Umbanda and Africa

Steven Engler

ABSTRACT: This article argues that scholarship on Umbanda (a distinctively Brazilian hybrid of Candomblé, Kardecist Spiritism, and popular Catholicism, with romanticized indigenous elements) manifests
certain limitations that lead to insufficient emphasis on the religious
tradition’s internal doctrinal, ritual, and organizational variation. It
compares the complex and ambivalent place of African traditions in
Umbanda and Candomblé, highlighting the extent to which Umbanda
has been seen as derivative, more distant from Africa. The article also
notes other distorting factors such as centros in the southeast of Brazil
being considered normative, and scholars focusing inordinately on the
question of the tradition’s “birth.” The case of Umbanda underlines
the Brazilian context of Afro-Brazilian traditions, in contrast to an emphasis on transnationalism.
KEYWORDS: Umbanda, Candomblé, Brazil, Africa, African religions,
Yoruba diaspora, transnationalization

U

mbanda is a distinctively Brazilian religion that came to
prominence in the early twentieth century as a hybrid of
Candomblé and Kardecist Spiritism,1 with elements of popular
Catholicism and a romanticized appropriation of indigenous figures. It
has developed to occupy a complex spectrum of doctrinal and ritual
forms between Afro-Brazilian and Kardecist traditions, with important
regional variations.2 Umbanda deserves more scholarly attention than
it has received for three related reasons. First, it is a uniquely Brazilian
religion that refracts its social context to an extent and in a manner
that distinguishes it sharply from Kardecism, Candomblé, and other

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Volume 15, Issue 4, pages
13–35, ISSN 1092-6690 (print), 1541-8480 (electronic). © 2012 by The Regents of the
University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.
DOI: 10.1525/nr.2012.15.4.13.

