Interweaving three centuries of transatlantic religious and social history with historical and present-day ethnography, Luis Nicolau Pares traces the formation of Candomble, one of the most influential African-derived religious forms in the African diaspora, with practitioners today centered in Brazil but also living in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas. Originally published in Brazil and not available in English, The Formation of Candomble reveals cultural changes that have occurred in religious practices within Africa, as well as those caused by the displacement of enslaved Africans in the Americas. Departing from the common assumption that Candomble originated in the Yoruba orixa (orisha) worship, Pares highlights the critical role of the vodun religious practices in its formation process. Vodun traditions were brought by enslaved Africans of Dahomean origin, known as the "Jeje" nation in Brazil since the early eighteenth century. The book concludes with Pares's account of present-day Jeje temples in Bahia, which serves as the first written record of the oral traditions and ritual of this particular nation of Candomble.

Formation of Candomble: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil"

Nago Grandma and White Papa is a signal work in Brazilian anthropology and African diaspora studies originally published in Brazil in 1988. This edition makes Beatriz Gois Dantas's historioethnographic study available to an English-speaking audienc

Winner, Hubert Herring Book Award, Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies Candomblé, an African religious and healing tradition that spread to Brazil during the slave trade, relies heavily on the use of plants in its spiritual and medicinal practices. When its African adherents were forcibly transplanted to the New World, they faced the challenge not only of maintaining their culture and beliefs in the face of European domination but also of finding plants with similar properties to the ones they had used in Africa. This book traces the origin, diffusion, medicinal use, and meaning of Candomblé's healing pharmacopoeia—the sacred leaves. Robert Voeks examines such topics as the biogeography of Africa and Brazil, the transference—and transformation—of Candomblé as its adherents encountered both native South American belief systems and European Christianity, and the African system of medicinal plant classification that allowed Candomblé to survive and even thrive in the New World. This research casts new light on topics ranging from the creation of African American cultures to tropical rain forest healing floras.

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.

• Explains how Kimbanda’s presiding deity Eshu embodies both masculine and feminine principles, both god and devil, and thus represents human nature itself with all its vices and virtues • Discusses Kimbanda’s magical practices, initiation rites, sacred knives, and sacrificial offerings • Details the seven realms and the entities that inhabit and govern each of them Although it has been demonized as a form of Satanic cult, Kimbanda--the tradition of Afro-Brazilian black magic--is a spiritual practice that embraces both the light and dark aspects of life through worship of the entities known as Eshu and Pombajira. Exploring the history and practice of Kimbanda, also known as Quimbanda, Diego de Oxóssi builds a timeline from the emergence of Afro-Brazilian religions in the 17th century when African slaves were first brought to Brazil, through the development of Orisha cults and the formation of Candomblé, Batuque, Macumba, and Umbanda religious practices, to the modern codification of Kimbanda by Mãe Ieda do Ogum in the 1960s. He explains how Kimbanda’s presiding deity Eshu Mayoral embodies both masculine and feminine principles, both god and devil, and thus represents human nature itself with all its vices and virtues. Discussing the magical practices, initiation rites, and spiritual landscape of Kimbanda, the author explains how there are seven realms, each with nine dominions, and he discusses the entities that inhabit and govern each of them. The author explores spirit possession and Kimbanda’s sacrificial practices, which are performed in order to honor and obtain the blessing of the entities of the seven realms. He discusses the sacred knives of the practice and the role each plays in it. He also explores the 16 zimba symbols and sigils used to attract the spirits most apt to realizing the magician’s will as well as traditional enchantment songs to summon and work with those spirits. Offering an accessible guide to Kimbanda, the author shows that this religion of the people is popular because it recognizes the dark and light sides of human morality and provides a way to interact with the deities to produce direct results. DIEGO DE OXÓSSI is a Chief of Kimbanda and Orishas Priest. For more than 20 years he has been researching and presenting courses, lectures, and workshops on pagan and African-Brazilian religions. He writes a weekly column at CoreSpirit.com and is the publisher at Arole Cultural. He lives in São Paulo, Brazil.

Husserl and Spatiality is an exploration of the phenomenology of space and embodiment, based on the work of Edmund Husserl. Little known in architecture, Husserl’s phenomenology of embodied spatiality established the foundations for the works of later phenomenologists, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s well-known phenomenology of perception. Through a detailed study of his posthumously published and unpublished manuscripts on space, DuFour examines the depth and scope of Husserl’s phenomenology of space. The book investigates his analyses of corporeity and the “lived body,” extending to questions of intersubjective, intergenerational, and geo-historical spatial experience, what DuFour terms the “environmentality” of space. Combining in-depth architectural philosophical investigations of spatiality with a rich and intimate ethnography, Husserl and Spatiality speaks to themes in social and cultural anthropology, from a theoretical perspective that addresses spatial practice and experience. Drawing on fieldwork in Brazil, DuFour develops his analyses of Husserl’s phenomenology through spatial accounts of ritual in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé. The result is a methodological innovation and unique mode of spatial description that DuFour terms a “phenomenological ethnography of space.” The book’s profoundly interdisciplinary approach makes an incisive contribution relevant to academics and students of architecture and architectural theory, anthropology and material culture, and philosophy and environmental aesthetics.