Craig Foster
HIST 3001
Prof. José Neves
3 Jun 2009

A 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

La Regla De Ocha and Gendered Medicine

Although it is difficult enough to negotiate the intersections of religion, biomedicine, and gender on a nationalized scale to provide policies and advocate for reforms that can accommodate the inherent inequalities in the provider-patient relationship, one must also be careful to help advocate for those people who do not have the same access to biomedical care as might be presumed in activism at the center of society such as simply advocating for the right to birth control services. To make biomedicine a privileged etiology in its construction of treatment and prevention of disease or illness, and then extend that conceit as something that is accepted by the patient, threatens a marginalization of people and social groups with different approaches to overcoming the state of being unwell. To further assume that the ways that the inevitable negotiation of alternative, religious and gendered etiologies on the part of the medical practitioner will be accepted by the patient aggravates the situation.

One case of how certain influential discourses, that of the disciplinary police force of the United States and the sensationalist daily media, belittle and seek to limit the negotiation of etiologies by patients who wish to empower themselves in an epistemology that extends beyond the cause of illness to a religious worldview itself, comes from the practice of La Regla de Ocha, or Santería. An Afro-Cuban religion that has made its way stateside through Cuban immigration into the United States but extends beyond Cuban immigrant populations, La Regla de Ocha has a hybrid identity as being Afro-Cuban and Roman Catholic. This originally led anthropologists to describe the religion as a syncretic combination of the religion of the Yoruba people of Western Africa who were forcibly taken to Cuba as slaves and the Roman Catholicism of the colonizers, associating the religion with what they deemed to be other Afro-American “syncretizations” like Vodou.

Yet the term “syncretism” to describe the formation of the religion was misleading despite its continued usage. Forced by the Cuban colonizers to participate in cabildos or social groups created to enforce Roman Catholicism, the slaves negotiated their religious beliefs with Catholic symbolism by adopting some of the signs of Roman Catholicism—the images of Saints—as masking representations of their religion’s orisás, or deities. By adapting to the social situation and “signifying on” Roman Catholicism, the slaves undermined the symbology of the dominant culture by using its symbols for religious and ritualistic purposes unintended in the dominant culture.

Signifying (or signifyin’) is a term used by African-American studies researchers to explain slaves’ and black Americans’ slang use of English phrases, words, or phonemes to create new meanings outside of normative language. It has been proposed by some researchers as an alternative way to understand the use of Roman Catholic symbology by followers of La Regla de Ocha that is apart from the idea of syncretism. The idea of signifying better stresses that the intentions were to keep the concerns and practices of the Yoruba religion as the basis for La Regla de Ocha, and that in signifying on Roman Catholicism, its practitioners maintained their religion as a challenge to Catholic beliefs, not as a hegemonic acceptance and fusion of those beliefs into the religion.
Both the beliefs and the organization of La Regla de Ocha exist as a challenge to colonial Cuban culture and, moving across the border into the United States, certain hegemonic principles of the country into which the religion is displaced. The most obvious norms from which the religion deviates are that of Roman Catholicism or in general, Christianity, but there is also a challenge on the level of the language of the religion itself and its gender formations. La Regla de Ocha has no central organization, instead functioning as diffuse groups of devotees, santer(os/as) or priests, and babalaos or high priests. While gender- restrictive in only males can serve as babalaos, in La Regla de Ocha women and other-gendered individuals can serve as santeros, and their presence within this organizational structure helps maintain the religion as accessible to people who might be alienated by the construction of gender in other religious frames.

The idea of gender itself is more complex in Cuba than even male/female, straight/gay dichotomies can account for, and these terms often placed upon individuals by anthropological researchers from the north. Furthermore, La Regla de Ocha suggests a fluidity to gender constructions, since some masculine orisás became associated with female saints (and vice versa), and more importantly practitioners who take on orisás in possession trance rituals can cross masculine/feminine dichotomies such that female practitioners can take on masculine orisás (and vice versa). While this admittedly upholds a border between binaries of male and female that is passed through in such instances, the acceptance of such a passing by practitioners speaks to a less rigid gender construction and is more accommodating to queer identities. It is also difficult to know exactly the extent of gender fluidity in the religion from an outsider perspective—as will be discussed in more detail later, some of the strength of La Regla de Ocha comes from its inaccessibility by a larger colonial discourse—and researchers have had to remind each other in the past of their own heteronormative, North American assumptions when speaking of gender constructions within La Regla de Ocha.

In addition to the challenges that La Regla de Ocha presents to gender formations, the rituals performed by practitioners of La Regla de Ocha often serve to provide a different empirical methodology set apart from biomedicine. This alternative etiology can provide the meaning to illness or the state of being unwell for Cuban citizens without access to biomedical services and/or pharmaceutical care. While empirical in the sense that the religion tries to make sense of observed symptoms of illness, the methodology for which the religion produces etiological meaning and proscribes cure and preventative measure relies on some constructions of the self and produces meaning in ways that often put it at odds with biomedical thought.