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Nova Religio
related religions. Second, in its capacity as a provider of spiritual services (along its spectrum of doctrinal and ritual forms) it achieves a very
broad “market penetration” among Brazilians of different classes and
races. Third, as I will argue in this article, its defining characteristic is
not a specific set of doctrinal, ritual, or institutional characteristics
(whether Afro-Brazilian or uniquely Brazilian), rather, Umbanda is best
characterized by the dynamic manner in which it occupies a spectrum
of religious forms that refract specific social contexts. However, a number of features of scholarship on Umbanda have occluded this central
aspect: e.g., defining it narrowly as Afro-Brazilian; comparing it to
Candomblé in terms of its preservation of African elements; and taking
as representative only groups in the large cities of south-eastern Brazil.3
In this article, I will discuss Umbanda’s relation to Africa in order to
argue for the value of paying closer attention to the internal variation
of Umbanda in its national, rather than transnational, context.
Exploring the extent to which Umbanda is rooted in and continues
to manifest African elements is a useful way to highlight its differences
from Afro-Brazilian traditions. A radical approach, like that of Ortiz,
would be to divorce Umbanda from Africa altogether. This involves
two distinct logical moves. First, Umbanda is distanced from Africa:
“Umbanda is not a black religion; in this sense, it is opposed to
Candomblé.”4 Second, it is linked to the specifically Brazilian context:
“If ‘Candomblé’ and ‘Macumba’ are African religions, the Spiritism of
Umbanda is, on the contrary, a—I would say the—national religion of
Brazil.”5 However, a more nuanced consideration of the place of Yoruba
elements—the dominant African ethnic influence in Brazil—leads
to seeing Umbanda as an exceptional case of a “marked process of nationalization” undergone by Afro-Brazilian traditions, to varying extents, since the mid-nineteenth century.6 In this light, the present
article offers a supplement to J. Lorand Matory’s case for the transnational nature of Candomblé, the most well-known and well-studied of
the Afro-Brazilian traditions, “the political economy, iconographic vocabulary, and interpretive discourses that Candomblé has produced
and been produced by have never been Brazilian alone, African alone,
or Brazilian and African alone. They have always been radically transnational and, particularly, circum-Atlantic, even in the middle of the
19th century.”7 Matory’s emphasis on transnational dialogue is an important and necessary corrective to scholarly views of Candomblé, in
part because it underscores the extent to which Yoruba groups in Africa
and the Americas have mutually influenced each other and continue to
do so. As such, it made a major contribution to the literature on the
African diaspora within the broad paradigm of “Atlantic history.”8
Matory’s argument is also important because it emphasized that Yoruba
traditions are “traditions.”9 They were, and are, just as dynamic, dialogic,
and flexible as others (including, of course, Catholicism, Kardecism, and
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Engler: Umbanda and Africa
Pentecostalism). They are just as able to work strategically with claims to
the “high ground” of pure continuity with the past (real or imagined);
and, under colonialism, they have been more susceptible to having their
“traditional” status imagined by others. That is, Matory challenges biased
assumptions that diasporic African traditions developed independently of
static, pure African roots.
However, Matory’s focus on Candomblé is potentially problematic,
insofar as he draws conclusions regarding “African-American experience” throughout the Americas.10 Candomblé is not the most typical
of Afro-Brazilian religions. In terms of the factors that Matory highlights, it is unique in its degree of past and present contact with Africa,
in its emphasis (especially since the 1930s) on the issue of the purity of
its African roots, and on its more recent moves toward “desyncretization” and “re-africanization.”11 Candomblé is quite distinct from other
Afro-Brazilian traditions (e.g., Babassuê in Pará; Batuque in Rio
Grande do Sul; Candomblé de Caboclo and Jurê in Bahia; Canjerê in
Minas Gerais; Catimbó, Cura and Pajelança from Pernambuco through
Amazônia; Macumba in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo; Tambor de
Mata or Terecô in Maranhão; Tambor de Mina in Maranhão and Pará;
Toré in Sergipe; Xambá in Alagoas, Pernambuco and Paraíba; and
Xangô and Jurema in Pernambuco).12
Matory moves academic discussion of Candomblé beyond views that
see it in terms of derivative echoes of Africa or constrained responses
to a white-dominated, slave-holding colonial society, and reasserts “the
role of African-American [including Afro-Brazilian] agency in creating
these forms of cultural representation and self-representation.”13 However, Candomblé is also unique among Afro-Brazilian traditions in its
dynamic interrelation between insider and outside views, in part reflecting the greater attention that it has received from national and foreign scholars. Matory critiques “anti-essentialist” historiography that
sees an emphasis on pure Yoruba roots as an academic “invention of
Africa” on the grounds that such views attribute agency to white scholars, denying it to Afro-Brazilians.14 This is a false dichotomy, however.
The agency of candomblecistas includes their creative and autonomous
appropriation of ideas of nagô (Yoruba) purity put forward by Edson
Carneiro, Ruth Landes, Roger Bastide and others. In this same light, it
is arguable that ongoing dialogue with Africa—and assertion of
Candomblé as a black Atlantic religion because of it—is less a core
feature than it is one of a number of factors that have been drawn upon strategically by Afro-Brazilians as they work out their identities and
allegiances in a national context. Matory is certainly right that
Candomblé has a transnational dimension, but it is not clear that it is as
central as he holds it to be, nor can the claim be generalized to other
Afro-Brazilian traditions, and even less so to Umbanda. Stephen Selka
echoes Matory in calling for a “diasporic perspective” in the study of
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Afro-Brazilian traditions (not just Candomblé), but Selka places more
emphasis on the national context and on the polyvalent identities that
result from Afro-Brazilian agency. In the words of Selka, “Afro-Brazilian
identity is based on multiple and overlapping imagined communities
that are themselves based on different religions (Catholicism, Protestantism, Candomblé) and national identities (Brazilian, Jeje, Nagô,
etc.).”15 The case of Umbanda underlines such work with agency and
identity within Brazilian society, suggesting that an emphasis on transnational dialogue—however central to the “African” of the most wellknown Afro-Brazilian tradition—pays insufficient attention to the
Brazilian side of things.
THE SPECTRUM OF UMBANDAS
Umbanda’s many variants make it difficult to characterize core beliefs and practices. The following brief sketch captures a number of elements, though not all terreiros or centros manifest all of these.16
Umbanda emphasizes spirit-possession: in a typical ritual, a number of
mediums enter into trance and are possessed, often to the sound of
drums. The possessing entities are disembodied spirits, not deities. The
spirits then offer consultations to clients who line up, and are generally
not charged, for the spiritual advice and services; the spirits come in
order to work. The most common “guides” or “saints” that possess
umbandist mediums are: (1) caboclos (strong-willed, forceful, wellintentioned, healing, indigenous spirits), (2) pretos velhos (calm, humble,
christianized, former slaves), (3) exus (potentially dangerous and maleficent, potentially wise and helpful spirits, ritually associated with cemeteries and crossroads, uniquely able to undo the evil work of other
exus), and (4) pombas giras (female counterparts to the exus, with a
sexualized moral ambivalence).17 But a number of other types of spirits
are also common including baianos (spirits of Bahia), boiadeiros (“cowboys,” hybrid indigenous/white spirits), crianças (children), marinheiros
(sailors), Zé Pilintras (a trickster figure prominent in Jurema), eguns
(ancestral spirits), and ciganos (“gypsies”). The formalized theology
shared by most umbandistas (practitioners of Umbanda), with many variants, preserves pride of place for the Orixás: higher, never-embodied
spirits who head up the “seven lines” (or hierarchies) under which are
the many “spirits of the light.”18 Exus and pombas giras are generally
considered “spirits of the darkness” and do not fall under the seven
lines. Expert mediums often work with at least one spirit from each of
the seven lines.
Scholars of Umbanda generally situate Umbanda’s emergence in
Rio de Janeiro in the late 1920s and the 1930s, although there were
contemporaneous developments in Porto Alegre, and centros in São
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Paulo that can be traced to 1929.19 There is scattered, though unreliable, evidence for an earlier “birth.”20 Umbanda’s most prominent
myth of origin holds that seventeen year-old Zélio de Moraes incorporated a powerful indigenous spirit “of the seven crossroads,” Caboclo
das Sete Encruzilhadas, at a Kardecist center in Niteroi on 15 November
1908. This enlightened spirit then guided the formation of the religion,
and the date is celebrated in some centros in commemoration.21
Emerson Giumbelli argues that this myth of origin was consolidated
only around the time of the death of Moraes in the 1970s.22
Given the dearth of evidence regarding the emergence of Umbanda
as a distinct religious tradition, it is curious that so much effort has been
dedicated to the topic, by both umbandistas and scholars, and that such
discussions almost universally frame the possession of Moraes as the
“birth” or “founding” of Umbanda. This tends to presuppose an artificial unity, a core set of characteristics that can be defined in terms of
that point of origin. Bruno Faria Rohde offers an astute critique
along these lines. He suggests that Umbanda’s roots lie with older
Afro-Brazilian traditions, and he points to the eighteenth-century
Calundu-angola as a potential precursor.23 However, Rohde himself
presumes too much in making this suggestion. On the one hand, this
quest for an older point of origin, based on parallels to earlier practices,
is itself unstable: the calundus can be traced earlier, including a lesser
presence in Portugal.24 On the other hand, placing such weight on
suggestive parallels, without clear evidence of intervening influence,
merely presupposes a different sort of artificial unity (that of a unitary
diachronic trajectory). Historian Laura de Mello e Souza—who made
a similar appeal to this same case in her earlier work—concludes, “I no
longer believe that the end of the line explains the genesis of the
process, i.e., that there is a coherent nexus between . . . Umbanda and
Calundu-angola.”25 As Maria Laura Cavalcanti notes, scholarly emphasis
on Umbanda’s origins reflects distorting presuppositions, and these
obscure “the particular form [of Umbanda], in which heterogeneity
and fluidity are distinguishing characteristics.”26
The possibility of a multi-point, nebulous emergence of Umbanda
in the early twentieth-century (though hinted at by Renato Ortiz) is
seldom considered in scholarly literature. I mention this not as an
alternative hypothesis (which would simply face the same lack of
evidence) but as a query intended to highlight how scholars seek to
define Umbanda as a unitary religion, in terms of its possessing certain
core characteristic beliefs and practices, rather than as a relational
tradition, in terms of internal variation that refracts social and political
tensions in distinct contexts. Camargo argues that the development of
Umbanda cannot be explained “merely by the diffusion and continuity
of cultural traces and complexes,” and he shifts focus to the social
functions it plays in specific areas of Brazilian society.27 This prompts
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us to heed Duglas Teixeira Monteiro’s insight that “Umbanda represents the passing of the moment of disintegration during which traditional rites had been simplified: the priest had yielded to the healer
and the faithful to the client.”28 This emphasis on links between ritual
and social relations allows us to make sense of Umbanda’s variability in
terms of its relation to Brazilian society.
Despite some movement toward institutionalization, it remains the
case that “diversity is characteristic of this religion.”29 Individual centros
are led by pais- or mães-de-santo (saint fathers/mothers) and tend to be
organized along bureaucratic lines.30 A number of federations emerged
(the first in 1939, with most founded in the 1950s), and a national
congress was first held in 1941. These resulted in a greater degree of
doctrinal, ritual, and organization uniformity among participating
groups, though many terreiros and centros have no formal affiliations and
manifest an extremely broad range of variations in belief, practice,
and organization. Writing in 1961, Cândido P. F. de Camargo concluded
that the results of attempts to unify Umbanda were “weak, if not
negative.”31 Lisias Nogueira Negrão, writing in 1979, considered the
federations in the city of São Paulo to have made progress in institutional unification, but not in imposing ritual and doctrinal norms.32 The
main axis of variation is that between “white” Umbanda, which strongly
resembles Kardecism (including an absence of explicitly African
artifacts and images, and the strong presence of Christian elements,
e.g., group repetition of the “Our Father”) and variants that bear strong
resemblances to Candomblé in ritual, dress, and artifacts.33 Bastide,
studying Umbanda during the mid-twentieth-century period of consolidation and legitimization, described it as “a religion in the making, not
yet crystallized, organized, multiplying in an infinity of sub-sects, each
with its own ritual and mythology.”34 This alone should alert us to the
fact that such variation may be a constitutive feature of the tradition
rather than an early passing phase.
One of the main characteristics that scholars of Umbanda have noted in the last decades is the marked extent to which this religion reflects Brazilian society. Scholars argue that it mirrors Brazilian social
and political structures, that the nature of relations with spirits are homologous with those in Brazilian society and that the religion’s spirits
reflect social groups in the country’s past and present.35 These views
support the broader claim that Umbanda’s spectrum of doctrinal, ritual, and organizational variants is central to the tradition, not part of an
earlier phase or a case of outlying exceptional cases. I argue that it is
precisely this close relation between Umbanda and its social context
that results in its internal variation. More fundamentally, as French
ethnologist François Laplantine noted, “Umbanda, in the image of
Brazil, is disconcerting because it is multiple, contradictory and constantly evolving.”36
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Engler: Umbanda and Africa
Several other features of Umbanda underline its responsiveness to
specific social contexts. It creates a space where ambiguous moral
agency is prized, and demonstrates “the legitimacy of the rogue, the
underhanded and the personal favor [do malandro, da sacanagem e do
favor].”37 It “positions itself as a religion that encourages social mobility, . . . [and] this mobility is open to all, without exception.”38 It offers
something of a middle ground between private and public spheres, allowing greater freedom for women’s participation.39 It reflects, more
explicitly than other Brazilian religious traditions, the patron-client relations that are central to Brazilian society.40 Spirits who act as patrons
to their clients, and the pai-de-santo in an Umbanda centro is “the center
of a network of distribution where magical services are exchanged for
money with wealthy clients, celebrations are exchanged for recognition by the general public and the filhos-de-santo and money invested in
the centro become symbols of success.”41 The emergence and continued prominence of hierarchical patron-client relations is, of course, inseparable from the history of slavery and race in Brazil, just as these are
inseparable from issues of access to education and the formation of a
habitus adjusted by/to inclusion in the changing conditions of labor in
Brazil’s “peripheral modernity.”42 I argue elsewhere that specific features of umbandist ritual allow participants to re-imagine their own
agency within a virtual space that is both like and unlike the social
spaces of patron-client relations.43
Umbanda is a small tradition. In the 2000 census, 397,000 Brazilians
self-identified as umbandistas; by comparison 118,000 Brazilians claimed
Candomblé as their primary religious affiliation and 2.2 million
Kardecism.44 A 1994 survey focusing more specifically on religious
adherence reported slightly higher numbers, with “close to 1.5 million
adult Brazilians . . . [belonging to] Afro-Brazilian religions,” including
Candomblé, Umbanda, and others.45 According to the Brazilian census,
the number of people self-identifying as members of Afro-Brazilian
religions is in decline: 0.6 percent in 1980; 0.4 percent in 1991; and 0.3
percent in 2000.46 These adherence statistics are, of course, misleading.
Umbanda’s importance is in large part a function of the fact that many
non-umbandistas participate regularly in its rituals for spiritual healing
services.47
In the end, it is not entirely clear whether Umbanda is growing or
declining, especially given the limitations of the census data. However,
the way this question has been approached reveals a further limitation
in scholarship: a tendency to generalize based on limited cases. Sociologists
of religion at the Universidade de São Paulo, taking the number of
centros in that city as an indicator, argue that Umbanda achieved its
“apogee” in the 1970s and that it has since declined, in large part
through losing adherents to Candomblé.48 However, Umbanda’s importance was growing in the north of Brazil during this same period, where
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dramatic “umbandization” consisted not only of the growth in numbers
of umbandist centros, but in the absorption of umbandist elements by
other traditions.49 In the north “Umbanda’s penetrative force overcame
the very boundaries of the religions of African origin.”50 In the south a
“candomblization” or “re-africanization” of Umbanda began in the
1960s.51 Ângela Cristina Borges Marquez, based on research in Montes
Claros in the north of the state of Minas Gerais, notes that Afro-Brazilian
religions, primarily Umbanda, Quimbanda, and Candomblé, are growing
in numbers of both practitioners and clients.52 In São João da Boa Vista, a
small city in the interior of the State of São Paulo where I conduct fieldwork, the numbers of centros and clients have increased over the last few
years. One possibility is that the samples that indicate growth are nonrepresentative. Another is that Umbanda has rebounded since Negrão,
Reginaldo Prandi, and others evaluated its status in the 1990s. A more
interesting possibility is that the situation of Umbanda varies in different
social contexts, e.g., in the north and in the interior. This remains an
open question, though Carneiro suggested that the heterogeneity of
Afro-Brazilian traditions reflects three regionally-distinct processes of
nationalization.53 Minimally, the fact that portrayals of Umbanda as a
cohesive religion are almost all based on studies in São Paulo and Rio de
Janeiro means that the scholarship tends to beg this question, among
others. For example, most scholarly accounts consider the pretos velhos to
be core figures in Umbanda, and so they are in the southeast. However,
according to Yoshiaki Furuya, they are largely absent in Amazonia, or a
sub-type of caboclo.54 Minimally, asserting the preto velho to be an essential,
defining element of Umbanda flies in the face of the broader evidence;
moreover, regional variations arguably exemplify the relational nature of
the tradition.
Once we begin to contemplate the possibility that variation is fundamental to Umbanda, other interesting questions arise. For example, it is
generally accepted not only that Umbanda originated under conditions
of urbanization but that its growth and elaboration reflect urban conditions of social tensions and upheaval. Ortiz argued influentially that “the
birth of the umbandist religion coincides precisely with the consolidation of an urban-industrial class society,” and Diana Brown argued that
“Umbanda is pre-eminently a religion of urbanites.”55 On the one hand,
it is important to extend “urban” here to include small cities, themselves
going through significant economic and social transformation. On the
other hand, Yoshiaki’s study of “umbandization” in Amazonia shows this
process to be present even in small centers where little social disruption
had occurred. He concludes, it is “not . . . sufficient to simply understand ‘Umbandization’ as a reaction to the sweeping social changes of
the last years;” the growth of Umbanda in small centers cannot be interpreted “simply as an ‘imitation of big-city ways’. . . . It becomes necessary
to find something else to explain this ‘Umbandization’ that develops
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Engler: Umbanda and Africa
prior to socio-economic changes.”56 Umbanda’s ritual and therapeutic
sensitivity to local social tensions offers a potentially useful element
of this explanation. For example, Ismael Pordeus Jr., in his study of
Umbanda in the interior of the state of Ceará, argues that the figure of
the caboclo serves an important function in the strategic construction
of ethnic and regional identities; and Ângela Cristina Borges, in her
study of a distinct type of Umbanda in the north of the state of Minas
Gerais (“Umbanda sertaneja—one more among Brazil’s Umbandas”),
argues that the figure of the exu reflects the particular hybrid “ethos
sertanejo” of that region.57
Distinct social contexts, especially immigration from the northeast to the large urban centers in the south, played an important role
in the development of many Brazilian religions. It influenced
the manner in which Umbanda and Candomblé both manifest a
spectrum of variants, but in different ways. Here again, taking
Candomblé as the model for Umbanda masks the latter’s distinctiveness. Parés draws attention to the “polarization between ‘African’
and ‘national’ Candomblés, the former more closed and the latter
more open to ethnic and racial mixing.”58 A tension between
“African” centros and those more open to a broader social spectrum
has been prominent in Candomblé since at least the late nineteenth
century.59 This tension was amplified in the late twentieth century by
internal immigration. Prandi points to the increasingly universalized
and accessible nature of Candomblé as the key factor in Umbanda’s
decline in the southeast.60 Paul Christopher Johnson frames this
shift within Candomblé as a “social extension,” moving from traditional to public forms, in part as a result of the increasing prominence of Afro-Brazilian elements in popular culture, making “the
religion that was ethnically specific” now “presented as universally
available.”61 The recent emphasis on the re-africanization, de-syncretization, and de-catholicization of Candomblé is closely connected to
these developments, as they have occurred “precisely at a moment of
great expansion of the cult of the orixás and the entry into its ranks
of an increasingly white population.”62 In Candomblé, greater
emphasis on African roots is, in part, a market response to a hybridizing white valuation of pure black tradition, where the “national
Candomblés” reflect the historical trajectory of ad hoc encounters
between different groups. In this light, Candomblé manifests a
tension between “roots” and “routes.”63
Umbanda, on the other hand, appears to have no pure roots to return to (or, rather, it has various, depending on which account one
reads), a fact that may explain in part the many attempts to narrate its
“birth.” It manifests neither a hybridity of roots nor of routes, but one
of refraction. The spectra of its variations are much more complex that
a polarity between Africa and Brazil; it bridges, while legitimizing,
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a broad set of social distinctions.64 The place of Africa, of Yoruba traditions, and of race in Umbanda is more complex than is the case in
Candomblé.
“AFRICAN” IN BRAZIL
In the Brazilian literature, Umbanda has two distinct relations to
Africa (leaving aside Kardecist, Catholic, and romanticized indigenous
elements): Yoruba influences via Candomblé, and “Bantu” influences,
related to Macumba.65 There are two problems with the emphasis on
“Bantu” traditions. First, Bantu refers to a broad family of languages
not a specific ethnic group.66 Its usage in the Brazilian literature
is valuable insofar as it extends discussion beyond a narrow focus
on Yoruba traditions, but it lacks any further specificity and so
remains under-developed and not particularly helpful. Second, as with
the calundus, discussed above, it is important to distinguish between
broad influences and the more specific issue of the alleged origin of
Umbanda. In arguing for the predominance of Bantu influences on
Umbanda, for example, Malandrino takes as an analytical premise that
“the religious expressions of Brazilian groups belonging to the Bantu
tradition, throughout their history, can be understood as continuous
forms, granted that there is no maintenance of an equivalent whole,
that some aspects are recuperated, other rejected, and still others transformed in a manner that aims at symbolic reorganization.”67 This is a
particularly weak form of “continuity,” one not well suited to clarifying
the definitive origins of Umbanda. We are left with an intriguing claim
that Central African influences may have played an important role in
the origin of Umbanda, but this claim has insufficient specificity.
The case of Umbanda’s relation to Yoruba traditions in more complex and more revealing. Umbanda’s supposed roots in and ongoing
relations to Africa have been, and continue to be, very dynamic.
In general terms, using “Yoruba” to describe Candomblé and other
Afro-Brazilian traditions is potentially confusing for several reasons.
First, the origin of the term “Yoruba” is itself complex. It likely began
as a Hausa term for a certain group of “others,” originally limited to the
Oyo state or group, and later used by missionaries to refer to the broader
group.68 Kólá Abímbólá argues that “‘the Yorùbá’ are not, and never
were, a tribal group. Rather the hallmarks of ‘Yorùbá’ are to be found in
a unique set of religiophilosophical beliefs.”69 Granted current usage in
this latter sense, it is important to recognize both that Yoruba cultures
continued to shift in their West African homeland even as derivative
beliefs and practices began parallel developments in the Americas, and
also that Yoruba traditions in Africa and the diaspora developed in a
mutual influential dialogue.70
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Second, the Yoruba were only one, albeit the most important, of the
religious and cultural groups whose members were brought as slaves to
Brazil and who had a long-lasting impact on Afro-Brazilian traditions.
In Brazil, “nagô” was the main term used to define people of Yoruba
descent and their religious traditions (as “lucumi” is in Cuba).71 In its
African origin, “nagô” appears to have been a self-appellation of a
small Yoruba group, extended by the Fon of Dahomey into a generic
term for Yoruba-speakers; its use to refer to people of Yoruba descent
in general became prominent only in the Americas.72
Although Yoruba speakers were the dominant African group, in demographic terms, after the 1820s in Bahia, Central African groups
were more prominent in earlier periods.73 Nagô influences were dominant in the formation of Candomblé, and they have become increasingly so down to the present day. Of course, others “nations” remain
important as “Today Candomblé houses generally claim to belong to
one of the three main nations, Natô, Jeje, and Angola, which are characterized by the worship of different kinds of spiritual entities. The
Nagô worship the orixás, the Jeje the voduns, and the Angola the
enkices.”74
This picture of nagô pre-eminence as an influence in the development of Candomblé is complicated by two factors. First, though nagô
was the primary term for Yoruba speakers in Bahia, they were called by
other names in different parts of Brazil, including primarily “mina”
in Rio de Janeiro.75 Second, the scope of these terms varied. Though
“nagô” referred primarily to Yoruba speakers as a group, that usage
could expand to include non-Yorubas or contract to only specify Yoruba
subgroups. Similarly “mina” referred to both Yoruba speakers and to
West Africans more generally in the southeast of Brazil.76
In sum, insofar as “Yoruba” points to a transnational bridge between Africa and Brazil, the foundation of this bridge is unstable both
historically and socially on both sides of the Atlantic. The point here is
not that the denotation of “nagô” has been altered to the point that
historical links to African beliefs and practices have been severed; that
is clearly not the case.77 (As many as 20 million Brazilians self-identify
with Yoruba ancestry.78) Rather, appeals to the purity of Yoruba origins
play a strategic ideological role, not least in recent very public processes of “re-africanization,” “de-syncretization,” and “de-catholicization.”79
Matory highlights both sides of this coin,
Africanness is also constituted by a genealogy of interested claims and
practices, available for selective invocation as precedents. The naturalization of these claims and practices is situational and impermanent. In
other words, both the explicit, formal practices and the underlying logics of African and African-American cultures can, in my view, change
vastly without making those cultures objectively un-African.80

