Resistence, Redemptionn, and Engendered Representations of Slavery.pdf

preto velho: Resistance, Redemption, and Engendered Representations of Slavery in a Brazilian Possession-Trance Religion Author(s): Lindsay Lauren Hale Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 24, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 392-414 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/646756 . Accessed: 01/09/2014 11:57 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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preto velho: resistance, redemption,and engendered representations of slavery in a Brazilian possession-trance religion

LINDSAY LAUREN HALE-University of Texas, Austin

ThePretosVelhospresenta strikingcontrastto theCaboclos[theproudspiritsof BrazilianIndians].These "OldBlacks"arethe spiritsof Africansenslavedin Brazil,generallyslavesfromBahia.All areelderly.... as humble,patient,long-suffering, andgood.Umbandaleadersrepeatedlystressed Theyarecharacterized to me theirhumildade(humility),bondade(friendship), andcaridade(charity)andtendedto characterize themas subservient.... [theyrepresent]the FaithfulSlave,or moreprecisely,UncleTom. -Diana Brown,Umbanda:Religionand Politicsin UrbanBrazil Lookhere:No one messeswith me! Ifyou don't respectthe law of thisold nego [a colloquialtermfor Black,withno acceptableEnglishgloss],leave, hitthe road,or stayso Ican breakyou. To fightwiththis negao [a big nego] is no joke;I am the big machoof the slavequarters,I am in the path,I am in the dust of the road. -The pretovelho FatherSebastiao,stomping,muttering,glaring,and spitting out his wordsas he dressesdown the personnelof the SpiritualCenterof FatherJoaquimfromAngola the imageof [the]PretoVelho [as UncleTom]lends itselfas well to a radicallydifferentinterpretation. -Diana Brown,Umbanda:Religionand Politicsin UrbanBrazil The humble, kindly preto velho (old slave) is indeed open to a radically different interpretation. When Father Sebastian tells off the mediums and clients there in the senzala (slave quarters),it is not the image of a Brazilian Uncle Remus or Uncle Tom that comes to mind. In speech and bearing, Father Sebastian-at least in this moment, because Father Sebastian has many moods-is threatening, accusatory, and committed to his law. Nor is his "brother,"Father Joaquim, namesake of the SpiritualCenterwhere FatherSebastian railsagainst the lax, an elderly Uncle Tom. My friend Ze1 tells me that FatherJoaquim did not die an old man, nor was he ever a slave in Brazil: FatherJoaquim, it seems, died in the interior of Angola leading a guerrilla campaign against the slave trade. Other consultants give a ratherdifferent but equally heroic version: they relate that FatherJoaquim led a rebellion against his master. Captured, he refused to give up the hideout of his followers and was tied to the trunk of a tree. As the whip came down on his back, FatherJoaquim gave a mighty thrust, uprooting the tree and propelling it, and himself, into the heavens.2 The old-slave spirits (pretos velhos) of the Brazilian Umbanda religion have historically been dismissed as stereotypes supporting racist ideologies. While this appears to be true in many cases, old-slave spirits also offer searing indictments of racism and penetrating, critical explorations of the articulations of race, gender, morality, and power in Brazilian society. I argue that, through these spirits, Umbanda mediums embody conflicting representations of the moral dimensions of Brazilianhistorythat relate to their contemporary concerns with self and national identity. [Umbanda, Afro-Brazilian religion, Brazilian racial ideology, spirit possession, embodied representations of race, gender, self, and other] American Ethnologist24(2):392-414. Copyright? 1997, American Anthropological Association.

