From crime to art. Contradictions in the cultural transformation of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé

Abstract

The Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé radically changed in the twentieth century. From being persecuted as crime and sorcery, it has become identified as culture. Its objects and images have become works of art. This article presents this process of ‘culturalization’ through objects and images. This transformation, however, resulted in some contradictions, that left some of these objects in ambiguous positions. This case study aims to contribute to current debates on the agency of objects and images in material religion.

At the time of the abolition of slavery in Brazil, in the late nineteenth century, the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé was persecuted by the police as a form of sorcery and crime. The instruments of Candomblé’s religious practice were confiscated by the police as ‘Weapons of crime’ (Harding, 2000; Maggie, 1992; Sansi, 2007). Since then, the position of Candomblé in Brazil has changed substantially. By the end of the twentieth century, Candomblé was recognised by public institutions not only as a religion but also as Afro-Brazilian culture. Its temples and some of its leaders are declared national cultural patrimony (Sansi, 2007, 2016).

Most of the literature on Afro-Brazilian religions has described this historical process as a dialectics of resistance and recognition, showing how Candomblé has finally been recognised as culture after a long period of repression (Bastide, 1978; Harding, 2000; Santos, 1995; Smith Omari-Tunkara, 2005). On the other hand, a critical literature has questioned Afro-Brazilian culture as an ‘invented tradition’, constructed by the intellectual and political elites of Brazil as one of the key elements of national identity. Dantas (2009 [1988]) and Capone (2010 [1999]) in particular have discussed how values of ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’ have become central in Afro-Brazilian religions, due to the valorisation of ‘authentic’ African practices as opposed to syncretistic ones, which mixed Catholicism with African religions.

More recent approaches have proposed to investigate this historical process beyond narratives of resistance and the invention of tradition, to describe an affirmative historical process that has resulted in a new institution, that is neither just a resistant culture nor an invented, ‘made-up’ tradition. Different authors have described this process in different terms: the formation of a transatlantic nation (Matory, 2005), ‘theologization’ (Johnson, 2002), or ‘authentication’ (Van de Port, 2011). In my work (Sansi, 2007, 2016), I have defined this historical process in terms of ‘culturalization’ ¹ . I use the term ‘Culture’ here not in the broad, all-encompassing sense of anthropological culture but in the narrow institutional sense: Culture with a capital C, as ‘High Culture’, the humanities, the arts, museums, and institutions administered by Departments of Culture. Afro-Brazilian Culture would not be just ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense of all the traditions, ideas and practices that have come from Africa to Brazil but, more specifically, what has institutionally been recognised as such. ‘Culture’ is, I would argue, a rather modern and Western way of objectifying social practices and objects. In this sense, Afro-Brazilian Culture is not a given, something that existed as long as Africans were taken to Brazil, but on the contrary it is the result of a modern process of culturalization that has taken place in the last century. This process runs parallel to the diffusion of cultural policies and institutions in Brazil in the twentieth century, that has allowed for the formation of museums, research institutions and cultural heritage sites that have, for the most part, been favourable to the formation of Afro-Brazilian culture (Ickes, 2013; Sansi, 2007; Santos, 2005; Williams, 2001). But this process of culturalization is not just an external imposition, a superficial narrative, an ‘invented tradition’. The very leaders of Candomblé have come to see their own practice as ‘Culture’, and have become intellectuals and artists. Candomblé houses have been declared cultural heritage (Sansi, 2016), and they have opened museums within their premises.

This transformation has also generated some paradoxes and contradictions. In this article, I will address some of the limits of this process of ‘culturalization’ in particular through objects and images. ‘Culture’, as a modern institution, may imply certain forms of relating to things and images that may not easily correspond to Candomblé. In this article, I will give some examples of these paradoxes: Candomblé objects that have trouble becoming recognised as objects of culture, because of their inchoate power, and religious images that have been withdrawn from temples because they no longer correspond to the cultural self-representation of Candomblé. In these cases, the value and power of these objects and images is under dispute; it is unclear if they are objects to be religiously worshipped or just culturally valued; it is contentious if they are just representations or have actual power and agency (Gell, 1998). Looking at objects and images, I argue, we can have an interesting outlook at the contradictions in the transformation of Candomblé in the last century. Looking at the trajectories of objects and images, at their ‘social lives’ (Appadurai, 1986) we can see at this process from a particular angle, beyond the discourse of the social actors involved, which has been the focus of most of the literature, so far.

