By Mattijs van de Port
For over 100 years, writers, artists, anthropologists and travelers have travelled to Bahia, Brazil, looking for the spirit ownership cult referred to as Candomblé. therefore, successive generations of cultists have obvious an extended, regular move of curious outsiders coming to their temples with notebooks and cameras, questions and inquisitive gazes, or ogling eyes and the desire of inclusion. This examine asks what seduced those outsiders to hunt entry to the Afro-Brazilian spiritual universe and, conversely, how did cultists reply to the overpowering curiosity of their creed and to changing into an item of the outsiders’ imaginations.“Thriving within the hole among the sensuous fullness of existence and the impossibility of its cultural illustration, Ecstatic Encounters opens unbelievable vistas for 'writing tradition' in anthropology today.”— Birgit Meyer, loose collage of Amsterdam.
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Extra info for Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real
Sample text
The Dutch art historian Frank Reijnders, in a wonderful little book called Metamorphose van de Barok (1991), has for instance shown how the spirit of the baroque lived on in the realm of fine arts as the anti-art, whose impulses kept (and keep) undermining romantic notions of art’s totalizing visions of the sublime. Time and again, the baroque impulse sets out to show the falsity of the promise that the artwork enables the beholder to partake in the mysteries of the world. 9 The continued relevance of baroque forms of world-making is also evidenced in the many postmodernist thinkers who have discussed and/or ecstatic encounters · 38 picked up the style, the ethos and the sensibilities it expresses (Chiampi 1998; Day 1999; Ndalianis 2004).
One of the expressive missions of the baroque was thus to draw attention to its premise that the world is brought to order by an ‘absent truth’. To accomplish this task, baroque artists developed a whole set of forms geared to produce the double effect of, on the one hand, highlighting the fact that people live in man-made, and therefore imperfect worlds, and on the other hand, highlighting the glory of Divine Power as the sole force that is capable of bringing these imperfect worlds to harmony.
Spirit possession is the most visible and most spectacular instance of this force-from-beyond, yet I make clear that its manifestations can also be discerned in other expressive forms and practices in Candomblé. Chapter seven is an essay that takes a closer look at practices of mediation within the Candomblé community to reveal that the religious imagination of the people of Candomblé is permeated by the aesthetics, formats and styles that dominate the public sphere of the media saturated society that is Brazil.