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In this article I focus on the construction of the spirits of Afro-Brazilian slaves in the spirit-possession religion known as Umbanda. Umbanda, which has its roots in the religions brought from Africa during the slave trade, is practiced by millions of contemporary Brazilians who seek out spiritsof "old Blacks" like FatherJoaquim, along with those of Indians, cowboys, and other symbols of national identity in dealing with all kinds of personal problems. My purpose in this article is not to settle the question of whether the pretos velhos, these "old Blacks," represent abject submission or heroic resistance. As we will see, they can represent both extremes and all points in between. Instead I will focus on pretos velhos as mediators linking Umbanda bodies with key themes in Braziliancollective memory and religious ideology. These spirits constitute sign vehicles through which Umbandistas interpretand explore themes of racism, national identity, domination, suffering, and redemption within a moral framework broadly informed by the values and motifs of popular Catholicism. At the same time, pretos velhos work a reciprocal semiotic movement: through them, these cultural discourses and collective memories constitute bodily experience by way of spiritpossession and spiritperformance. As Paul Stoller suggests (1994), it is the lattermovement that makes spiritpossession such a potent vehicle for collective memory: enacted through the body, made present through speech and movement, boldfaced by a tangible force taking over the body, a people's vision of their past is saturated with affect and becomes the site of lived experience. The model of spirits as sign vehicles mediating between cultural themes and bodily experience suggests an interpretivestrategythat moves in multiple directions. The major thrustof my analysis is a movement from the bodily expression that is spirit possession toward stories, legends, mass-media presentations, and other discourses concerning slavery, racism, and domination. I seek to imbed spirit performances and talk of spirits in a wider web of Brazilian discourses; in this sense my task is a hermeneutic that links performance, text, and talk. At the same time, I sketch relationships between old slaves and the sociological contexts of mediums-for example, as women, as working-class individuals of Afro-Brazilian ancestry, as upper-middle-class white individuals, and so forth, contexts that make their performances readable through a grammar of social action. Again, the movement is outward, from discrete moments of bodily expression and testimony toward wider, temporally extended parameters. But there must be a reciprocal move, from cultural and social contexts inward to the possessed body. Here I will make use of Paul Stoller's (1994) recent comments on the distinction between "inscription"and "incorporation."Following the direction set by Foucault (1979) and Bourdieu (1977), anthropologists emphasize the way that culture (or power) "inscribes"itself on the body through habits of movement, gestures of submission or dominance, ornamentation, disciplines, postures, punishments, and still other means. Of equal importance to bodily semiotics is the fact that these inscriptions are experienced as sensual presences; in a word, they are "incorporated." Conversely, the inner, embodied experiences of persons inscribe themselves on the surfaces of the body for others to read-as when, for example, we say that the lines on a face tell the story of a life. My procedure will be to "read"-perhaps not an appropriate metaphor; "feel" might be better-my way from spirit performances toward the bodies of mediums, and from the bodies of mediums toward their representations of these old-slave spirits, as I travel the more conventional route from performance to social and cultural context. My interpretive strategy casts the pretos velhos as polysemic explorations of the moral dimensions of race and domination. I worry, however, that my analysis, focused as it is on my concerns with the inscription and incorporation of ideology and imagination, might give the mistaken impression that Umbanda is mainly about working out deep ambivalences about national identity. It is not; Umbanda is mostly about healing and spirituality.The pretos velhos are, first and foremost, spirits who help people with the problems of life. But questions about being, and being Brazilian, are the warp woven into the pragmatic and mystical woof of Umbanda spirits: it is not only the ethnographer's presence that elicits the telling stories about