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Nova Religio
“Africanness” here is defined in terms of a strategic use of discourse
that also seeks to hold onto an “objective” sense of “African;” meaning
that the concept is both a discursive construct and objectively real.
There is no problem with this view, as long as the middle ground is
carefully staked out. The best alternative to trying to “eat one’s
cake and have it too” is not, despite appearances, to eat one’s cake by
halving it in two.81 That is, it is untenable to both acknowledge AfroBrazilians’ agency in appeals to “Africa” in the work of constructing
their religious and cultural identities, and yet hold that terms like
“Yoruba” have some stable transnational referent, whether ultimately
rooted in Africa or not.
This ambiguity forces us to turn to the local context, albeit with transnational elements always in mind. As Joseph M. Murphy notes, “It is difficult to argue that the diaspora model fits the contemporary state of
Yoruba religious traditions.”82 On the one hand, in defining “Yoruba,”
the issue of origins tends to emphasize the African historical context.
This problematizes “Yoruba” given that, as Matory argues, African and
American (broadly speaking) Yoruba traditions developed in part
through dialogue. Defining “Yoruba” as purely African and historical
ignores the transnational dynamism of this group of traditions. Thus, it
smuggles in an emphasis on the purity of African roots, and this emphasis must be examined rather than presupposed, especially given its prevalence in many of the traditions that claim these roots.83 As Robin Law
notes, citing Matory, “African ethnicities were subject to transformations through the process of displacement across the Atlantic; and
conversely . . . new ethnic identities constructed in the diaspora could
be fed back into the homeland through the repatriation of ex-slaves to
Africa.”84 On the other hand, a focus on diasporic encounters and
dialogue problematizes the “neo” of “neo-Yoruba,” seeing change as
somehow supplementary to the essence of Yoruba cultures themselves.
For example, Law’s mention of “new ethnic identities” in the quotation
above begs the question of whether these identities were, for example,
still Yoruba or not. We should not be too quick to essentialize Africa by
finding its echoes in the Americas, nor to use either geography or chronology to sunder “old African” Yoruba traditions from “new American”
ones. There is truth in both sides, and a careful consideration of specific
cases is needed to draw out the details.
There is a clear lesson here with respect to scholarship on Umbanda.
Characterizing Candomblé in either of these ways—in terms of either a
romantic construct or an authentic descendent (or representation) of
African beliefs and practices—obscures and marginalizes core characteristics of Umbanda. That is, focusing on either the invention or the
purity of African origins shifts attention from the social and political
context in which Umbanda’s spectra of doctrinal and ritual forms takes
shape. It focuses on myths rather than functions, on origins rather than
24

