A Reflexive Response to J. Lorand Matory’s Retrospective on the Critical Reception of Black Atlantic Religion Michael Iyanaga Journal of Africana Religions, Volume 6, Number 1, 2018, pp. 114-122 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/683888 Access provided by College of William & Mary & (Viva) (20 Jan 2018 15:36 GMT) A Relexive Response to J. Lorand Matory’s Retrospective on the Critical Reception of Black Atlantic Religion mi c hae l iyanaga, Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia Abstract In this short essay, I relect on many of the most signiicant ways in which J. Lorand Matory’s now-classic book Black Atlantic Religion inluenced my approach to the study of music and religion in Bahia. Moreover, I present some of what I believe to be the work’s larger contributions within the broader scholarly context of its time. Keywords: Black Atlantic religion One of the recurring themes in J. Lorand Matory’s Black Atlantic Religion (BAR) is that writing can be monumentally inluential. And indeed, I can say—without hyperbole—that BAR transformed me. It forever changed my approach to research, scholarly debate, the African diaspora, and global history. In an anthropophagic sense, to use a favorite Brazilianist trope, I devoured the text and made its rigor and broad conceptual lessons a fundamental part not only of my own scholarly endeavors but also of how I evaluate and interpret the work of others. When I irst read BAR in 2009, I was a very green graduate student in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The book loored me. So much so that, in a laudatory review I wrote at the time, I praised Matory’s “bravery,” insisting that he “masterfully deconstructs . . . scholarly assertions” and “skillfully broadens the conversation.” I unreservedly characterized the book as “fantastic.”1 While I don’t fundamentally disagree with my younger self’s enthusiasm, the way I read BAR today is nevertheless quite diferent. In the eight years since writing that review, not only have I invested countless hours catching up, so to speak, with the anthropological, historical, and sociological literature that preceded BAR, but I have also been fairly diligent about tracking new developments in what Herskovits called “Afroamerican studies.”2 Moreover, I have conducted years of ethnographic and historical research on religion in Bahia, where I currently teach as assistant professor of music and culture at the Universidade 115 Roundtable: J. Lorand Matory’s Bl a c k At l an t ic Re l igio n Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia. As one might expect, then, in rereading BAR today, I am less likely to agree with arguments that I found entirely unproblematic when I irst read the book. Knowledge and experience often change our expectations, after all. What has not changed, however, is my admiration for the text’s paradigm-shifting interpretations and conceptual models, not to mention its bar-raising scope, rigor, and clarity. These are qualities of the book that have never ceased to inspire me. In this brief essay, I ofer some thoughts on BAR in the context of past and current developments, while also highlighting the very personal ways in which Matory’s seminal work has impacted my own scholarship. Cultivating an Atlantic Perspective: BAR’s Context and Inluence By the mid-1990s, J. Lorand Matory had already begun introducing—mainly in lectures and presentations, but also in print form—the ideas and arguments we ind in BAR.3 But Matory was not the only one rethinking the study of what are now called “Afro-Atlantic” religions. In fact, it seems to me that BAR was part of a broader turn-of-the-millennium zeitgeist that synthesized three decades of interdisciplinary investigation and theorization. As I see it, this most prominently included anthropological political economy approaches to the Atlantic world,4 the Atlanticizing of the diaspora largely inspired by the work of Paul Gilroy,5 a growth of general interest in globalization (including community and transnationalism),6 and Africanist historical work that sought to return agency to Africans living in western Africa during the transatlantic slave trade.7 With these new interpretive frames, theoretical interests, and raw historical data, anthropologists—building on their own ethnographic work—began to produce comprehensive, historically grounded studies that pushed the study of Afro-Atlantic religions in a new direction that clearly went well beyond the classic survivals/creolization dichotomy. In addition to BAR, some of the most impactful studies were Stefania Capone’s La quête de l’Afrique dans le candomblé, Luis Nicolau Parés’s A formação do candomblé, David Brown’s Santería Enthroned, Stephan Palmié’s Wizards and Scientists, and—ofering a view from the African continent—Rosalind Shaw’s Memories of the Slave Trade.8 All of these books took a serious interest in sociopolitical, scholarly, and/or ritual history, rejecting facile approaches to “tradition” while also seeking to understand the central role the empirical past and historical imagination played in contemporary adepts’ ideas, practices, and experiences. 