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a FatherJoaquim. As they carry out their imminently practical work, the pretos velhos speak to recurring, unsettled questions of Afro-Brazilianexperience and national identity. It is in this domain of questioning and exploring and expressing that the pretos velhos become significant for us, in a way that is complementary, although not identical, to their significance for Umbandistas. What is most strikingabout the pretos velhos from a sociological perspective is the variety of attitudes they express toward the historical figure of the Afro-Brazilian.This is not surprising, however, when we consider the history of Umbanda and the diversity of its membership. Although Umbanda makes its firstappearance in the state of Rio de Janeiro in the early decades of the 20th century, its roots go back several centuries, while its specific beliefs and practices place it within a broader family of Afro-Brazilian and African diaspora religions, such as Brazilian Candomble and Xang6, the Santeriaof Cuba, and Haitian Vodou.3 Umbanda differs (at least in degree) from these traditional Africandiaspora religions in its eclectic incorporation of non-African beliefs and practices. As described by the turn of the century journalist Paulo Barreto(1976[1904]), Rio de Janeiro seems to have been a fertile ground for nurturinga new religion combining African, Spiritualist,and Catholic elements. A large Afro-Brazilianpopulation, a significant portion only released from slavery by the abolition of 1888, continued to practice African religions devoted to the worship of nature deities known as Orixas and cultivated the spiritsof the dead. Practitionersfaced considerable police repression and ridicule from "respectable" society. The Catholic Church in particularobjected to these religions, not only because their followers traffickedin spirits(an abomination) and worshipped Africandeities in a strategy of accommodation, but also because, adding insult to injury,they identified their Orixas with Catholic saints and utilized Catholic icons and holy water in rituals. While little could be done to satisfy the Church on those counts, some practitionerssensitive to the charges of barbarismand the stigma of Afro-Brazilianidentity set out to "whiten"their religion, ridding it of such practices as animal sacrifice, drumming,the use of liquor in ritual,and so forth (Brown 1994; Ortiz 1978). At the same time, they redefined themselves as followers of a new form of Spiritualism.Spiritualismhad been introduced to Brazil from France in the 1860s and quickly developed a vigorous following among members of the white elite (Barreto1976[1904]; Bastide 1978; Brown 1994; Camargo 1961). While Spiritualistscommuned with the shades of eminent scientists, statesmen, physicians, philosophers, and other paragons of elite culture, Umbandistas received the spirits of plantation slaves, Indians, backwoodsmen, streetwalkers, and rogues-the ancestors of the common people. This new synthesis-a more or less "de-Africanized" Afro-Brazilianreligion, suffused with the doctrines of the French spiritualistAllen Kardec and retaining imagery and ethical precepts from Catholicism-became known as Umbanda. It proved successful. Umbanda grew beyond its original base of working-class and impoverished Afro-Brazilians (whence it still finds the bulk of its membership), attracting a considerable following among the white middle-class. By the 1990s researchers estimated its participantsat 30 million (Brown 1994:xviii). Umbanda is actually far more diverse than my thumbnail sketch indicates. While Spiritualist rhetoric and practices and Catholic symbols and sentiments permeate Umbanda, the extent to which Umbandistas de-Africanize their religion varies considerably. Practitionersat the Spiritual Center of FatherJoaquim explicitly emphasize the Africanness of their Umbanda; they proudly claim that their Umbanda is organically linked to Angola, growing from a root literally planted in the dirtfloor by FatherJoaquim. At FatherJoaquim's,the drums and traditional Afro-Brazilian styles of dancing are part of a yearly cycle of blood sacrifices celebrating the Orixas and the African heritage. Meanwhile, my consultants at the House of Saint Benedict, who with equal pride point to the "purity"of their Umbanda, so completely reject any identification with Afro-Brazilthat one of the pretos velhos I interviewed there told me that Umbanda originated on the planet Cabal and was the religion of Atlantis. The only thing "African"about it, he told