This article clearly places itself within the growing field of ‘material religion’. In more traditional iconographic approaches, religious objects and images have been seen as illustrations or representations of religious discourse, as material or visual texts. But in the last decades a growing literature on the ‘power’, ‘agency’ and ‘presence’ of objects and images has started to build up in reaction to ‘textualism’ (Belting, 2005; Gell, 1998; Keane, 2008; Latour and Weibel, 2002). These authors have addressed situations when images and objects are not only seen as fixations of collective representations, or symbols, but as social agents that actively participate in social exchanges. Alfred Gell, in particular, questioned the approach to objects, religious images and works of art as ‘symbols’, texts or representations of ideas, and proposed to look at them as indexes of agency, traces of a distributed agent that may appear as directly present in the thing or image (Gell, 1998). But perhaps rather than a radical opposition, what is interesting about objects and images is that often they are in an ambiguous situation between symbol and index, text and agent. The doubt that can be cast upon them, the fact that they can be agents, but perhaps not quite, just the presence of an absence (Belting, 2005), maybe just a trace or a document, is what gives dynamism and ‘power’ to objects and images. In Mitchell’s (2005) terms, the question we often implicitly ask is what do objects or images ‘want’, in the sense of what they are ‘wanting’ or lacking to become full agents. This ambiguity may recursively help us rethink the assumptions behind what constitutes agency, the ‘semiotic ideologies’ (Keane, 2008) or ‘ontologies’ (Henare et al., 2007) at play in the case in study.

These issues are present in the contradictory discourses on and uses of objects and images in and around Candomblé as Culture. Some objects, in the religious practice of Candomblé, are recognised as active agents, having a life of their own. On the other hand, in Candomblé, figurative images of the Orixás or gods are rather marginal, or at least do not take part in the religious practice, because the Orixás don’t have to be represented, they are directly present in the objects and bodies of the initiates. There are iconic representations in Candomblé houses, as we will see, but they are not objects of worship. In general terms, the objects of cult are not publicly displayed, but kept hidden, precisely because they are not representations, but the very presence of the sacred. In these terms, the relation to objects and images in Candomblé may contradict Culture as an institution. In modern Cultural institutions, at least in principle, objects of culture are seen as representations to be displayed in public, for example, in museums, as works of art and objects of heritage (Pomian, 1990). They are not deemed to have a power, to have a life, to be agents, but they have value as representations or texts. The transition, then, from religious presence to cultural value can be quite problematic, as we will show through some examples in the next few pages. But then one could raise the question, if Candomblé and Culture are so different, what brings them together? I will try to answer this question first, in the next section, where I introduce Candomblé in more detail.

People and things in Candomblé

Candomblé is the worship of the Orixás, spirits or gods of African origin. ² In Candomblé cosmology, everybody and everything corresponds to an Orixá. But in Candomblé practice, not everybody is called to be initiated. Traditionally, many initiates in Candomblé affirm that they didn’t join of their own free will but because the Orixá obliged them to pay them duty ( obrigação ). This call of duty may arrive as a dream, a pain or a symptom that has to be interpreted by a priest of Candomblé. Orixás can cause physical, mental and social afflictions if the people they want do not fulfil their duties.