116 jour na l of a f r ica na r e l ig ions All of these texts made their Atlantic perspective more or less explicit, but BAR stands out for its long-run historical focus on the Atlantic as a complex transnational system wherein people, ideas, commodities, and practices circulated with tremendous luidity and inluence. Indeed, BAR showed precisely why Candomblé is intractably Atlantic, with lasting implications for other Afro-Atlantic religions. Though building in many ways on the work of scholars that came before him—perhaps most prominently that of French photographer-turned-historian/ethnographer Pierre Verger—Matory was able to demonstrate with unprecedented clarity the ways in which, as he put it in BAR, “the African diaspora has at times played a critical role in the making of its own alleged African ‘base line.’”9 His argument was that scholars (and practitioners) may have been wrongly conceptualizing “diaspora” all along. Rather than an African past that would unidirectionally lead to contemporary New World Black culture, Matory helped show us that the diaspora is instead engaged in a “live dialogue” with its supposed “homeland,” in which both sides of the Atlantic are part of a single ongoing system. BAR’s success is largely due to the various examples it provides to show just how “live” this dialogue was. Matory’s most unanimously celebrated argument, as far as I can tell, has been that the consolidation of a “Yoruba” identity in Africa can be traced in large part to returnees from the Americas. Other arguments have been critiqued only by way of nuance. Recently, for example, Andrew Apter and Luis Nicolau Parés have, in distinct ways, suggested there might be other important factors related to Nagô purity in Bahia besides the Lagosian Renaissance. Apter insists that we might beneit from looking more closely at “Yoruba scheme-transpositions ‘from within,’” while Parés notes that strong Bahia-Lagos connections existed decades before the Lagosian Renaissance.10 Other arguments have received less support. This does not necessarily mean, however, that such arguments—despite their questionable accuracy— have not been transformative in the ield. One such argument is that Ruth Landes exerted a deining inluence over Candomblé’s matriarchic character. As I will show, the evidence suggests that Matory may in fact have overstated the case. Still, it is worth noting that if we get too caught up in the accuracy of the interpretation, we can easily lose sight of the author’s broader “dialogic” point: a North American scholar’s ideological stance can in fact construct local religious discourses and practices. That is, what might appear to be an endogenous development actually has a complex transnational history. The implications for future research directions are, in some ways, more important than the details of this particular argument. 117 Roundtable: J. Lorand Matory’s Bl a c k At l an t ic Re l igio n All of the available data show that Matory is indeed correct in asserting that men had historically dominated Candomblé leadership. In fact, for much of the nineteenth century, there were roughly two male leaders to every female leader. And even though the percentage of female leaders seems to have increased during the second half of the century, they appear to have continued to constitute a minority at the turn of the twentieth century.11 But this was the leadership, not adepts more generally. According to historian João José Reis, “The vast majority of people known to be involved with dancing for the gods, being initiated to serve them or merely becoming clients of Candomblé priests, were women.”12 In other words, though women only began to dominate Candomblé leadership roles in the twentieth century, they have always played key roles as initiates and dancers (that is, as recipients of Orixás). Both Reis and Parés note that the signiicantly higher numbers of female initiates may be directly linked to their eventual numerical superiority in leadership.13 This suggests that already by the nineteenth century there was a general trend toward female dominance. Moreover, Matory’s claim that in the 1930s “male chief priests (pais-desanto) still equaled or outnumbered female chief priests (mães-de-santo)” is not quite as black-and-white as it appears here.14 One of Matory’s sources for this assertion is an article by anthropologist Mariza Corrêa, in which she wrote that “according to data from Édison Carneiro, cited by her [Landes], in the