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me, is its imperfections; it seems that when Atlantis disintegrated, its survivors washed up on the Guinea coast. They taught Umbanda to the "primitives"they encountered there, who of course got it wrong. The work of enlightened spirits, he went on, is to correct the mistakes these "simple"but good people inflicted on the true faith. The contrast between this story of Umbanda from outer space and the Angolan root of Father Joaquim captures the range of Umbanda attitudes about race-a diversity and ambivalence embodied in the "radically different" representations of the pretos velhos spirits. The multiplicity of interpretationsof pretos velhos-a diversity that figures prominently in this article-is not only a reflection of Brazil's historical ambivalence about race (Degler 1986; Skidmore 1974) but also a function of Umbanda's diverse following. The medium whose preto velho told me that Umbanda comes from Cabal and only accidentally (and unfortunately, in his opinion) by way of Africa is a middle-aged white man of means. His colleagues at the House of Saint Benedict are practically all of upper-middle-class standing and include the wives of ranking military officers and businessmen. My friend Ze, who tells of FatherJoaquim's heroic struggle against oppression, is the son of Afro-Brazilianand Afro-Brazilian-indigenous parents; his skin is black, he lives in a hillside shantytown, and he is acutely aware of race and class inequality. I worked most intensively with four Umbanda groups. Two of the groups were composed almost exclusively of white participants who were of middle-class or higher status. A third group was located in Rio's sprawling Rocinha slum; its members all lived in that neighborhood and included mulattos, black Afro-Brazilians,and whites. The fourth group, the Spiritual Center of Father Joaquim, draws its members from nearby shantytowns, distant working-class and poor neighborhoods, and the wealthy condominiums of the South Zone of Rio. As with the Rocinha group, racial categories are almost equally represented. While ethnographic facts such as these provide contexts for understanding strikingly different ways Umbandistas construct their pretos velhos, I hasten to point out that they only partiallyexplain the shapes taken by these symbols of the Afro-Brazilian. Ambivalence about race runs deep within individuals regardless of their circumstances (Degler 1986), and the slave's dilemma admits of multiple (admittedly tragic) solutions. My approach, therefore, is to employ these contexts of class and race not as reductionist solutions but rather as clues in working through the interpretive puzzle. My interpretive strategy casts the pretos velhos as sign-vehicles through which Umbandistas speak to and embody Brazilian dramas of race and power. I focus on stories about and representations of pretos velhos in terms of three recurrent, interrelatedthemes. These include the inscription of power on the torturedbody of the preto velho; the sexualization and gendering of unequal power; and what I will call the quasi-Hegelian dialectic of master and slave and the slave's struggle for a full humanity, which in the emic perspective takes the form of a dialectic between rebellion and an explicitly Christianethos of spiritualtranscendence. I must firsttake a moment to outline the lattertheme, as it is the key to the others in my analysis. According to Hegel, the moral problem of the slave is that he has relinquished a measure of his humanity by submittingto the master, instead of (as the master was willing to do, and as the rebel FatherJoaquim did) risking his life in a bloody battle for dominance. He has chosen life over freedom. There is a moral stigma attached to this choice, and it is not only Hegel who sees the slave diminished: according to Roger Bastide, a French sociologist who spent most of his professional life in Brazil grappling with the sociology of race and religion and who was in fact an initiated member of an Afro-Brazilianreligion, Brazilian ideology elevates the Indian over the African, because the Indigenous population-at least in folk theory-resisted and did not submit to slavery (Bastide 1978). Indeed, some Umbandistas maintain that the spiritsof Indians are more "advanced" or "evolved" than those of Afro-Brazilian slaves, and it is a fact that in Umbanda spirit performance, as in Romantic Brazilian fiction, the Indian embodies physical courage, pride, and nobility-precisely the qualities negated by enslavement. This suggests one