In Cuba, La Regla de Ocha, the ontology of a self as a human experiencing life is constructed not simply on the individual level of a body but as a less obvious self encompassing a quotidian or non-ritualistic self that extends somewhat into ones social environment and never stands apart from social processes, as well as a divine self during possession rituals, another social self encompassing the practitioner and their interaction with the orisás. This dual selfhood stands in contrast to western medical thought as not a pathological condition but as a normative and sought- after ontology or state of being within La Regla de Ocha. As a consequence of the dual social selfhood, La Regla de Ocha often proscribes healing, curing and preventative measures that must account for a healing of social interactions between one individual and other human individuals as well as the human individual and the orisás.

In Cuba, anthropological research suggests that La Regla de Ocha exists in a more balanced equilibrium between the many fields that its practitioners negotiate, religious, gendered, and etiological. It is not uncommon for an initiate into La Regla de Ocha who has themselves recognized a symptom of illness or being unwell to seek out explanations and etiologies from various sources such as a santero, the Roman Catholic Church, and a biomedical doctor. While individuals may privilege one form of meaning over another, it is difficult to reduce and generalize as to which explanation will be most valued by those who seek out these multiple sources.

Instead of simply undermining and challenging the authority of each other in their various use of symbols and construction of the self or reasons for illness, La Regla de Ocha, Roman Catholicism, and biomedicine provide material for the individual to synthesize and thus create meaning from hybridizations of their prescriptive outcomes. This can be especially empowering for people when economic factors restrict access to biomedical services. When one cannot afford biomedical procedures or cures, such as the purchase of medication from pharmacies, La Regla de Ocha’s ritualistic practices and divination procedures often increase in importance in a practitioner’s etiological perspective.

At face value, even a cursory examination of how La Regla de Ocha functions in Cuba seems to frame it as a powerful religious and social practice that empowered disenfranchised slaves or has even worked its way into a normative religion accessible to much of Cuba’s population. A serious problem exists, however, in the way many people outside of Cuba, and specifically the United States, receive and construct information about the religion. The religion gained power and preserved itself partially through a skillful maintenance of its inaccessibility to colonial and Roman Catholic discourses. Thus there is a great danger that when one speaks or writes about members of the religion and its practices from an outsider perspective that one will produce meaning that maintains the large divide that the religion sought to preserve between an illusory understanding of the religion and its healing practices ontologically, or as they exist, versus a colonial understanding of the religion within a particular epistemology, or as an outsider method of knowing the religion tells itself what the religion is.

In the United States particularly, certain disciplinary and regulatory forces purposely enlarge this divide, and in the process discursively recolonize practitioners of La Regla de Ocha. Part of this comes from a normative construction of self from the police force. As part of a pragmatic approach to protection of citizens, the police force seeks incarceration as a cure to civil unwell by removing individual bodies from society. Thus, the police force seeks to regulate against and prohibit the function of a religion or religious practices that exist in opposition to a self as a recognizable and discrete unit definable outside of social interaction. Special cult task forces within police departments seek out and produce information about new and non-normative religious practices that places them in alterity from the legitimate citizens whom the police seek to protect, authorizing police action to disrupt the religious practices.

Often this is targeted at “saving” people within these religious practices who are seen as especially prone to exploitation because they cannot construct and maintain themselves as agents apart from or within cultural practices—usually women and children. Instead of truly advocating for these people, however, police action and discourse often reinforces normative constructions which many feminist, queer, Marxist, or any other oppositional thinkers and advocates are compelled to dexterously disrupt. They often rely on the idea of a charismatic leader, on whom the rest of the cult wholly depends, thus limiting their ability to perceive the political action members take within the group.

Furthermore, because the idea of a charismatic leader often searches for a man to focus on as the head of the cult, police reduce their ability to protect subjects within the group to efforts to simply subjects on the other side of a heteronormative binary. Even to those who do not identify with these oppositional groups, for instance the police force itself, such uncritical action undermines the intentions to help those that they intend to serve and instead functions to create and preserve a discipline that maintains the position of these groups as low and illegitimate.

Often the police force works in tandem with popular media in a sensationalization of individuals within alternative religious practices such as La Regla de Ocha, or Santería as reports on the religion in the United States typically name the practices. To sensationalize the religion serves an easy way to create news without discussing the complexities of social interaction in our cities, and it adds to enforcement and discipline    of    national    normative constructions of social interaction and meanings. This reinforces the legitimacy of discourses such as biomedicine, and can make it thus much more difficult for practitioners of Santería to negotiate etiologies between intersecting systems of meaning in their lives.