Nagô subgroup there were 20 mothers and only three fathers; in the Caboclo subgroup, the proportion is inverted: 10 mothers to 34 fathers in saint.”15 This means that the number of priests and priestesses was only (roughly) equal when considering both Caboclo and Nagô temples. This is an important detail because, as Parés has suggested, the twentieth-century criticisms against the supposedly “mixed” Caboclo cults, which were an important factor in the decline of Caboclo temples, were linked to ideas about the importance of purity.16 As such, the decrease in male authority seems to have other causes external to Landes’s matriarchy discourse. My point is that Ruth Landes was in Bahia at a crucial transitional period, during which time female-led temples were already on the rise and purity discourses favored non-Caboclo temples, which were themselves primarily led by females. Consequently, though Landes surely played an important role in solidifying Candomblé’s matriarchy narrative, she seems to have been only one of many causal forces. In my view, more important than the question of whether or not Ruth Landes did construct Candomblé as a matriarchy is whether or not she could have. And Matory does an excellent job making his case for plausibility. The Landes argument, in other words, is an excellent example of how profound the 118 jour na l of a f r ica na r e l ig ions interactions between people and the ethnographies written about them can be. The contribution of such an argument (even if I ultimately disagree) is that it encourages other scholars to take more seriously what Palmié has more recently called “the ethnographic interface.”17 Although other Candomblé scholars had already been looking at interactions between practitioners and ethnographies, Matory’s argument about Landes is particularly powerful because it implies that scholarly discourse can penetrate a deep-seated “traditional” tenet of Candomblé while also suggesting that a discursive position bound up in transnational feminism helped to construct a practical (and local) Candomblé reality that had important implications for the future of the religion.18 On a inal note, it seems important to note that BAR largely predates what Joseph Miller has called the “‘biographical turn’ in the ‘Black Atlantic.’”19 Indeed, in the past decade or so there has been an explosion in brilliant microhistorical accounts of Africans who lived thoroughly Atlantic lives.20 Other similar projects, such as those of Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés, trace—through documents and oral testimony—the transatlantic histories of some of Bahia’s oldest Candomblé temples.21 A quick look at a cross-section of bibliographies suggests that many of these historians (and historical anthropologists) have certainly read BAR. Still, it is diicult to know exactly how inluential the book has been in the construction of these microhistories; perhaps they are all just part of the aforementioned zeitgeist. Whatever the case may be, BAR was nevertheless a pioneering text in ofering a dynamic glimpse of how real people managed and constructed truly transatlantic lives already at the turn of the twentieth century. Personalizing Black Atlantic Religions In 2009, when I irst read BAR, I was still loundering intellectually. The preliminary dissertation ieldwork I had conducted several months earlier in Bahia had left me utterly frustrated and confused. I had begun to study the music of rezas, which are domestic patron saint prayer rituals common throughout the Recôncavo (in Bahia). Devotees would sing Catholic hymns and samba songs for their patron saints, and sometimes deities would possess celebrants in order to samba dance with guests. When I asked people what these deities were called, people would tell me they were “Caboclos.” Some of these Caboclos, they explained, were Obaluaiê or Iemanjá, others were St. Cosmas or St. Roch, and still others were sailors, cowboys, or Indians. Everything I thought I knew about Caboclos seemed wrong. After all, Caboclos were described in the scholarly literature and in conversations with Candomblé adepts as a class of deity 119 Roundtable: J. Lorand Matory’s Bl a c k At l an t ic Re l igio n separate from Orixás and Catholic saints. But the pantheons I was witnessing seemed diferent; indeed, rezas were not Candomblé. Reza practitioners insisted that theirs was a Catholic practice, vital to repaying a vow to a saint. But the presence of samba and Caboclos seemed to suggest not only a diferent form of Catholicism but also an entirely diferent picture of the Afro-Brazilian religious landscape. I was unable to reconcile my ethnographic reza experiences with the scholarly literature or even with my previous Candomblé experiences. I was not sure how to proceed. And then I read BAR. BAR was not