The Orixás may ask for a simple offering or for a full initiation, surrendering one’s body to spirit possession. Those who receive this call need to be taken care of by a priest, who will teach them how to relate to their Orixá. This may involve a very long and complex process in which the initiate will be confined in the temple, and the relationship between the initiate and the Orixá will be ritually fixed. The outcome of the initiation process is twofold: on the one hand, the person will learn to deal with the phenomenon of spirit possession. The Orixá will periodically possess their body in the rituals of the Candomblé house. On the other hand, the Orixá will also be present in a shrine: each initiate will add a personal shrine to the general shrine of each Orixá in the Candomblé house.

The shrines of Candomblé are called assentamentos. Assentamento means ‘sitting’, and it makes reference to the act of ‘setting down’, fixing the Orixá in a thing, transforming an event into an object. The general structure of the assentamento consists of a dais full of pots and other containers. The pots are wrapped with cloth and concealed. These pots contain the fundamentos, the foundations that embody the saints of the initiates. The fundamentos can be different things, but stones (otã) are one of the more common elements. Each Orixá has a particular otã and fundamento. Otas have to be found, and teach stone is unique. And they are found because they want to: it is their will.

Once these stones have been found, they go through a ritual of consecration in which they are ‘seated’ in the pots. There they will be ritually washed and fed with offerings and sacrifices, prayed to, begged for help, always in an attitude of extreme respect and submission. Never to be looked at directly, they are hidden in dark rooms, covered with cloth. The assentamento is not the image but the house of the Orixá, a house that is ‘seated’, fixed, permanently and enduringly, ideally for the lifetime of the initiate. The assentamento is concealed and veiled, and its life is a latent mystery, a hidden breath; closed in a pot, wrapped in cloth and locked in a room that only the priestess can dare to open. The layers of invisibility of the assentamento are built precisely to enhance its force, multiplying the powers of its presence by making it only indirectly perceptible. In a way, a display that is too overt is avoided to allow a certain degree of intimacy and a secrecy that is indispensable for the continuity of its mysterious force, called axé. This force will explode, eventually, in the human body through possession.

Shrine offerings and sacrifices open the circulation of axé that will culminate in spirit possession. The living image of the Orixá is the body of the initiate, possessed, dancing, and dressed in the clothing of the Orixá. This image changes through time as the relationship between Orixá and initiate changes. The initiate progressively grows and deepens in knowledge, and the body becomes better adapted to the ritual of possession, which becomes less violent. At the same time, the person’s shrine becomes bigger, richer, filled with presents that serve as an objectification of this intense interaction. The initiates talk, pray, and sing to their shrines, and ask for help from their Orixá. Offerings and gifts are added continuously; periodically, the pots are washed and their contents changed. The ‘life’ of shrines is always renewed through interaction with the initiates. The constant ritual feeding establishes a highly determined and determinant relationship between shrine and initiate; the shrine becomes an extension of the practitioner.

The objects accumulated in the shrines are part of the Orixá. Ogun, orixá of war and iron, whose colour is blue, receives iron tools and blue robes. Despite the fact that we often find similar objects in different shrines, there is virtually no limit to what can be added. The association with the Orixá can be extended to many kinds of objects that the initiate finds suitable. Presents are difficult to locate, and those that are felt to be most appropriate are often found through coincidence or chance. These fortuitous encounters are described as necessary: moments of revelation that had to happen. The found object is an index of the Orixá, who left it there to be seized upon by the initiate. That means that anything can become part of a shrine, if the Orixá wants it. An Ogum shrine can accumulate pots, tools, car parts, or typewriters, if he wants it to.

It is important to understand the apparently random and disordered character of the objects in shrines. Assentamentos do not stand for specific qualities intended to form a logical ensemble, on the contrary, they are accumulations of things, assemblages that people have found and feel to fit naturally with the spirit that lives in the shrine.

The intimacy of the assentamento is only challenged in ritual offerings and sacrifices. The offering awakens the living force of the shrine, the axé, to ‘switch on’ the spiritual channels that bring the gods down to the bodies of the initiates, culminating in the dance of possession when the spirit takes hold of the devotee’s body in public festivals.