preto velho: resistance and redemption

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option for slaves seekingto transcendtheirdegradedcondition:they can rebel, at the riskof theirlives;no matterthe outcome,theywill live or die freeand full, like FatherJoaquim.Aswe shallsee, this is a recurrent,althoughnotthe mostcommon, resolutionof old-slavelives. Anotheroption, diametricallyopposed in theorybut frequentlyentwinedwith rebellionin fact,chooses life and finds redemptionin two ideologicalmoves associatedwith Christianity. One of these is to assertthathumanvalue is an inherentcondition,with which all areequally endowed and that cannot be obtainedor forfeitedthroughpower;the slave's humiliationis as the master'sbrutalsin, irrelevant to the slave'smoralcondition.Theothermove reinterpreted redefineslife, not as somethingthat one risksin a bloody strugglefor recognition-indeed, withinthis ideology,thatconstitutespridefulsin-but ratheras an arenaforwork,suffering,and demonstrationof the core value of humility.Thiswill be rewardedbeyond the grave in an egalitarianutopiaepitomizinghow the worldshouldbe;while in the sphereof earthlyexistence slaves realize their selfhood through labor (Hegel 1967:238-239) and learn moral truths essential to humanity'sprogresstoward species realization.4Slaves do not transcendtheir conditionthroughconfrontationbut by the selflessconstructionof a moralcommunity.This option,which at a superficiallevel mightgive the old slavethe appearanceof an "UncleTom" but actually involves its own formsof heroism,is far more common in the storiesof these Umbandaspiritsthanthe bloodyrebellionsof FatherJoaquimandotherslikehim.Eitheroption opens spaces for deep and variedexplorationsof dominationand the moralsignificanceof possible responsesto it-explorations, it should go without saying, relevantnot only to the folk-historical contextsof spiritperformanceand narrative,butalso to the contemporaryissues of powerfacing Umbandistas. of slave days,these characterizations of Whatarethe themesof these dramasand narratives victimization?FatherJoaquimexemplifiesone theme: rebellionand the price of resistance. Pretosvelhos also expound on the sexualityof oppression;we will hearthe storiesof slave women spiritswho were abused by lustfulmasters,with the testimonyof spiritswho were deprivedof theiroffspringandof the rightto choose in mattersof romanticlove. The hypocrisy of kindmastersis anothertheme, as is the dreadedpowerof sorcery.Butmost commonof all is the theme of torture.I thus beginwiththe matterof physicaltorment. the body inscribed Inthe opening scene of Quilombo,the enormouslysuccessfulepic movie concerningthe runawayslave communityof Palmares,BraziliandirectorCarlosDiegues presentsa scene of terriblydarkcomedy. A Portuguesematron,the ladyof the manor,is seated in a sedanchair, beingattendedby severalslaves,ina vastfieldof sugarcane.She is readingaloudfroma manual. At herfeet, a slave is beingtorturedin a device knownas the tronco(trunk),which is actually a kindof stocks, in this case with holes forthe neck and wrists.While anotherslave tightens the device on the screamingvictim,ourreadertells us thatthe ringcan be tighteneduntilblood spurtscopiouslyfromthe miscreant'smouth,inflictingconsiderablepain but doing no lasting damageto the valuableworker.Atthis point,the slave screamsone lasttime beforegivingup the ghost."Damnit! How could he do thisto me!"5 the mistresshisseswhen she realizesthat her disciplinarytechnologyand instructionmanualhave just cost her a considerablecapital investment. Diegues's bitterjest points to one half of the curiouslyschizophrenicnationalview of Brazilianslavery.On the one hand, there is the notionthat Brazilianslaverywas somehow benign,full of cases of kindnessand affectionbetween masterand slave. On the otherhand, there is a fascinationwith the crueltyof slavery,especially in regardto physicaltorture.The opening scene of Quilombois one example of the imageryof slave torturethat permeates Umbandistas'constructionsof theirpretosvelhos' lives;othersare thereto be seen in starkly