Engler: Umbanda and Africa
on strategies of identity formation. As Selka notes, “Candomblé is
perhaps the best known of the African-derived religions practiced in
Brazil. Its popularity partly stems from the common belief that Candomblé
is closer to its African origins than its alternatives, such as Umbanda, that
have more fully integrated Christian and other European beliefs and
practices.”85 Selka rightly underlines how Candomblé, as paradigmatic
Afro-Brazilian religion, is used as the measure of Umbanda, relegating it
to a secondary level by virtue of its supposed greater distance from Africa.
At the same time, it would be worth highlighting even more clearly the
value of not accepting this characterization. Framing Umbanda as an
“alternative” among “the African-derived religions” misses the unique
extent of its relation to Kardecism and its significant doctrinal and ritual
differences from Afro-Brazilian traditions.
More to the point, it fails to note the extent to which umbandist
groups vary amongst themselves. Some emphasize African roots, but
others claim Kardecist, “Brazilian,” Guarani, Vedic, Egyptian, Esoteric,
Lemurian, and/or extraterrestrial roots, ideas elaborated mainly in the
1940s and 1950s.86 Crucially, various presenters at the First Brazilian
Conference of Spiritism and Umbanda, in 1941, described their
religions origins in a wide variety of terms: “on Earth for more than
one-hundred centuries, with roots lost in the unfathomable past of the
most ancient philosophies,” “the Upanishads,” “the lost continent
of Lemuria,” “Egypt,” and a more general identification with the
history of esoteric thought (Lao Tzu, Confucious, Buddha . . . Vedanta,
Patanjali . . . Greece, Krishna, Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus . . . Moses . . .
China, Tibet and India . . . Orpheus.”)87 Bastide interpreted this as a
move to distance Africa, and wrote “to make the slaves brought to
Brazil no more than a link in an initiatic chain that stretches much
farther back.” Prandi argues that “‘Cleaning up’ the new religion of
those elements most compromised by a secret and sacrificial initiation
tradition was to take Kardecism as a model, one capable of expressing
the ideas and values of the new republican society.” Finally José H. M.
de Oliveira sees it as one of several strategies of legitimization in the
face of political persecution during the dictatorship of the Estado
Novo.88 Certainly, legal sanctions against curandeirismo and other magical therapeutics (prominent from 1890 and tailing off only in the late
twentieth century) are an important part of the story of Umbanda’s
evolution.89
These and related points are valuable in explaining Umbanda’s
de-emphasis of Afro-Brazilian elements, but with three provisos. First,
the basic point is that Umbanda is responsive to its social context.
Second, we must keep in mind that these strategies are not universal
among umbandist groups. These developments do not characterize
Umbanda as a whole, but instead, they point to one of the many axes
along which this religious tradition expresses internal variation.90
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Nova Religio
Neither the affirmation of nor rejection of African roots is characteristic of Umbanda (or, rather, both are, depending on the context).
Third, it is essential to recognize the centrality of Brazilian ideas of,
and attitudes to, race, which were closely linked to Umbanda’s development.91 Three racially-loaded processes appear to have been central
in the early formalization of the religion: (1) the empretecimento (blackening) of Kardecism, as Spiritists sought more stimulating rituals;
(2) the embranquecimento (whitening) of Candomblé due to the presence
of increasing numbers of white members, often new immigrants, and the
formation of a “low Spiritism” among the lower classes; and (3) the
reception of indigenous spirits by Kardecist groups, and the subsequent
rejection of these caboclos as unevolved.92 In the following decades, institutionalized groups distanced themselves from African elements
through processes of legitimization, in part reflecting Brazil’s “myth of
three races” and the ideology of “racial democracy.”93 In the 1960s
rejection of this ideology as racist, Umbanda was again positioned to
respond differentially, with its spectrum of variants, from Kardecism-like
to Candomblé-like. Candomblé, on the other hand, with its bipolar
(vs. Umbanda’s multi-polar) syncretism, became a primary site of
contestation as examinations of racism in Brazil became more critical in
the 1960s and 1970s.94 As different evaluations of the preto velho spirits
in the south and north suggest, Umbanda, by virtue of the extent
to which it refracts its social context in a spectrum of religious forms,
is not as polarized as Candomblé in the face of racialized social
tensions. It continues to occupy a complex spectrum even as the poles
themselves shift.
CONCLUSION
Scholarship on Umbanda has been hampered by four limiting perspectives. First, Umbanda’s historical, sociological, and ritual uniqueness
has been occluded by its being characterized as one among the AfroBrazilian traditions. Second, the resulting comparison with Candomblé,
framed as the prototypical Afro-Brazilian religion, characterizes Umbanda
as secondary, an impure mixture with less fidelity to African roots. Third,
overreliance on studies of Umbanda in the cities of Rio de Janeiro
and São Paulo, has led to the neglect of other areas of the county,
including the interior of those two states. Fourth, as a corollary of these
factors, there has been insufficient emphasis on doctrinal, ritual, and
institutional variation as a core characteristic, rather than a marginal
phenomenon. This last, most basic, limitation reflects attempts to characterize Umbanda in terms of a core set of beliefs, practices, and
organizational forms, along with a historiographic emphasis on the birth
or origin of the religion.
26