about rezas, of course. And very little of its empirical data was useful for me. But its contribution to my intellectual growth was less about its content than its scope, its rigor, and its attitude. BAR made me stop questioning my observations and experiences, leading me instead to question the scholars that had come before me. By deconstructing decades-old ideas and challenging truths that had seemed irrefutable, the book challenged convention in a way that was truly inspirational to me. More importantly, this was not sensationalism or mere irreverence for its own sake. Rather, it was Matory’s profound respect for scholarship and scholarly dialogue, together with his rigorous ethnographic and historical research, that allowed him to challenge convention so boldly. That is, without good research in the library, the ield, and the archive, there is no way to make a convincing case for the unconventional. Following BAR’s lead, then, I read and researched all I could, and when what I saw in the ield or the archive seemed counter to what other scholars had observed, I refused to back down. Instead, I ofered unconventional arguments, rooted in my own research, while trying never to lose sight of the dialogue in which I was engaged. BAR also reminded me how global the world has always been. I of course knew this before reading BAR, but the book really brought transnationalism’s antiquity to life. As such, it expanded geographically and historically my research purview. Rather than try to understand the reza tradition only synchronically within the local Bahian context, I began to look across the Atlantic. While I have yet to come across anything even remotely close to Matory’s turn-of-the-century “live dialogues,” I was nonetheless inspired to think about the reza in an Atlantic context. This pushed me to investigate the history of Catholicism in Africa (particularly in central Africa) and to conceptualize how this transnational past might be part of the reza practice, which, at irst glance, appears to be so particular to Bahia. Furthermore, recognizing how vital Catholicism-inspired practices have been to Africans and their descendents in the Americas has helped me remember how heterogeneous religion has always been in the Americas while also pushing me to rethink Catholic practices as creative Afro-American social institutions of empowerment rather than as vessels of syncretism.22 12 0 jour na l of a f r ica na r e l igions Still, what most struck me about BAR may have been the way in which Matory brought the past to life, demonstrating with almost cinematic vibrancy the agency of the Africans and African descendents who shaped what we today call Candomblé. It convinced me that indeed all “traditions”—no matter how widely disseminated—must have pasts whose actors had names, lives, agendas, and ideologies. In my own research I have yet to ind dominating igures with the reach of someone like Martiniano Eliseu do Bonim, but I have found countless fascinating stories of important people who helped construct and innovate the reza tradition in their own communities.23 In fact, one of my current projects is a genealogy that traces a single Afro-Brazilian family’s reza by looking at contemporary practice, historical memory, and archival documents. The goal is to understand how these people, their ancestors, and their community members molded—in their transatlantic context—what they today see as their “tradition.” In short, BAR ofered me an example of how to couple ethnography and history in seamless and truly expansive ways that could return agency to Africans and their descendants. Relecting on BAR more than a decade after it was published is a bit like relecting on my own growth as a scholar. This is because, as I have already noted, BAR intervened deinitively in my scholarly development; it marks a particular moment in my intellectual growth and sense of purpose. Were I to write a review of the book today, my observations and commentary would surely be more critical than they were in 2009. Ironically, though, many of my critiques would no doubt be based on data and interpretations that were meant as responses to BAR in the irst place. The continual creation of other “live dialogues,” in other words, seems to be alive and well. Notes 1. Michael Iyanaga, review of J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, in Paciic Review of Ethnomusicology 14 (2009). 2. Melville J. Herskovits, “Problem, Method and Theory in Afroamerican Studies,” Phylon 7, no. 4 (1946): 337–54. 3. Curriculum vitae for James Lorand Matory, https://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/CA/ faculty/j.lorand.matory/iles/CV.pdf (accessed on January 31, 2017). See, for instance, J. Lorand Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1 (1999): 72–103; and Matory, “Jeje: repensando nações e transnacionalismo,” Mana 5, no. 1 (1999): 57–80. 