Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé

by J. Lorand Matory

Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a "survival," or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world.


With counterparts in Nigeria, the Benin Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad, and the United States, Candomblé is a religion of spirit possession, dance, healing, and blood sacrifice. Most surprising to those who imagine Candomblé and other such religions as the products of anonymous folk memory is the fact that some of this religion's towering leaders and priests have been either well-traveled writers or merchants, whose stake in African-inspired religion was as much commercial as spiritual. Morever, they influenced Africa as much as Brazil. Thus, for centuries, Candomblé and its counterparts have stood at the crux of enormous transnational forces.


Vividly combining history and ethnography, Matory spotlights a so-called "folk" religion defined not by its closure or internal homogeneity but by the diversity of its connections to classes and places often far away. Black Atlantic Religion sets a new standard for the study of transnationalism in its subaltern and often ancient manifestations.

Genres: Religion, Anthropology, History, Nonfiction, Africa, Academic

392 pages, Paperback

First published July 5, 2005

About the author

Dr. J. Lorand Matory, Ph.D. (Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1991) is Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project and Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of African and African American Studies of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University. Previously, he was a tenured Full Professor at Harvard University until moving to Duke in 2009. He also served from 2009 to 2013 as the James P. Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont.

He has produced 37 years of intensive research on the great religions of the Black Atlantic, West-African Yoruba religion, West-Central African Kongo religion, Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santeria/Ocha and Haitian Vodou.

In 2003, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Alexander von Humboldt prize, a Lifetime Achievement Award and year-long residential fellowship, and U.S. President G.W. Bush appointed Professor Matory to the Presidential Advisory Committee on Cultural Property at the US Department of State, where he served until 2011. In 2010, he received the Distinguished Africanist Award from the American Anthropological Association.

Reviews

[Dan Gorman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great ideas, poor delivery. Matory studies candomblé in Brazil, as well as its parent religions in Benin and Nigeria, to understand the ways that blacks created religion in the transatlantic region. Matory argues that, although candomblé preserves some African religious traditions, syncretism, invention, and cultural exchange have shaped candomblé to a greater degree, so that candomblé is not simply a pure recreation of African folk religion. Indeed, Matory rejects the idea that any religion is pure and unchanging. To Matory, constant transformation and invention is the authentic nature of African, and all, religions. A bustling Brazilian city with candomblé temples, and not an isolated community (e.g., the Gullah), is the place to find "true" African culture, in Matory's eyes, because true African culture is change, not stasis out in the backwaters.

Matory has done a tone of research, shows the importance of women in the candomblé world, and has BIG ideas. Unfortunately, the book is written in an extremely dense manner, so that it is basically a reference book. It is tiring to read. Chapter Six, describing Matory's personal candomblé practice and religious beliefs, also feels unnecessary; it is a memoir, and distracts from the academic argument.

I really hoped this book would be a better read than it turned out to be.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I was studying African religion, this book was still an interesting read on the development of religion in Black communities.

[Garret Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful book that challenges previous notions about Candomblé. Good stuff!