The Orixás are present, therefore, both in people and things, in the body of initiates and in shrines (Sansi, 2005). Permanently in the shrines, temporarily in bodies. Their presence is described in terms of force, or axé. Axé is particularly expressed in and through sacrifice, although it is not only through sacrifice that it comes to be. This force is present in different degrees in different people, places and things. Powerful priestesses and shrines which have gone through many initiations and sacrifices are said to have a lot of axé. Axé is given, not bought or sold. The Orixás give axé, and powerful priestesses give axé to their initiates. This is a gift-giving relationship that creates communion. But this communion is clearly hierarchical: the priestess is the ‘mother’, the initiate, the ‘daughter’; there are people with more and people with less axé, more or less power – it’s not exactly an egalitarian community.

So this gift-giving relationship is hierarchical, and it creates a community in the sense of a common being: the house of Candomblé, can also be called ‘The Axé’, since the house is the assemblage of all the instances of this axé in people and things. Thus, when an initiate becomes a priestess, an initiator, and she opens her own house of Candomblé, she has to take her shrine with her, to the new house that she will open. But still, it is said that the new house will be the same axé as the house of her mother; because they are, in fact, the same. But this is not a community in the sense of equality among individuals: it is a strictly hierarchical system.

Hence Candomblé is built as a practice of gift –giving, through which an ‘inalienable’ force, axé, is distributed in people, things and places. This can be described through Weiner’s (1992) argument on ‘inalienable possessions’. For Weiner, the production and re-production of communities is often not only guaranteed through persons but also through objects, which are consubstantial to the group. These objects are characterised precisely by being inalienable, by not being subject to exchange. At least in principle: because often reproduction requires a certain form of exchange, an exchange that is characterised as a gift, in which these inalienable things are not sold to strangers (as in commodity exchange) but to partners who, by the act of receiving an inalienable possession, become a part of the community. This is what Weiner described as ‘the paradox of keeping-while-giving’ (Weiner, 1992).

This dynamic, Weiner showed, exists in different societies in regard to different kinds of objects and different value systems. One of the value systems that could be illuminated by this idea of inalienable possessions is the Western system of cultural value or heritage (Myers, 2001). Cultural heritage consists of those places and objects produced in the course of history and that in some way embody history. These objects or places, because of this essential condition, cannot be sold, because doing that would be like selling the collective identity they stand for (the nation, humanity). Moreover, their value is above individual tastes or opinions. As historical relics, regardless of their function when they were created, their value lies not in their use but in their capacity to embody the community.

In this sense, so far, it seems that both Candomblé notions of axé and Western notions of Culture are based on inalienable possessions. But there are some meaningful differences. The main one is the value of secrecy. Axé is, by definition, a secret. Most people cannot have access to sacrifices or altars; only the initiated can do so, and even they cannot look at the shrines. The shrines are not objects or images to be contemplated or admired, but they are the Orixás themselves. It is therefore not that easy to translate Candomblé shrines into art objects, or objects of heritage. One of the main points of the modern notion of cultural or artistic heritage and art is that it has to be public, and accessible; it has to be visible (Pomian, 1990). The modern notion of culture is strictly linked to values of the public good and democracy. But that is not the case in Candomblé: only the higher-ranking individuals, the ones more familiar to the secret, can have access to certain objects. How to make the two compatible? I will address this question after explaining the actual historical process through which Candomblé has become Culture.

