Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in Bahia, Brazil

Selka, Stephen

doi:10.5744/florida/9780813031712.001.0001

Cited by 53 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Almost everybody who attended the Mass would be considered Black or would openly self-identify as such. The mass, described in detail by Burdick (1998a) and also by Selka (2007), is one in which many of the movements, expressions, and vocalizations bear a striking similarity to those found in the terreiro. But, Maria insists, they are being done primarily for God, for Jesus, and for the Virgin, not for Yoruba deities.…”

Section: Mariamentioning

confidence: 95%

Food and spirits: religion, gender, and identity in the ‘African’ cuisine of Northeast Brazil

Dawson

2012

African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal

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Acarajé is an Afro-Brazilian culinary specialty sold throughout the city of Salvador. Because of its African origins, acarajé is typically used as a sacred food in the meetinghouses or terreiros of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions such as Candomblé. The image of the acarajé seller Á dressed in a flowing white dress elaborated with lace and beads Á selling this so-called 'food of the gods' has become one of the most iconic images of Salvador, the capital of Bahia. It is often used to depict the city as rustic, quaint, and Á most importantly Á Black. However, evangelical churches decry the consumption of acarajé and its use in the terreiro as devil worship and have introduced so-called bolinhos de Jesus or Jesus's acarajé as a Christian alternative. This article explores how questions about Blackness and the African past, competitive religious identity, gender, and ethnicity all converge and intersect within the symbol of the Baiana and the food she sells.

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Section: Mariamentioning

confidence: 95%

Food and spirits: religion, gender, and identity in the ‘African’ cuisine of Northeast Brazil

Dawson

2012

African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal

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“…One of the stated goals of outlined in a CAAPA pamphlet from 2001 is: "To identify the cultural elements and the proper expressions of African culture in order to develop a liturgical proposal according to the directions of the document Sacrossantum Concillium no 37." This meant reaching out to those who have a "double religious belonging"those who identity as Catholic and practice Candombléand integrating the Afro-Brazilian "cosmovision" with Catholicism (Selka, 2007).…”

Section: The Contemporary and Ethnographic Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Afro‐Catholicism in Latin America

Selka

2019

Religion Compass

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This article provides a historical and ethnographic overview of Afro-Catholicism in Latin America. For the purposes of this article, "Afro-Catholicism" encompasses the wide variety of ways that people of African descent have practiced or engaged with Catholicism. Much of the article focuses on Brazil, but it also draws on the literature on Afro-Catholicism in Haiti and Cuba both to highlight similarities and differences throughout Latin America and to foreground the necessarily transnational scope of this topic.

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“…The restoration of Salvador's Pelourinho neighborhood, Brazil's most extensive collection of Iberian baroque architecture, its first capital, and the former administrative center of the Portuguese south Atlantic, provides a window onto a state and its citizens’ negotiation of the shifting meanings of race in a nation whose history has been posed repeatedly as thinkable only through mixture. Or, put somewhat differently, as the most expressive sign of colonial origins and African legacies in Brazil, the Pelourinho is a linchpin for imagining, and deploying, race in a nation in which academics and citizens find themselves divided between those who defend a vision of redemptive and quintessentially Brazilian racial mixture (Fry 2007; Lessa 2007; Maggie 2005) and those who understand this formation as basic to an enduring racism, albeit one that at times is difficult to disaggregate from other forms of discrimination (Burdick 1998; Caldwell 2007; Goldstein 2003; Gonçalves da Silva 2008; Hanchard 1994; Perry 2004; Selka 2007; Twine 1997).…”

Section: “The Cradle Of Brazil”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Melted gold and national bodies: The hermeneutics of depth and the value of history in Brazilian racial politics

Collins¹

2011

American Ethnologist

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Anthropologists have long puzzled over a supposed lack of explicitly racial identification among Brazilians who face racial discrimination. Yet a clear uptick in Afro‐Brazilian identification and contestation of racism is observable in Brazil today. In this article, I examine the transformation of Salvador, Brazil's Pelourinho neighborhood into a heritage center, a process that includes the commodification of residents’ lifeways, so as to link semiotic relationships encouraged by the patrimonializing of buildings, people, and their habits to alterations in racial politics. This case suggests that racial consciousness ties into popular concerns with secrets, depths, and hidden relations encouraged by heritage‐based reifications of everyday habits as potentially alienable forms of property.

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Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in Bahia, Brazil

Cited by 53 publications

References 4 publications

Food and spirits: religion, gender, and identity in the ‘African’ cuisine of Northeast Brazil

Food and spirits: religion, gender, and identity in the ‘African’ cuisine of Northeast Brazil

Afro‐Catholicism in Latin America

Melted gold and national bodies: The hermeneutics of depth and the value of history in Brazilian racial politics

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