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disturbing exhibits of torture instruments such as those at the Museum of the Negro or in magazine commemorations that appeared in the 1988 centennial of emancipation day.6 I never interviewed a preto velho who did not suffertrauma. These experiences are inscribed not only in discourse, but, more eloquently, on the body itself. Most pretos velhos exhibit characteristic signs of crippling and old age; pretos velhos walk hunched over their canes, their joints stiff, their movements labored and palsied. Many need to be helped to the little white benches-said to be typical of the rustic furnishingsof the slave quarters-at which they sit to consult their clients. They look at their interlocutors with watery eyes, suggesting the failing vision of age; their discourse wanders, touched with senility, and their voices are often high-pitched and raspy. Their difficulties are not just a function of age. Their bodies are worn-out from hard labor, torture, hunger, and accident. This is understood; most of the time, the physical signs stand as a mute reproach for the suffering inflicted by the allegedly benevolent system of Brazilian slavery. One preto velho with whom I worked, Rei Congo (Congo King),stuttered and suffered strong facial tics, although his medium displayed neither symptom. Despite our close relationship, Congo King would always change the subject and suffer worse nervous symptoms when I asked about this. Clients and other pretos velhos explained to me that Rei Congo King's difficulties were the resultsof head injuries sufferedduring beatings meant to break the enslaved king's spirit. Another Congo King I know suffers convulsions when he prays over clients. His story is essentially the same, and he, too, leaves it for others to tell. It seems that the stories of torture, although inscribed on the body, evoke memories too bitter for speech, memories that might upset the ethic of forgiveness and gentleness that predominate in preto velho representations. A song that evokes these spirits alludes to the pain of memory: vov6 nao quercascarade coco no terreiro porquefaz lembraro tempono cativeiro

grandmother doesn'tlikecoconutshellsin theterreiro becauseit remindsherof the time in captivity

Another such song expresses an aversion to conflict, which all too often had disastrous consequences for slaves: La,no cruzeirodivino e onde as almasvao passear eles estao felizes quandoas pessoascombinam e choramquandoeles discordam

there,in the divinecruzeiro7 is wherethe soulsgo passingby they arehappy when peopleget along andcrywhen they disagree

Physical violence is only one of the tortures inscribed by slavery on the pretos velhos. I recall the feast at FatherJoaquim's in celebration of the pretos velhos, held every year on the weekend nearest Emancipation Day on May 13. The high point of the celebration was the feast. To the sound of a solemn African hymn to the supreme deity, Olorum, mediums brought great baskets of food-fruits of all kinds, fish, corn, vegetables-into the terreiro, balancing the abundance on their heads as they circled the open floor. Two huge pots, one of rice, the other of black beans-each holding perhaps 20 gallons of food-were brought from the kitchen9 and set out on straw mats on the floor. The senior mediums received their old-slave spirits and sat around the enormous feast. Many seemed content, some were smiling, while many had tears running down their faces. It was explained to me that the slaves came from an Africa where there had always been plenty to eat. Perhapstheir worst pain in Brazilwas chronic hunger. So, every year, Umbandistas prepare the pretos velhos a magnificent feast, a living reminder of their suffering and its passage. That, my interlocutor went on, is why we do this and why the pretos velhos smile and cry tears of joy and pain. Afterthe pretos velhos consume the spiritualessence of the food, what remains is shared by all present. Nearly 200 people attended this particularpreto velho festa (in 1991); most were