Candomblé as Afro-Brazilian culture

Formerly a marginal and persecuted cult, the social status of Candomblé radically changed over the course of the twentieth century, in particular from the 1930s onwards. Confronting the eugenics and racial determinism predominant at that time (Borges, 1995), the political and cultural foundations of Brazil were challenged in the 1930s, and a new image of the nation emerged. As the first state departments of culture were formed in the 1930s, the definition of Brazilian cultural heritage extended beyond architecture and the fine arts, to popular culture, folklore and African-American and indigenous cultures (Ickes, 2013; Williams, 2001). Artists and intellectuals like Gilberto Freyre and Jorge Amado looked at Candomblé with different eyes, as a culture worth praising and studying. The first Afro-Brazilian Congresses were organised in Recife in 1934, and in Bahia in 1937. These congresses valued the influence of Afro-Brazilian traditions for Brazilian Culture, and a particular relevance was given to Afro-Brazilian cults, like Candomblé. Candomblé priests gave talks in these conferences. This alliance of intellectuals and Candomblé priests would also generate an image of Black Bahia, the capital of Candomblé, which started to attract international researchers and artists, Melville Herskovits and Roger Bastide among them. For Bastide, Candomblé was not only an expression of Brazilian popular culture but also an African civilisation, a ‘High culture’, autonomous from Euro-Brazilian civilisation, with its own systems of value and its own metaphysics (Bastide, 1978). Bastide was one of the first to dismiss the ‘syncretism’ between Candomblé and Catholicism, affirming that Candomblé practitioners were only hiding behind Catholicism; their conversion was not sincere. Bastide became an ogan (‘sir’), an ‘official’ at a Candomblé temple, the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.

Bastide was part of an ongoing process in which the cultural elites and artists were getting more involved in Candomblé. He shared his position at the Opô Afonjá with the writer Jorge Amado, the musician Dorival Caymmi, the Argentinian painter Carybé, and the French photographer Pierre Verger. In the 1970s, many white middle-class people, including foreigners, would attend to the more prestigious Candomblé houses. At the same time, the elite of Candomblé practitioners in these prestigious Candomblé houses became increasingly influenced by Anthropology, art and by this middle-class, international, intellectual culture; some of them became public intellectuals and artists in their own right (Sansi, 2007), like Maximilano dos Santos, Mestre Didi, studied at the Centre of Afro-Oriental Studies, CEAO, which allowed for scholarly exchanges with the African motherland (Santos, 2005). From the 1980s, several Candomblé houses started to be declared national heritage (Sansi, 2016; Van der Port, 2011).

The trouble with images

After the second COMTOC (World Conference on the Orixá Tradition) took place in Bahia in 1983, Mae Stella, priestess of the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, led a movement of clear and explicit rejection of ‘syncretism’ in a manifesto that she wrote together with the priestesses of four other traditional Candomblé houses of Bahia (Santos, 1995). After the Manifesto, Stella decided to withdraw all the Catholic images from the shrines and public rooms of the temple, and put them in a basement (Santos, 1995). However, the other houses that signed the manifesto did not withdraw the images.

Stella’s decision was polemical even within her own house. It assumed that the Catholic images in Candomblé houses were just a public façade, that Catholic images were only used to hide Candomblé. It is important to understand that Stella was not just rejecting Catholic images, but images in general. Following a very strict reading of Yoruba Orixá religion, back in Africa shrines rarely included figurative representations of the Orixás, but at most images of initiates being possessed by them. The Orixás themselves were not represented: their presence takes place in the ritual of possession, in the body of their initiates (see i.e. Santos, 1967; Thompson, 1993). Therefore, figurative images in Candomblé shrines would be only peripheral, as opposed to Catholic shrines, which are precisely built around the figurative image of saints. And yet, Catholic images used to be present in many Candomblé houses. They were mainly displayed in the public room of the house, but in some cases they were also present in shrines, even if they were not objects of worship (fundamentos). In Candomblé, images can be, like everything else (people, plants animals, places, food), related to the Orixás. Just as gold can manifest Oxum, the goddess of wealth and fresh water, whose colour is golden, so can a sculpture of the Virgin with yellow clothes, or a mermaid with blond hair. Like other objects in shrines, images can often be described as ‘found’ objects, images that have been recognised as their Orixás by initiates. In this way, they were not seen so much as representations of Catholic religion but more as indexes of this personal encounter. That is probably the way in which Catholic images were initially incorporated into shrines: some initiates recognised the images of their Orixás in already existing images.