Engler: Umbanda and Africa
Umbanda is worthy of study above all because in its internal variation, and not in any core set of beliefs or practices, it refracts its social
context to a remarkable extent. Arguably, this is a feature common to
all religious traditions. However, its prominence in Umbanda underlines the value of studying this neglected religion as an exemplary case
of relations between religion, power, and social differentiation. It is an
unfortunate side-effect of tendencies to essentialize religions—e.g., to
emphasize generic and normative models of world religions in the
classroom—that the social dynamism of “hybrid” traditions is too often
passed over in silence. By defining Umbanda as an Afro-Brazilian religion, and by characterizing Afro-Brazilian religions as transnational, we
ignore the broad and responsive range of variation that is so characteristic of Umbanda, thereby missing the centrality of its national context,
its responsiveness to and refraction of issues of race-based hierarchy,
exclusion, and marginalization in Brazilian society. As Paul Cohen
notes, “the Atlantic paradigm, by emphasizing mobility, fluidity, and
broad transnational frames of reference, risks obscuring the realities of
power.”95 It is important to emphasize the agency of umbandistas, but
we must do so without losing sight of the complex, and specifically
Brazilian, social tensions that frame the spectrum of Umbandas.
Research for this article was partially funded by fellowships from the Fundação
de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), the Coordenação de
Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), and Mount Royal
University’s Research Reserve Fund. I am indebted to my colleagues in the
Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados em Ciências da Religião at the Pontifícia
Universidade Católica de São Paulo for their hospitality and generosity during
the two and a half years that I spent there as a Visiting Research Professor
(2005–2007) and also to the many Brazilians who have generously agreed to discuss their religious beliefs and practices with me. Thanks also to Rebecca Moore,
Cathy Wessinger and Joel E. Tishken for helpful comments on previous drafts.

ENDNOTES
1
Candomblé is the most important and well known of many distinct AfroBrazilian religions. Its key rituals include initiation, divination, and the rodade-santo (saint wheel) in which initiated members dance counter-clockwise, to
intense, syncopated drumming, until they enter into a trance state, becoming
cavalos (horses) for the orixás. Kardecism has its roots in a mid nineteenthcentury French appropriation of the American Spiritualist movement. Kardecism’s
beliefs include the possibility of communication with disembodied spirits, reincarnation, karma, the universal spiritual evolution of humankind and a correlated
hierarchy of spiritual realms, ranging from largely material to fully spiritual, the

27

Nova Religio
aid of evolved spiritual guides and the hindrance of non-evolved spirits, a plurality
of inhabited worlds, a transcendent God, and Jesus Christ as an exceptionally
evolved spirit.
2
Steven Engler, “Umbanda and Hybridity,” Numen 56:5 (2009), 564–70; Cândido
Procópio Ferreira de Camargo, Kardecismo e umbanda: uma interpretação sociológica
(São Paulo: Livraria Pioneira Editora, 1961), 13–15; Cândido Procópio Ferreira
de Camargo, Católicos, Protestantes, Espíritas (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1973), 166–72; José
Guilherme Cantor Magnani, Umbanda (São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1986), 43;
Lindsay Hale, Hearing the Mermaid’s Song: The Umbanda Religion in Rio de Janeiro
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), xiv–xv.
3
Most religious studies scholars, if they have heard of Umbanda at all, lump it
together as a rough equivalent to Candomblé: e.g., “Macuba, Candomblé, and
Umbanda” are “African-Derived Religions” (Carolyn M. Jones and Theodore
Louis Trost, Teaching African American Religions [New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005], 171). Even very solid ethnographic studies of Candomblé by
non-Brazilian scholars tend to misleadingly present Umbanda as just one
among the “Afro-Brazilian” traditions: Umbanda is “a nationalized AfroBrazilian tradition” (Paul Christopher Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The
Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé. [Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002], 95, see 45, 52–53); it is one of a range of “Afro-Brazilian activities”
(Emma Cohen, The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an AfroBrazilian Religious Tradition [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2007], 30 see 214n5). See Tina Gudrun Jensen, “Discourses on Afro-Brazilian
Religion: From De-Africanization to Re-Africanization,” in Latin American
Religion in Motion, ed. Christian Smith and Joshua Prokopy (New York and
London: Routledge, 1999), 279.
4
Renato Ortiz, “A morte branca do feiticeiro negro,” Religião e Sociedade 1
(1977), 43. All translations from Portuguese and French are mine.
5
Renato Ortiz, A morte branca do feiticeiro negro: umbanda e sociedade brasileira, 2nd
edition (1978, Petrópolis: Vozes, 1999), 96, emphasis in original.
6
Edison Carneiro, Candomblés da Bahia, 5th edition (1948, Rio de Janeiro:
Civilização Brasileira, 1977), 16. See also Esther Pressel, “Umbanda Trance and
Possession in São Paulo,” in Trance, Healing, and Hallucination: Three Field Studies
in Religious Experience, ed. Felicitas D. Goodman, Jeannette H. Henney and
Esther Pressel (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 224. Further supporting
the idea that differences and tensions between Umbanda and Afro-Brazilian
traditions reflect specificities of the Brazilian context, a distinctive aspect of
these religions’ spread to Argentina is the fact that Batuque and Umbanda
tend to be practiced alongside one another in the same templos. See Alejandro
Frigerio, “Umbanda e africanismo em Buenos Aires: duas etapas de um mesmo
caminho religioso,” Comunicações do ISER 35 (1990): 52–63.
7
J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2005), 17. See also J. Lorand Matory, “Jeje: repensando nações e transnacionalismo,” Mana - Estudos de Antropologia Social 5:1 (1999): 57–80.
8
See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay,

