![]()
This chapter introduces the topic of Afro-Brazilian religion, specifically CandomblĂ©, and the particular ritual that serves as the example and concrete basis of spatial description for this study. The ritual is referred to in Portuguese as a reuniĂŁoâtranslated simply as a âgatheringââand involves the manifestation of an entity called a caboclo, referred to by name as Tupiniquim. Experienced as masculine, the manifestation of Tupiniquim is given as âhisâ incarnation in/as the body of the head of a CandomblĂ© house, a woman called a mĂŁe-de-santo or âmother-of-saint.â The reuniĂŁo ritual takes place in a room of a simple house in the periphery of the city of Salvador. The chapter begins with a view towards this urban context in Brazil where I undertook fieldwork, and in relation to this it traces the contours of CandomblĂ©, its historical formation and aspects of its praxis. The ritual practices that I encountered in the field presented spatial situations of a particular quality and character, and pointed towards ways of conceptualising spatiality tied to their modes of givenness and presentation. Implied are problems of method in approaching spatial description, where the descriptive task is aimed at the situations and experiences themselves in the way that they are concretely lived. In the following, I elaborate on the manner in which the experiences of the field provoked methodological considerations on spatial description, as discussed in the Introduction, and go on to explore these questions of method. They concern the path that led me from an interest in the spatiality of CandomblĂ© ritual to a way of describing spatial experience, and thus to the problem of a phenomenological description of space.
*My fieldwork to study the spatiality of CandomblĂ© ritual was undertaken in Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia in the Brazilian Northeast. Salvador is a major port city that forms part of a vast natural harbour called BaĂa de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints). The scale of the bay is difficult to grasp from land by the naked eye and gives the feel of a small sea into which Salvador projects, like a peninsula.1 The Portuguese first landed in this area at the turn of the sixteenth century, though the mythical Ilha Brasil (Brazil Island) of the European imagination appeared already in the medieval world in a fourteenth-century map.2 Salvador lies to the eastern side of the bay. In his history of Bahia, Antonio RisĂ©rio traces the initial colonisation of the bay not to the Portuguese, but to the indigenous Tupinamba.3 The Tupinamba are one of the peoples of the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family. Anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro notes that the population of the latter in the sixteenth century was around four million: âOf the various peoples who speak closely related languages, we find the groups ranging from small bands of nomadic hunters [âŠ] up to the enormous Tupinamba villages of the sixteenth century with their sophisticated economy.â4 A small village in the area of the bay was set up by the Portuguese in the first half of the sixteenth century, portrayed by a contemporary historical narrative as âthe most complete eurotupinambĂĄ village of Bahia.â5 The city of Salvador proper, however, was founded in 1549, and three years later the first episcopate under the archbishop of Lisbon was established. Salvador, the first capital of the Portuguese colony of Brazil, was to retain this status until 1763.6 The task of pacification and catechisation of the indigenous population lay primarily in the hands of the religious orders, specifically the Society of Jesus, for whom Bahia was a âJesuit utopia,â an opportunity to âreinvent the human.â7 This utopia took the form of âthe wholesale slaughter and enslavement of Indiansâ which, coupled with virulent epidemics, meant that by the turn of the century the indigenous population of Bahia in demographic terms had dwindled to insignificance.8
From its origins until the nineteenth century, Salvador was essentially a port and administrative centre, which functioned as part of a colonial society built on institutionalised enslavement and based on a plantation economy divided between a rural planter and an urban merchant class.9 The eighteenth-century city had a basic geographic and functional division: the port facing the bay formed the cidade baixa or low city, and atop the steep hillsâthe cidade alta or high cityâwere the colonial administrative and ecclesiastical centres.10 Pierre Verger divides the traffic of enslaved Africans to Bahia into four âcycles,â corresponding to the geographical regions in Africa from which persons were taken.11 The first two cyclesâthe sixteenth to seventeenth centuriesâsaw the arrival of people from the Bantu linguistic group, in particular from Angola and the Congo. In terms of religious practices, they brought with them traditions of ancestor worship and the cult of the inquice.12 The third and fourth cycles occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with slavery finally abolished in 1888.13 This period saw the arrival of the GĂ©gĂ© and the NagĂŽ-YorĂčbĂĄ (from regions in present-day Togo, Republic of Benin, and southwestern Nigeria) who brought with them the cults of the voduns and the orixĂĄs.14 Recent scholarship has highlighted the complexity and plasticity of the formation of identities as a consequence of the slave tradeâincluding the denominational significance of slave ports on the African coast, geographic regions of residence, and ethno-linguistic identitiesâemphasising the tension between what Luis Nicolau ParĂ©s has termed âethnonymâ and âmeta-ethnic denomination.â15 The former refers to modes of self-identification âinternalâ to social groups, while the latter term to ââexternalâ denominations used, whether by Africans or European slavocrats, to designate a plurality of initially heterogeneous groups.â16 In the Bahian context ParĂ©s emphasises the process of meta-ethnic denomination, which was distinctly tied to language: âthe ability of Africans to communicate with and understand one another [...] led to the absorption of these denominations as forms of self-identification and to the consequent creation of new communities or feelings of collective belonging.â17 The significance of this dialogical formation of community should not be viewed in the abstract, rather, religious practices and thus the space of ritual functioned as âa privileged context for expression.â18
By the late nineteenth century, the population of Salvador was just over one hundred thousand.19 Nineteenth-century Salvador, no longer the capital, but still a major city in the now independent Brazilian nation, was defined by a multilayered socio-economic structure.20 The colonial tripartite cityâthe port of the low city, and the administrative and religious centres of the high cityâwas now spread out into various urban and rural districts. The latter comprised small farms, fishing communities, and coastal forests.21 The ten or eleven urban districts allowed for a certain mobility across classes and races, making it possible for the veiled continuity of various African religious traditions, as Rachel Harding notes: âMany ritual activities of CandomblĂ© were purposefully conducted clandestinely both to avoid detection and repression and because of their sui generis secretive nature. However, the public space of the street was also a site of ritual action.â22 This was even more the case in the rural districts where, according to JoĂŁo JosĂ© Reis, âhills, woods, lagoons and rivers [âŠ] provided ecological support for the development of an independent, quasi-clandestine African collective. The city was surrounded by mobile quilombos [maroon communities] and religious meeting places.â23
Modern Salvador has, since the mid-twentieth century, expanded significantly beyond its nineteenth-century limits.24 The process leading to the immense transformation of the city can be traced to the ânew economic dynamismâ of the Brazilian Northeast in the 1960s, such that today Salvador is an expansive city of roughly three million inhabitants.25 The historic centre has retained its basic topographic integrityâthe low city and the high cityâthough it is dwarfed by a modern skyline littered with commercial and residential towers. These latter form a cluster along the coast but overlook in the other direction towards the interior a field of low-level residential districts, which articulate the urban periphery. James Holston notes that urban peripheries
developed in Brazil as the place of and for the laboring poor. After the 1930s, these hinterlands became practically the only areas in which both established workers and new migrants could secure a residential foothold in Brazilâs industrializing urban economies. As urban migration mushroomed in subsequent decades, so did this autoconstruction of distant hinterlands [âŠ] At the same time, a new national state sought to modernise the organization of this urbanizing economy and society.26
Within this larger socio-economic framework concretely articulated by the urban fabric, resides an extraordinary, complex spiritual network. Anthropologist Marcio Goldman describes Candomblé succinctly as follows:
Put very simply, Candomblé can be described as a religion of African origin, brought to Brazil with the traffic of slaves. Here i...