Thus, it is important for one to challenge any sensationalized stories about “Santería,” and other religious practices outside of those accepted by media sources, such as news articles that exoticize a practitioner’s use of animal sacrifice in ritual practice, in an effort to force a renegotiation of how we understand these religions and to build dialogues between communities to help preserve agency and the ability to negotiate between religion, gender, and biomedical practice. The word “cult,” which is often applied to practice of La Regla de Ocha in the United States, should be fought against as a useful short-hand for understanding religious practices, or work should be done to remove some of the stigma and generalizations that its use provokes.

This is true even when the results of religious practice seem horrific, as in the case of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana an event which sparked much of the interest in and usage of the term “cult.” For while it can be agreed that the deaths that arose in part as a consequence of attempts made by a religious group to organize, outsider understanding and subsequent action against those who support these practices can often be just as damning to the desire to “help” them. It allows outsiders to operate under the pretense of magnanimity without sharing in the responsibility for the results of actions taken against or on behalf of these groups.

[...]

[Bibliography and Suggested Reading about] La Regla De Ocha
Arguelles, Lourdes, and B. Ruby Rich. “Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward and Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience. Part I.” Signs 9(1984): 683-699.
Birn, Anne-Emmanuelle. “Healers, Healing and Child Well-Being: Ideologies, Institutions and Health in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Latin American Research Review 40(2005): 176-192.
Cardoza-Orlandi, Carlos F. “Vodou, Spiritism, and Santería: Hybridity and Identity in Caribbean Religions.”Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America. Indiana University Press, 2006.
Lancaster, Roger N. “Comment on Arguelles and Rich’s ‘Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward and Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience. Part II.” Signs 12(1986): 188-192.
Lefever, Harry G. “When the Saints Go Riding in: Santería in Cuba and the United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35(1996): 318-330.
Maaga, Mary McCormick. Hearing the voices of Jonestown. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998. (not on La Regla de Ocha, but an interesting look into the gendered political dynamics of the People’s Temple)
Olesesn, Virginia. “Confluences in Social Change: Cuban Women and Health Care.” Journal of interamerican Studies and World Affairs 17(1975): 398-410.
Pérez Y Mena, Andrés I. “Cuban Santería, Haitian Vodun, Puerto Rican Spiritualism: A Multiculturalist Inquiry into Syncretism.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1998): 15-27.
Somerville, Erica. Santeria. <http://science.gcc.edu/reli/kemeny/> (Recommended for those interested in further inquiry into the subject; an exhaustive bibliography, extending beyond our own research, prepared for her course at Grove City College, PA).
Wedel, Johan. Santería Healing: A Journey into the Afro-Cuban World of Divinities, Spirits, and Sorcery. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Wirtz, Kristina. “How diasporic religious communities remember: Learning to speak the “tongue of the oricha” in Cuban Santería.” American Ethnologist 34(2007): 108-126.
Wirtz, Kristina. Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería. Florida: University Press of Florida, 2007.
Young, Serenity. Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion. Macmillan Library Reference, 1999.

[to fosterthemovie@gmail.com] Is this you Sara [my cousin, once removed]? Kinda tacky and tasteless. Plus maybe dad conflated the two as well, but Voodoo and Santeria are two different religions. So unless you can show me clear documentation that Mark practiced some sort of personal hybrid between the two, I think it’s best to desist in calling it a voodoo cult. Or maybe this “movie” will contain a discussion of a quick history of religious practices in the Americas that emphasized a African roots. With voodoo and santeria, the former is Hatian in origin, and the latter is Cuban. But rhetorically, both religions speak to African roots using come Christian symbology while actually forging new religious beliefs for their followers. Part of the organizational strucutre emphasizes secrecy, as the religions also have their roots in slave groups that were being forced Christianity coopted some of the religous space provided to them by their owners to practice a religion more their own, gathering strength from at least rhetorical stress on the African historicity. I have done some academic research on both Santeria and Candomblé, and the emphasis on Africa seems to have been synthesized in the ninteenth century by a cetain middle class of multilingual, bicontinental (Africa and America) blacks who sought political strength from the unification of West African history at the expense of the nuance of more localized political structure and the unification of the history of slaves and blacks in the Americas. Then came white neocolnial anthropologists who marvelled at the “syncretization” of Christian and African religious beliefs, also at the expense of nuanced and self-critical looks at what knowledge of the religions were being produced. The early anthropological research, while very flawed, did increase interest however and alot of work has gone into correcting some of their mistakes in their approach.

Sadly, the work people have done to make a space for these religious practices in a pluricultural world can easily be degraded by organizations working against the space for non-majority religious beliefs and practices. Police organizations love to conflate Voodoo and Santeria in overblown scare tactics that end up being racist and anti-immigrant, and the news likes to coopt this shorthand in telling sensational stories of ritual killings and etc. A man died, and lest that we feel so personally injured by him that we need to lash out and degrade his religious beliefs or whatever lead him to the point where he decided death was his best option, I don’t feel comfortable sensationalizing those beliefs against him. It comes across as immature at best and ends up reinforcing Christian hegemonic principles and derading the right to personal religious beliefs and practices.