28

Engler: Umbanda and Africa
eds., Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight
of Benin and Brazil (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2001); and Patrick
Manning, “Africa and the African Diaspora: New Directions of Study,” Journal of
African History 44 (2003): 487–506.
9
See Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The
Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), 211–62. On “tradition” as site of ideological
struggle, see Steven Engler, “Tradition’s Legacy,” in Historicizing Tradition in the
Study of Religion, ed. Steven Engler and Gregory P. Grieve (Berlin and
New York: DeGruyter, 2005), 357–78; Steven Engler, “Tradition,” in The Brill
Dictionary of Religion, 4 vols., ed. Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2005),
4:1907–11. Reflecting this critical perspective, this article uses the term “tradition” throughout, in order to highlight the importance of relational and strategic claims to normatively valued origins and trajectories. The word “religion” is
used only when attention is being drawn to a tradition that is presented, and
valued, in an essentialized and normatively institutionalized form.
10
Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 292.
11
Roberto Motta, “A eclesificação dos cultos afro-brasileiros,” Comunicações do
ISER 30 (1988): 31–43; Reginaldo Prandi, “Referências sociais das religiões
afro-brasileiras: sincretismo, branqueamento, africanização,” in Faces da tradição
afro-brasileiro: religiosidade, sincretismo, anti-sincretismo, reafricanização, práticas
terapêuticas, etnobotánica e comida, ed. Carlos Caroso and Jeferson Bacelar, 2nd
edition (1999, Rio de Janeiro/Salvador: Pallas/CNPq, 2006), 93–111; Vagner
Gonçalves da Silva, “Reafricanização e sincretismo: interpretações acadêmicas
e experiências religiosas,” in Faces da tradição afro-brasileiro: religiosidade, sincretismo,
anti-sincretismo, reafricanização, práticas terapêuticas, etnobotánica e comida, ed. Carlos
Caroso and Jeferson Bacelar, 2nd edition (1999, Rio de Janeiro/Salvador:
Pallas/CNPq, 2006), 149–57.
12
Despite early arguments for “unity without uniformity” among the AfroBrazilian traditions (Carneiro, Candomblés da Bahia, 16; see Raimundo Nina
Rodrigues, Os africanos no Brasil, 3rd edition [1932, São Paulo: Companhia Editora
Nacional, 1945]), there are significant historical, doctrinal, ritual, and organizational differences between these various traditions. The degree to which they
constitute one or more distinct families or variants remains an open question. For
example, Quimbanda is a tradition closely related to Umbanda (the “left side” of
Umbanda) that emphasizes the instrumental, often amoral, use of magic, appealing primarily to exus and pombas giras. See Fernando Giobellina Brumana and
Elda Gonzales Martinez, Spirits from the Margins: Umbanda in São Paulo (Uppsala:
Uppsala University Press, 1989), 459, and Ângela Cristina Borges Marquez,
Umbanda sertaneja: cultura e religiosidade no sertão norte-mineiro (M.A. thesis, Pontifícia
Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2007), 187–197.
13

Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 16.
Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 45. For comparable arguments, see also
Beatriz Góis Dantas, “Repensando a pureza nagô,” Religião e Sociedade 8 (1982):
15–20; Roberto Motta, “A invenção da África: Roger Bastide, Edison Carneiro
e os conceitos de memória coletiva e pureza nagô,” in Sincretismo religioso: o ritual
afro. Anais do IV congresso afro-brasileiro, ed. Tânia Lima (Recife: Fundação
14

29

Nova Religio
Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana, 1996), 24–32; and Maria Lina Leão
Teixeira, “Candomblé e a (re)invenção de tradições,” in Faces da tradição afrobrasileiro: religiosidade, sincretismo, anti-sincretismo, reafricanização, práticas terapêuticas,
etnobotánica e comida, ed. Carlos Caroso and Bacelar, 2nd edition (1999, Rio de
Janeiro/Salvador: Pallas/CNPq, 2006), 131–40.
15
Stephen Selka, Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in Bahia, Brazil
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 151, 2, accents corrected. See
also Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 81.
16
“Terreiro” (grounds) is the most common term for the cultic space of
candomblé, as “centro” (center) is for Kardecism. Both terms are used in Umbanda,
with the former more prominent for rituals at the Afro-Brazilian end of the
spectrum of ritual forms, and the latter for those at the Kardecist end.
17
Exu is pronounced “eh-shoo.” Exus, escoras (in essence a more friendly and
protective, male or female, type of exu), and pombas giras are the dominant spirits
in Quimbanda and are less central in Umbanda (Borges Marquez, Umbanda
sertaneja, 35, 91–92, 103–105).
18
Some umbandistas refer to their guides as “orixás.”
19
Diana Brown, “Umbanda and Class Relations in Brazil,” in Brazil: Anthropological Perspectives. Essays in Honor of Charles Wagley, ed. Maxine L. Margolis and
William E. Carter (1977, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 277;
Diana Brown, Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 37–46; Renato Ortiz, “Ogum and the Umbandista
Religion,” in Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New, ed. Sandra T. Barnes, 2nd edition
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 91–3; Ortiz, A
morte branca, 42–43; Lisias Nogueira Negrão, Entre a cruz e a encruzilhada: formação
do campo umbandista em São Paulo (São Paulo: Edusp, 1996), 65, 67.
20
José Henrique Motta de Oliveira, Das macumbas à umbanda: uma análise
histórica da construção de uma religião brasileira (Limeira: Editora do Conhecimento,
2008), 90–91; Alfredo d’Alcântara, Umbanda em julgamento (Rio de Janeiro:
Edições Mundo Espírita, 1949), 164; and Diamantino Fernandes Trindade,
Umbanda e sua história (São Paulo: Ícone Editora, 1991), 56.
21
Brown, Religion and Politics, 38–41; José Henrique Motta de Oliveira, “Eis que
o caboclo veio à terra ‘anunciar’ a umbanda,” História, imagem e narrativas 4:2
(2007): 176–188; Oliveira, “Entre a Macumba e o Espiritismo,” 106–16, 160–4;
Oliveira, Das macumbas à umbanda, 90–102; Alexandre Cumino, História da
umbanda: uma religião brasileira (São Paulo: Madras, 2010), 137–138.
22
Emerson Giumbelli, “Zélio de Moraes e as origens da Umbanda no Rio de
Janeiro,” in Caminhos da alma: memória afro-brasileira, ed. Vagner Gonçalves da
Silva (São Paulo: Summus, 2002), 183–217.
23
Bruno Faria Rohde, “Umbanda, uma religião que não nasceu: breves
considerações sobre uma tendência dominante na interpretação do universo
umbandista,” Revista de Estudos da Religião (Rever) 9 (2009); see Luiz Mott,
“O calundu angola de Luzia Pinta: Sabará, 1739,” Revista IAC 2 (1994): 73–82.
On the relation between the calundus and Umbanda more generally see Brígida
Carla Malandrino, “‘Há sempre confiança de estar ligado a alguém’: dimensões
utópicas das expressões da religiosidade bantú no Brasil” (Ph.D. dissertation,
Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2010), 173, 223–230.