Historically, Candomblé shrines incorporated many different kinds of secular images besides Catholic ones. If Catholic images were once dominant in Candomblé shrines, it was not just because of an implicit project of ‘syncretism’ between religions, but also because Catholicism was overwhelmingly hegemonic in the production of public images. But Candomblé has also borrowed from many other sources of popular culture: as I said, Oxum can be the Virgin Mary but also a mermaid. What Stella didn’t seem to consider was precisely, that the value of these images sometimes was very personal and indexical: they were the result of the personal encounter between a devotee and what she recognised as an image or index of her Orixá.

But Stella was well aware that she was proposing a revolution. Although many of the initiates complained, in the long run, four decades later, this revolution seems to have been successful; the ‘syncretism’ with Catholicism has been fading in Candomblé, at least in big cities like Salvador. In the Candomblé, houses opened in recent decades in Salvador, at least in the ones I have seen, it is difficult to find a Catholic image or a reference to Catholicism. Many people of Candomblé to whom I talked in Salvador, if they were under or around 40, would not identify themselves as Catholic. They would simply say that ‘this (Candomblé) is my religion’, or ‘this is my culture’, or both.

Museums in the temple

The second big project of Mae Stella at Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá was to build a museum, the Ilê Ohum Lailai, ‘House of Ancient Things’ in Yoruba. At the beginning, according to Stella, this idea was received with scepticism: ‘A museum of Candomblé? With what culture?’ (Campos, 1999: 172). The museum originally displayed cult implements, clothes and representative elements of the history of the temple. The museum presents this Candomblé house as the site of African Culture in Brazil where African ‘immanences’ (Campos, 1999: 171) are safely preserved. Later, it was reformed and reopened in April 2000. The space was enlarged, and objects were explained with panels. The story of the founding of the museum was explained in an introductory panel. A bigger space was dedicated to the history of the house, with panels explaining the biography of the priestesses of the house, together with their objects and dresses, and also explaining the achievements of their respective ‘administrations’. This time, a central space was reserved for the current priestess, Stella, explaining the changes she had brought to the house. First and foremost among these was her rejection of syncretism. The Catholic saints that had received homage in the house before her ‘rule’ were now displayed in the museum as evidence of respect but also, of desecration: they are simply reminders of the past, documents. Since the repudiation of syncretism in the 1980s, these images were hidden in the basement. Now, they are on open display in the museum, together with the original letter in which Stella affirmed the rejection of syncretism.

Thus, in addition to the narrative of African immanence, the new display incorporates a secondary narrative, the rejection of syncretism. But both narratives are included in an overarching history: that of the priestesses and their achievements. The Museum of Opô Afonjá explains ‘pure’ African culture, understood as the history of an aristocratic lineage. It explains the history of this Candomblé house or, better, of the rulers of this Candomblé house, through souvenirs and relics, and a glorification of the current ruler. It is like the museum of a royal dynasty in Europe. The objects at display are somewhat inalienable possessions, to draw again on Weiner’s term: objects in which the history and the claims to continuity of the house are embedded. But the secrets of the house, the objects of worship, where the Orixás really are, these are not shown. And these really are inalienable possessions at a deeper level: they are constitutive of the axé or force of the house. By contrast, the display focuses on the priestesses, who have been the link, the mediation between the interior, hidden value of axé and the public value of Afro-Brazilian Culture.

