Chapter 8 - Candomblé as paradigm for translocal religion

Summary

Religion is for many people still a territorialized reality. This is reflected in dictionary definitions and stems from years of construction of religion by Western theologians, philosophers and historians. The Crusades ended with the drawing up of a strong line between Muslim and Christian lands. The sixteenth century reforms carved out Europe into Catholic and Protestant countries. Twentieth century Jews struggled to create and defend a Jewish land. Bastide's work focussed on one of the contemporary religions in which the urge to achieve hegemony over a territory is weak or absent. As he explored various facets of the life and history of Candomblé, he was led into numerous thematic and methodological revolutions. Bastide's work forces itself on the attention of scholars of religion for two reasons. He sketched a general picture of all Afro-American cults (in both Americas). He showed that what Candomblé exhibits is not more of the same kind of religion, because it is an instance of an alternative metaphysics, another way of carving out reality.

Fernando Giobellina Brumana wrote that the focus on Afro-Brasilian cults is a gift of French scholars. Bastide forced serious attention upon it and wrote what became the classical corpus. He clearly broke with the trend that studied Afro-Brazilians in order to exercise power over them (power intended to be beneficent to be sure, to bring them into the mainstream). Verger brought further depth to his study with his photographic art and with a reorienting of the geographic imagination and with documentation on the trans-Atlantic traffic.