30

Engler: Umbanda and Africa
24

Daniela Buono Calainho, Metrópole das mandingas: religiosidade negra e
inquisição portuguesa no antigo regime (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Garamond,
2008), 87–92.
25
Laura de Mello e Souza, “Revisitando o calundu,” <http://www.historia.
fflch.usp.br/sites/historia.fflch.usp.br/files/CALUNDU_0.pdf>, January 2002,
accessed December 2011. See Laura de Mello e Souza, O diabo e a terra de Santa
Cruz (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1986), 355.
26
Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro Cavalcanti, “Origens, para que as quero?
Questões para uma investigação sobre a umbanda,” Religião e Sociedade 13:2
(1986), 100.
27
Camargo, Católicos, Protestantes, Espíritas, 166.
28
Duglas Teixeira Monteiro, “Churches, Sects, and Agencies: Aspects of Popular Ecumenism,” Diogenes 25 (1977), 48–9, emphasis in original.
29
Borges Marquez, Umbanda sertaneja, 205.
30
For an admirable study of tensions between traditional and bureaucratic forms
of leadership, see Yvonne Maggie, Guerra de orixá: um estudo de ritual e conflito,
2nd edition (1977, Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2001).
31
Camargo, Kardecismo e Umbanda, 53. See also Diane Brown, “O papel histórico
da classe média na umbanda,” Religião e Sociedade 1 (1977), 38–9.
32
Lisias Nogueira Negrão, “A Umbanda como expressão da religiosidade popular,” Religião e Sociedade 4 (1979), 178. See also Patrícia Birman, O que é umbanda?
(São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1983), 94–106.
33
There are two senses of “white Umbanda” in the literature: the Kardecist
end of the ritual spectrum, and the “pure Umbanda” that allegedly originated
with Zélio de Moraes in 1908. I use the former. For brief overviews of differences between Umbanda and Candomblé, see Magnani, Umbanda, 29–40, and
Vagner Gonçalves da Silva, Candomblé e umbanda: caminhos da devoção brasileira,
2nd edition (2000, São Paulo: Selo Negro Edições, 2005), 126–127.
Roger Bastide, “Naissance d’une religion,” in Religions africains au Brésil:
Contribution à une sociologie des interpénétrations de civilisation (1960, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1995), 443.
35
Peter Fry, “Manchester e São Paulo: industrialização e religiosidade popular,” Religião e Sociedade 3 (1978), 45, 47; Maria Helena Villas Boas Concone,
“Caboclos e pretos-velhos da umbanda,” in Encantaria brasileira: o livro dos
mestres, caboclos e encantados, ed. Reginaldo Prandi (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas,
2001), 282; Fernando Giobellina Brumana and Elda Gonzales Martinez, Spirits
from the Margins: Umbanda in São Paulo (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press,
1989), 45; Patricia Birman, Fazer estilo criando gênero: possessão e diferenças de
gênero em terreiros de umbanda e candomblé no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro:
Editora UERJ/Relume Dumará, 1995), 44–5.
36
François Laplantine, “Os sistemas de representações da doença e da saúde
na umbanda em Fortaleza,” Comunicações do ISER 30 (1988), 52.
34

Peter Fry, “Homosexualidade masculina e cultos afro-brasileiros,” in Para
inglês ver: identidade e política na cultura brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar,
1982), 13. See also Concone, “Caboclos e pretos-velhos,” 284–286; Brumana
and Martinez, Spirits from the Margins, 40–2.
37

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Nova Religio
38

Reginaldo Prandi, Os candomblés de São Paulo: a velha magia na metropole nova
(São Paulo: Hucitec/Edusp, 1991), 58.
39
Esther Pressel, “Spirit Magic in the Social Relations between Men and Women
(São Paulo, Brazil),” in A World of Women: Anthropological Studies of Women in the
Societies of the World, ed. Erika Bourguignon (New York: Praeger, 1980), 123–5.
40

On patron-client relations, see Shepard Forman and Joyce F. Riegelhaupt,
“The Political Economy of Patron-Clientship: Brazil and Portugal Compared,”
in Brazil: Anthropological Perspectives. Essays in Honor of Charles Wagley, ed. Maxine
L. Margolis and William E. Carter (New York: Columbia University Press,
1979): 379–400.
41
Fry, “Homosexualidade,” 75.
42
Michel Agier, “Ethnopolitique: racisme, statuts et mouvement noir à Bahia,”
Cahiers d’Études africaines 32:125 (1992): 57; Florestan Fernandes, O negro no
mundo dos brancos, 2nd edition (1972, São Paulo: Global Editora, 2007), 65–6,
83–8, 105–17.
43
Steven Engler, “Ritual Theory and Attitudes to Agency in Brazilian Spirit
Possession,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 21:4 (2009): 460–492, and
Steven Engler, “Brazilian Spirit Possession and Theory of Ritual,” ARC: The
Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University (2009): 1–28.
44

Cesar Romero Jacob, Dora Rodrigues Hees, Philippe Waniez and Violette
Brustlein, Atlas da filiação religiosa e indicadores sociais no Brasil (São Paulo:
Edições Loyola, 2003), 101–5.
45
Antônio Flávio Pierucci and Reginaldo Prandi, “Religious Diversity in Brazil:
Numbers and Perspectives in a Sociological Evaluation,” International Sociology
15:4 (2000), 633.
46
Reginaldo Prandi, “As religiões afro-brasileiras e seus seguidores,” Civitas:
Revista de Ciências Sociais 3:1 (2003), 18–9.
47
Camargo, Kardecismo e Umbanda, 99–110; Renato Ortiz, “Ética, poder e política:
umbanda, um mito-ideologia,” Religião e Sociedade 11:3 (1984), 50–1; Paula Montero
“A cura mágica na Umbanda,” Comunicações do ISER 20 (1986): 39–47; Ari Pedro
Oro, “Negros e brancos nas religiões afro-brasileiras no Rio Grande do Sul,”
Comunicações do ISER 28 (1988): 33–54.
48
Negrão, Entre a cruz e a encruzilhada, 103–41; Prandi, Os candomblés de São
Paulo, 62.
49
Yoshiaki Furuya, “Umbandização dos cultos populares na Amazônia: a
integração ao Brasil?” Senri Ethnological Reports 1 (1994): 11–59; Luiz Assunção,
O reino dos mestres: a tradição da jurema na umbanda nordestina (Rio de Janeiro:
Pallas, 2006), 111–2.
50
Furuya, “Umbandização,” 44.
51
Reginaldo Prandi and Vagner Gonçalves da Silva, “Axé São Paulo,” in Meu
sinal está no teu corpo, ed. Carlos Eugênio Marcondes Moura (São Paulo:
EDICON/EDUSP, 1989), 220–239; Prandi, Os candomblés de São Paulo; 74;
Reginaldo Prandi, “African Gods in Contemporary Brazil: A Sociological Introduction to Candomblé Today,” International Sociology 15:4 (2000), 644.
52
Ângela Cristina Borges Marquez, “Interculturalidade e ciências da religião:
reflexões sobre o ensino religioso no norte de Minas Gerais,” paper presented