Ambiguous objects in museums

Candomblé objects are also present in other museums outside temples. Historically, they have been a part of police museums such as the Museum of ‘Legal Medicine’ in Bahia, Museu Estácio da Lima. The museum included objects of interest for specialists in autopsy, objects of phrenological analysis, the heads of famous criminals, monstrous human and animal foetuses, and objects seized by the police, like weapons, drugs, and the implements of Candomblé cults. These implements were seized by the police when they persecuted Candomblé as a form of ‘false medicine’ or ‘folk healing’ in the first half of the twentieth century. But by the end of the twentieth century, the social status of Candomblé had radically changed. The laws criminalising ‘folk healing’ had been abolished, and Candomblé was recognised publicly as an expression of Afro-Brazilian culture. In 1996, a group of Candomblé houses joined together as ‘Societies for the Protection and Defence of Afro-Brazilian Cults’ and filed a legal complaint against the museum for ‘threatening public decency’. The plaintiffs argued that ‘beautiful creations of sacred black art’ should not be displayed in an exhibit with ‘a racist and perverse ideological discourse’, in which these works of black sacred art were exhibited as ‘objects of criminological and pathologic interest [. . .] What are children going to infer from seeing documents of a black civilisation, of religions spread throughout Brazil by Africans and their descendants, grouped together with criminal artefacts and natural monstrosities?’ Moreover, these objects were kept ‘poorly and without appropriate museological considerations’. Given this, the plaintiffs asked, first, that these objects be housed in another institution that ‘would display them with dignity’ ³ ; they observed that there is no clear reference regarding the origin and the meaning of these objects and that most of them were collected during a period of police repression of Candomblé.

What they were asking for was precisely that the material culture of Candomblé be made equal to Western art. They were not demanding the objects back for the Candomblé houses; they were asking that these objects should be displayed in art museums together with historical or contemporary works of art, and not in a police museum. In other words, they were recognising museums as appropriate institutions for housing these objects: provided they were exhibited in the appropriate way. There was one exception however: an otã, an altar stone, which should be kept away from the public gaze. Unlike other objects, the otã is not a work of art, nor an artefact: its immanent power should be respected; it should be hidden and not seen. According to this argument, the ‘sacred’ character of the otã as a fundamento is not transformed by the museum. Thus, even if the representatives of Candomblé have appropriated the cultural values that the museum represents, and they recognise a ‘cultural’ value in most of their objects, there are still some objects that remain outside these museological considerations, and the dynamics of invisibility and secrecy of Candomblé ritual still apply to them.

What happened to the otã in the museum? If it was still a sacred object, one might expect it to would have been returned to a Candomblé house. But it was kept in storage. Why? The value of an otã is not just the result of a generic ritual of consecration but also an index of its particular history. And that stone has a long and complicated story; the traces of its origin have been lost. We do not know which agencies may still be present in the stone, so it is not easy to re-contextualise it in a temple. Thus, the stone remains in a situation of latent indeterminacy, between the museum and the temple: in storage.

This is the reason why this same Candomblé community did not demand the return of the liturgical objects in the Police museum to their original use or place (which is not known with certainty), but wanted these objects to be displayed as ‘beautiful’ artworks rather than as ‘curious’ police evidence, thus demonstrating that they had appropriated the museum’s logic of display. This appropriation took the form of ‘culture’, as opposed to ‘crime’. This worked for most objects but not all: the otã, the body-house of the Orixá, cannot become an artwork, something to be seen; it is still sacred; it has to be hidden, although its original place is no longer known.

Recently, an art project of the 3rd Bahia Biennial (2014), doing research for an exhibition on Archive and Fiction, discovered the stone in the deposits of the museum, and decided to show it during the Biennial (Pato, 2015), together with other objects of the museum, to display the recent colonial past of the city. After the Biennial, the stone went back to the storage area of the museum, perhaps making the case that in spite of good intentions, there are things in Candomblé that should not be made public, they resist being transformed into cultural objects.

The hidden mask

To conclude, I would like to introduce a small anecdote. This story was explained to me by a friend who did not belong to the Opô Afonjá but was in another traditional house. She was a black woman in her mid-30s, an artist and art teacher. She was born in Bahia, but raised a Protestant. She had lived for many years in Berlin. She started to get interested in her roots while living abroad and started to get in contact with Candomblé when she returned to Brazil. Her relationship to Candomblé is very personal. She went to the public ceremonies but did not participate in the religious life of the house. She did not have her shrine in the Candomblé house but at home: she felt that she had her own form of practicing Candomblé. Her relation to Candomblé could be seen as an example of new forms of approaching the religion, more personal and based on cultural allegiance.