Craig

Foram muito delicioso.

1. Bus Stop    The Hollies

From what I know from our road trip, this is one of Carlye’s favorites. It starts off the mix this time because it captures the moment of meeting somebody, at a bus stop, and the best circumlocutory-but-fits-rhyme-scheme way of saying that he plans to marry her one day.

2. Then He Kissed Me   The Crystals

A song by my favorite 60s girl-group that perfectly captures the magic of a first kiss.

3. A Minha Menina    Os Mutantes

Esta canção dos mutantes marca o primeiro tempo que o protagonista homem sente-se comfortável chamando-se a menina “minha.” O céu é o límite, “pois ela é o meu amor.”

4. Don’t Worry Baby    The Beach Boys

A song ostensibly about the comfort of having somebody love you, but actually an extended euphemism for the embarrassment of premature ejaculation. Either way, this is about the time in the relationship that this comes up.

5. Linus & Lucy    Vince Guaraldi Trio

An interlude. Life is good in the relationship, not much adversity but the initial reason to sing has lost some of its lustre.

6. Baby    Gal Costa

Talvez seja uma canção de o crescimento das crianças, mas talvez seja  sobre o desenvolvimento das expectativas que um namorado começaría de ter para o outro neste lugar do relaçionamento, lhe dizendo “você precisa de isto … você precisa de isso também e etc.”

7. Debora    Tyrannosaurus Rex

One of the lovers throws back childish insults ála “you look like a zebra.”

8. Laisse Tomber les Filles    Gall, France

9. You’re Gonna Miss Me    13th Floor Elevators

10. Never My Love    The Association

Three song arch where our lovers go between declarations that they will forget each other, but that the other won’t be able to forget them, They briefly get back together and declare that their love will last forever again, yet their sentiments are tinged with the very real possibility that there will come a time when they grow tired of each other.

11. Some Velvet Morning    Hazlewood, Lee & Nancy Sinatra

12. Bonnie and Clyde    Gainsbourg, Serge & Brigitte Bardot

Two song arch with two of the most bad ass male-female duets from the 60s. In the first, we learn that drug use may be taking its toll on the relationship. In the second, we wonder if they stay in their crime-fueled relationship that they won’t end up dead.

13. The First Cut is the Deepest    Arnold, P.P.

Still the best single ever recorded, even if Cheryl Crow did her best to ruin the song. The trebled dissonance of the sparse percussive background perfectly compliments P.P.’s cathartic invocation of finding yourself suddenly out of a relationship.

14. Surf’s Up (Solo Piano Version)    Wilson, Brian

Yet as we know people on the rebound can push the limits of being bearable to others. Like this song by Brian Wilson, that makes you want to empathize and help someone out but makes you not necessarily look forward to the prospect of being in that position or listening to the song for long.

15. Walk on  By    Warwick, Dionne

Dionne sings softly but packs a mean punch with this song about keeping it cool and telling an ex off even while some saudade remains.

16. Moulty    Barbarians, The

One of the lovers puts on their headphones and finds redemption in the power of music to take us higher.

I just figured out why Lobo Antunes chose the title “What Will I do when Everything Burns?” but I still haven’t figured out any significance beyond the superficial one that I have scratched.  I didn’t read much of the book in the past few days because I was looking up the definitions of words that I didn’t understand. What I understood however is many of the words that I had found were names of trees, flowers or things related  to these. Initially, I thought that I had to look up the definitions of these words because they were proper names of trees like cedar (cedro, exemplo mau a partir porque posso ter dado um palpite), boxwoods or european boxes (buxos), a medicinal plant of Brazil (macela), etc. (I would think that in portuguese as it is a latin language one wouldn’t need to say or write both “and” and “etc” and would write only “etc” in order to avoid redundancy but I have repeatedly seen this written as such). Now, I think that the trees and other plants are there with reason and I’m going to think more about this, trying to discern the relation between them and old age, fatherhood and gender in the book.

Uma Horta, A Huerta (English took the Spanish name)

Vela: From the dictionary that I use online, it appears to mean: a sail, an arm of a windmill, the wax of a candle, insomnia, an anal suppository, and a spark plug.

Uma vela

Quatro velas

Uma vela com uma anão

A vela duma mulher

Uma vela anal

Vela da ignição

The arm of a windmill follows from the sail, the spark plug from the candle (and the candle from the sail, since it’s focusing on the thing that is wrapped around the wick), and insomnia makes sense if you read that it also means the nightwatchman (although I can’t piece together the etymology of why staying up at night is related to a cover or a veil), but anal suppository?