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Engler: Umbanda and Africa
at the annual meeting of the Sociedade de Teologia e Ciências da Religião
(SOTER), Belo Horizonte, 12 July 2011.
53
Carneiro, Candomblés da Bahia, 28–31.
54
Furuya, “Umbandização,” 17. Attentiveness to variation on this issue raises
the possibility (albeit remote) that Negrão was too harsh in taking Brumana
and Martinez to task for holding that the pretos velhos are minor figures, based
on their fieldwork in São Paulo. See Negrão, Entre a cruz e a encruzilhada, 34,
and Brumana and Martinez, Spirits from the Margins, 290.
55
Ortiz, A morte branca, 15; Brown, Religion and Politics, 132.
56
Furuya, “Umbandização,” 45–6.
57
Ismael Pordeus Jr., “De índio a caboclo: a (re)construção da identidade na
umbanda,” in Sincretismo religioso: o ritual afro. Anais do IV congresso afro-brasileiro,
ed. Tânia Lima (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana,
1994), 113–26; Borges Marquez, Umbanda sertaneja, 220, 225, emphasis in
original. Borges Marquez traces the trajectory of Umbanda in that region from
Kardecist roots in the 1940s, through growing convergence with Candomblé,
to its present distinctiveness.
58
Luis Nicolau Parés, A formação do candomblé: história e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia,
2nd edition (Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2007), 138.
59
Rachel E. Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of
Blackness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), and Parés, A formação
do Candomblé, 132–138.
60
Prandi, Os candomblés de São Paulo, 91 ff.
61
Paul Christopher Johnson, “Migrating Bodies, Circulating Signs: Brazilian
Candomblé, the Garifuna of the Caribbean, and the Category of Indigenous
Religions,” History of Religions 41:4 (2002), 313.
62
Josildeth Gomes Consorte, “Em torno de um manifesto de ialorixás baianas
contra o sincretismo,” in Faces da tradição afro-brasileiro: religiosidade, sincretismo,
anti-sincretismo, reafricanização, práticas terapêuticas, etnobotánica e comida, ed.
Carlos Caroso and Jeferson Bacelar, 2nd edition (1999, Rio de Janeiro/Salvador:
Pallas/CNPq, 2006), 80.
63
James Clifford distinguished between “roots hybridity” and “routes hybridity”
in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Jonathan Friedman, “From Roots to
Routes: Tropes for Trippers,” Anthropological Theory 2:1 (2002): 21–36. Peter
Wade develops the distinction further in “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and
Lived Experience,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37:2 (2005): 239–257, while
Matthias Röhrig Assunção uses the same play on words to draw much the same
distinction in a less developed manner in “Brazilian Popular Culture or the
Curse and Blessings of Cultural Hybridism,” Bulletin of Latin American Research
24:2 (2005), 162.
64
Engler, “Umbanda and Hybridity,” 11–20.
65
See Liana Trindade, Conflitos sociais e magia (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2000), passim; Malandrino, “‘Há sempre confiança,” passim.
66
I am grateful to Joel E. Tishken for underlining this point.
67
Malandrino, “‘Há sempre confiança,” abstract (n. p.).

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Nova Religio
Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–219, and Joseph M.
Murphy, “Yoruba Religions in Diaspora” Religion Compass 4:7 (2010): 400.
69
Kólá Abímbólá, “Yorùbá Diaspora,” in Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and
Refugee Cultures around the World, ed. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian A.
Skoggard (New York: Springer, 2004), 317–8.
70
Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 267ff.
71
Matory, Black Atlantic, 5, 56–7.
72
Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade,” 212–13; Luis Nicolau Parés, “The
‘Nagôization’ Process in Bahian Candomblé,” in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2004), 187; and Parés, A formação do candomblé, 25.
73
Parés, “‘Nagôization’ Process,” 190; João José Reis and Beatriz Gallotti
Mamigonian, “Nagô and Mina: The Yoruba Diaspora in Brazil,” in The Yoruba
Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 91; Matory, Black Atlantic
Religion, 45. On Central Africans, see James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture,
Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
74
Parés, “‘Nagôization’ Process,” 185. On nagô dominance see Rodrigues, Os
africanos no Brasil, 342, 365; Arthur Ramos, O negro brasileiro, 1o volume: etnografia
religiosa, 5th edition (1934, Rio de Janeiro: Graphia Editorial, 2001); Arthur
Ramos, As culturas negras no novo mundo, 4th edition (1935, São Paulo: Companhia
Editora Nacional, 1979), 189–201; Carneiro, Candomblés da Bahia, 19, 23; Ruth
Landes, “Fetish Worship in Brazil,” The Journal of American Folklore 53:210 (1940),
268; J. Lorand Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots
of the Yoruba Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), 75–9.
75
Reis and Mamigonian, “Nagô and Mina,” 99–105.
76
Reis and Mamigonian, “Nagô and Mina,” 83, 99; Mariza de Carvalho Soares,
“From Gbe to Yoruba: Ethnic Change and the Mina Nation in Rio de Janeiro,”
in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 231–47.
77
Marco Aurélio Luz, “A tradição dos orixás, continuade transatlântica,” in Sincretismo religioso: o ritual afro. Anais do IV congresso afro-brasileiro, ed. Tânia Lima
(Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana, 1996), 155–162.
78
Abímbólá, “Yorùbá Diaspora,” 318.
79
See n. 9 supra. On the role of early informants in shaping scholarly views of
“pure” Yoruba traditions in Brazil see Stephen Palmié, “The Cultural Work of
Yoruba Globalization,” in Christianity and Social Change in Africa: Essay in Honor
of J. D. Y. Peel, ed. Toyin Falola (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005),
43–82.
80
Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 15.
81
See Steven Engler, “Constructionism vs. What?” Religion 34:4 (2004):
291–313, and Steven Engler, “Two Problems with Constructionism in the Study
of Religion,” Revista de Estudos da Religião (Rever) 5 (2005): 28–34.
82
Murphy, “Yoruba Religions in Diaspora,” 407.
68

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Engler: Umbanda and Africa
Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 115–48; Stephen Selka, “Mediated Authenticity: Tradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Brazilian Candomblé,” Nova
Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 11:1 (2007), 13.
84
Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade,” 205.
85
Selka, “Mediated Authenticity,” 7.
86
Bastide, “Naissance,” 445–7; Oliveira, Das macumbas à umbanda, 114–9; Cumino,
História da umbanda, 33–79, 204–207; Mario Teixeira de Sá Junior, “A invenção da
alva nação umbandista: a relação entre a produção historiográfica brasileira e a sua
influência na produção dos intelectuais da umbanda (1840–1960)” (Master’s
thesis, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul, 2004), 77–80.
87
Cumino, História da Umbanda, 204–210.
88
Bastide, “Naissance,” 446; José Henrique Motta de Oliveira, “As estratégias
de legitimação da Umbanda durante o Estado Novo: institucionalização e
evolucionismo,” Horizontes 4 (2007): 133–43; Prandi, Os candomblés de São Paulo; 49.
89
Yvonne Maggie, “O medo do feitiço: verdade e mentiras sobre a repressão às
religiões mediúnicas,” Religião e Sociedade 13 (1986): 72–86; Yvonne Maggie, Medo
do feitiço: relações entre magia e poder no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional,
1992), passim; Ana Lúcia Pastore Schritzmeyer, Sortilégio de saberes: curandeiros e
juizes nos tribunais brasileiros (1900–1990) (São Paulo: IBCCRIM, 2004). 55ff.; and
Antonio Carlos Duarte de Carvalho, Feiticeiros, burlões e mistificadores: criminalidade
e mudança das práticas populares de saúde em São Paulo, 1950 a 1980 (São Paulo:
Editora Unesp, 2005), 121ff.
90
Rohde, “Umbanda, uma religião,” 91.
91
Rohde, “Umbanda, uma religião,” 85.
92
Edison Carneiro, “The Structure of African Cults in Bahia,” The Journal of
American Folklore 53:210 (1940), 276; Camargo, Kardecismo e Umbanda, 34–35;
Ortiz, A morte branca, 4–45; Diana Brown, “Uma história da umbanda no Rio,” in
Umbanda e Política (Rio de Janeiro: Marco Zero, 1985), 11; Brown, Umbanda:
Religion and Politics, 38–48; Hale, Hearing the Mermaid’s Song, 126.
93
Roberto DaMatta, Relativizando: Uma introdução à antropologia social (Rio de
Janeiro: Rocco, 1987), 58–85; Fernandes, O negro, 38–48, 59–63; Demétrio Magnoli,
Uma gota de sangue: história do pensamento racial (São Paulo: Editora Contexto, 2009),
143–62.
94
Agier, “Ethnopolitique,” 63, 76; Magnoli, Uma gota de sangue, 157–62.
95
Paul Cohen, “Was there an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits
of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European Ideas 34:4 (2008), 408.
83

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