12 1 Roundtable: J. Lorand Matory’s Bl a c k At l an t ic Re l igio n 4. See, for example, Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985); and Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 5. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 6. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Relections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006 [1983]); Peggy Levitt and B. Nadya Jaworsky, “Transnational Migration Studies: Past Developments and Future Trends,” Annual Review of Sociology 33 (2007): 129–56; and Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald, “Transnationalism in Question,” American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 5 (2004): 1177–95. 7. See, for example, Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); Paul Lovejoy, “Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora,” in Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (London: Continuum, 2000), 1–29; and John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 8. David Hilary Brown, Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an AfroCuban Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Stefania Capone, La quête de l’Afrique dans le candomblé: pouvoir et tradition au Brésil (Paris: Karthala, 1999); Luis Nicolau Parés, A formação do candomblé: História e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia, 2nd ed. (Campinas, São Paulo: Editora da UNICAMP, 2007); Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 9. J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 39. 10. Andrew Apter, “Yoruba Ethnogenesis from Within,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (2013): 382; and Luis Nicolau Parés, O rei, o pai e a morte: a religião vodum na antiga Costa dos Escravos na África Ocidental (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016), 324–26. 11. Rachel E. Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 72; Parés, A formação do candomblé, 135; and João José Reis, “Candomblé in Nineteenth-Century Bahia: Priests, Followers, Clients,” Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 1 (2001): 120. 12. Reis, “Candomblé in Nineteenth-Century Bahia,” 130. 13. Parés, A formação do candomblé, 136; Reis, “Candomblé in Nineteenth-Century Bahia,” 131. 14. Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 192. 15. Mariza Corrêa, “O mistério dos orixás e das bonecas: raça e gênero na antropologia brasileira,” Etnográica 4, no. 2 (2000): 245. 12 2 jour na l of a f r ica na r e l igions 16. 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: Indiana University Press, 2004), 196. 17. Stephan Palmié, The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 18. See, for instance, Beatriz Góis Dantas, Vovó nagô e papai branco: usos e abusos da África no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1988); and Lisa Earl Castillo, Entre a oralidade e a escrita: a etnograia nos candomblés da Bahia (Salvador: Edufba, 2008). Castillo’s book was an adaptation of her 2005 Ph.D. dissertation. 19. Joseph C. Miller, “A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn,” in Biography and the Black Atlantic, ed. John W. Sweet and Lisa A. Lindsay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 19. 20. See, for example, João José Reis, Domingos Sodré, um sacerdote africano: Escravidão, liberdade e candomblé na Bahia do século XIX (São Paulo: Companhia Das Letras, 2008); João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, and Marcus Joaquim Maciel de Carvalho, O alufá Ruino: tráico, escravidão e liberdade no Atlântico negro (c. 1823– 1853) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010); and James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 21. Lisa Earl Castillo, “O terreiro do Alaketu e seus fundadores: História e genealogia familiar, 1807–1867,” Afro-Ásia 43 (2011): 213–59; Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés, “Marcelina da Silva e seu mundo: novos dados para uma historiograia do candomblé ketu,” Afro-Ásia 36 (2007): 111–51; and Luis Nicolau Parés and Lisa Earl Castillo, “José Pedro Autran e o retorno de Xangô,” Religião e Sociedade 35 (2015): 13–43. 22. Michael Iyanaga, “Why Saints Love Samba: A Historical Perspective on Black Agency and the Rearticulation of Catholicism in Bahia, Brazil,” Black Music Research Journal 35, no. 1 (2015): 119–47; and Iyanaga, “A história católica do samba na Bahia: Relexões sobre a Diáspora Africana,” in Anais do VII ENABET, ed. María Eugenia Domínguez (Florianópolis: Encontro Nacional da Associação Brasileira de Etnomusicologia, 2015), 488–89. 23. Michael Iyanaga, “New World Songs for Catholic Saints: Domestic Performances of Devotion and History in Bahia, Brazil” (Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2013), 402–49.