Once she went on holiday to Gambia in Africa, with German friends. In the backlands of Gambia, she attended a curious ritual that she did not quite understand, but from which she kept a mask. Since she had a research interest in masks, she was enthusiastic about this finding. When she went back to Bahia she wanted to give it as a present, a souvenir, to her priestess, who to her surprise, was truly horrified by the mask. The mask, she said, had made my friend fall into ritual impurity, awo (secret/taboo): it contained some African ancestor spirit, a power that my friend could not control because she was not initiated. She had to give the mask to the temple to keep it secret, and undertake a ritual cleansing there, which in her own words (Interview, 10 August 2002) was a horrible nightmare. The misunderstanding between my friend and her priestess was clear. As a cosmopolitan artist, she saw the mask as a work of art with ancestrality, since it came directly from Africa, the source of Candomblé. For her priestess, this ancestrality was not only a positive cultural value, but it could also contain a dangerous presence. Which ancestral spirit could be present in the mask? How could she address it?

Conclusion: ambiguous objects

In this article, I have discussed the culturalization of Candomblé through objects and images. I have argued that Afro-Brazilian ‘Culture’ is not a given, but the result of a process by which Candomblé has been identified with the values, practices and objects of Culture in the institutional sense – museums, heritage, art, and so on. This identification has been possible because of a shared valorization of ‘inalienable possessions’ in Candomblé and in institutional Culture.

But this modern, cultural approach also presupposes the representational character of certain objects: religious objects would be representations that make reference to a religious system of beliefs; and each religion would have its own symbols. Moreover, these symbols could have aesthetic qualities. They could be works of art. Thus, for example, when my friend brought a mask from Africa she saw it as a work of art, an object that represented something and that was beautiful. Her priestess, on the other hand, a traditional practitioner, did not see the mask as a beautiful artwork but a possible repository of unknown agency that was difficult to control. She did not see a symbol but a hidden presence.

The case of Mãe Stella withdrawing the images of the Catholic saints from the shrines and enclosing them in the basement is a reverse example of the same argument. For Stella, as an intellectualised, modern practitioner, Catholic images are symbols and representations. And since what they represented was another system of belief, different from the ‘Orixá belief’, in her own terms (Santos, 1995), it did not make sense that they shared the shrine with the representations of the ‘Orixá belief’. But for other more traditional practitioners, the images were not only symbols of the Catholic Church but indexes of their personal relation with certain entities. However, with time, these Catholic images may have lost their meaning for younger generations. They are not a part of their everyday lives anymore, and other referents may replace them. They are becoming cultural documents of the past.

Finally, I presented the case of the transformation of objects in Museums. In the case of the Museums in the Candomblé houses, the selection of the objects for display personalises the history of the religion in the figures of the priestesses, and hides the sacred objects that are subject to secrecy. Some of these objects, on the other hand, would be in display in the police museums, as a result of the violent plunder of Candomblé temples a century ago. Some of these objects cannot be transformed into objects of cultural display, but they cannot be returned to Candomblé temples either, because they cannot be identified; they may contain a hidden power, even if it is not quite known which one; and hence they have to be kept away from public display, in ambivalent containment. This example shows the limits on the conversion of Candomblé into public culture: how the centrality of visibility in modern culture, which gives dignity, public recognition and prestige to Candomblé, paradoxically contradicts its practice.

In the long run, we do not know where this process of culturalization will lead, but if representation becomes more important than presence, Candomblé may be a radically different religion, or culture, in a few decades. The ‘semiotic ideology’ or ‘ontology’ of Candomblé may have changed. By now, what is interesting about this case in general terms is the ambiguity of these objects and images. Does the mask from Gambia contain a spirit? Which one? What is present in the otã? We do not really know. It is neither a clear presence or a representation, symbol or index, text or agent. They are in an ambiguous position between object and subject: who is present in these images? That ambiguity, that unstable superposition, is paradoxically what makes these objects and images powerful, and challenging.