveness of a particular ritual to produce meaning amongst the individual and collective members of the group. This leads, however, to a bias toward the evangelical in describing the effectiveness of a religion to produce meaning in the lives of its followers and masks how small religious groups such as Umbanda terreiros may fill niches in Portuguese society for people alienated or disenfranchised from normative discourses, on both large national and inter-national scales as well as within smaller community scales.
What I wish to leave the reader with, then, is an ambivalence (not in the sense of careless, but rather in the sense of double-edged) that there is much more knowledge to be produced about the interplay between Umbanda and Portuguese nationalism. The representation of these religious practices will always from an epistemological sense bias itself and produce meaning as much as observe its production and report on it. However, colonial memory persists in the Portuguese national imaginary and the positioning of Portugal as a member of the European Union makes it as an attractive state for many members of its former colonies to migrate. The presence of religious groups with these former colonies as their referents should thus continue to provoke a reimagining of Portuguese national identity in response to and as part of the religious imaginary of these communities.Endnotes [which I can't seem to get to be cited in the text correctly, I will update this when I have more time]
Smith, Anthony. “The Modernist Fallacy.” Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Oxford: Polity Press, (1995).
Saraiva, Clara. “African and Brazilian Altars in Lisbon—Some Considerations on the Reconfigurations of the Portuguese Religious Field.” Cultures of the Black Lusophone Atlantic. New York: Palgrave MacMillan (2007) 175-196.
van de Port, Mattijs. “Priests and Stars: Candomblé, celebrity discourses and the authentication of authority in Bahia’s public sphere. ” Postscripts 1.2/1.3(2005). 301–324.
Comunicação Social/MinC. “Ministério da Cultura – MinC » Solenidade no Palácio do Planalto.” «http://www.cultura.gov.br/site/2008/08/28/novo-ministro-da-cultura» Accessed 1 June 2009.
Lefever, Harry G. “When the Saints Go Riding in: Santeria in Cuba and the United States” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35(1996). 318-330.
Matory, J. Lorand. “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 41(1999). 72-103.
Brown, Diana De G. and Mario Bick. “Religion, Class, and Context: Continuities and Discontinuities in Brazilian Umbanda.” American Ethnologist 14(1987) 73-93.
Brown and Bick, ibid. p. 80
Saraiva, Clara. 2007. ibid. p. 188
Informal discussion at UNL:FCSH, Av. de Berna, Lisboa.
Saraiva, Clara. 2007. ibid. p. 188
Saraiva, Clara. 2007. ibid. p. 189
Saraiva, Clara. 2007. ibid. p. 189