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poor, the majority black and resident in nearby favelas (shantytowns). Many bore the marks of malnutrition.These histories, it seems, are lived literally, not just figuratively. While in Umbanda theory the pain embodied by the medium's performance comes from outside-it is part of the spirit's life experience of terrorand tragedy-we can see, more clearly in some cases than others, that the medium's own experience provides a model for the suffering enacted through the preto velho. The collective memories constructed and evoked by spirit performance coincide with mediums' personal, body memories. In strictlyphysical terms, none are immune to illness and injury,especially as they reach middle age and later.Arthritis,varicose veins, chronic backache, broken bones and sprains, menopause, the gradual waning of strength and the accumulation of aches and pains: those real-life physical complaints are an ubiquitous subject of conversation among my interlocutors; mediums can knowingly embody the pretos velhos' pains because they have felt similar pains in their own bodies. A key dimension of preto velho suffering-hunger-is a bodily memory shared by pretos velhos and all too many contemporary Brazilians. Emotionally,the medium's own body memory is a reservoirof feelings shared with the preto velho. The robust motherliness, which we will see is characteristic of the old slave woman, is already partof most female mediums' experiences: if they are middle-aged orolder, they have been mothers (and usually grandmothersas well). The pretavelha's (feminine counterpart to the preto velho) maternal love-culturally styled as warm physicality and indulgent, forgiving, sentimental concern-embodies feelings already sedimented within mediums' lives as women. Many Umbandistas are of Afro-Brazilianphenotype and have known the sting of racial prejudice. My friendJorge,talking about his (Afro-Brazilian)wife and the preta velha she receives, explained in these terms: both have felt the whip-Maria Redonda (the preta velha) has experienced the lashings of leather whip; Deolinda (Jorge'swife) has experienced the lashing of cruel words, slights, and betrayals by those who pretended not to be racist but really were. The bodily metaphors accrue: the psychic pain of being silenced or, rather-as in Deolinda's case, as a woman of color-the pain of not having someone to listen is graphically materialized in Anastacia's muzzle, while the convulsions of the Congo Kings physically represent the psychological suffering imposed by poverty and prejudice on their respective mediums. Even those whose phenotype prevents them from sharing the preto velhos' racial victimization still must know from bitterexperience what it means to be mistreated, humiliated, bullied, and treated as less than a full person. These memories, often stored in the body since childhood, resonate with the spiritthat is thought to come from outside. We might even say that these memories constitute the emotional raw material from which Umbandistas form their old-slave spirits. It is no wonder, then, that mediums display a markedly emotional attachment to their old-slave spirits, and that these representations of history and national identity are so often saturated with an affective immediacy that we might not expect of characterizations of obscure personages from centuries ago. Crippled, exhausted, broken by beatings and hunger, most pretos velhos exhibit the submissive, humble, forgiving personalities exemplified by the two Congo Kings. But it would be a mistake to interpretthem as Uncle Toms, even were Uncle Tom not a damning indictment of slavery, as he is in the original novel (Stowe 1852) if not in usage. Firstof all, the wounds inscribed on their bodies constitute mute-but eloquent-accusations against the system; their injuries lay bare the truth beneath the national myth of a more "benign" Brazilian institution. Their names (Congo King,Joaquim from Angola), like the biographies of most pretos velhos and the storyof the Abolition Day feast, allude to a precapitalist, pre-BrazilianAfrican utopia, against which Brazilian historical (and by extension, contemporary) reality appears a purgatory,even an inferno. Finally,the submissiveness of (some, not all) pretos velhos must be understood within the deeply Catholic context of Umbanda ethos. The point is eloquently made by Roger Bastide: And here againthe blacks have the advantageover the whites because spiritualizationis produced primarilyby suffering,especiallyunjustsuffering.Theslavewas tortured,beaten,and cursed,likeJesus

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Christ.Hisearthlyexistencewas a second Passion,a secondcrucifixion.Yethe does not answerwrong withwrong.On the contraryit is he who, in the sweatof his brow,has createdall the wealthof Brazil, the fortunesof his masters,the greatnessof his new homeland... a new mythemerges-the mythof messianicsalvationthroughthe blacks,the mysteriousalchemythat makesgoodnessout of injustice. [1978:309] The indictment of slavery, the depiction by ruined bodies of its real horror as a second crucifixion notwithstanding, and the stories and performances of pretos velhos in many cases all critically depict and explore the ambivalences and ambiguities of the "benign" myth of Brazilianslavery and race relations. The epic skeleton of a Congo King's story-born high and free in Africa, broken by torture in Brazil, redeemed by a Christ-likemartyrdom,a history lived according to the Hegelian paradigm of the slave's dilemma-or the equally black-and-white tale of FatherJoaquim's resistance, gives way to more nuanced explorations of the complex, ambiguous space of Brazilian conceptions of slavery. Salient in these more richly articulated representations are such themes as betrayal, sexual exploitation, and ambivalent sexual relations between master and slave, as well as temporary evasions of the inexorable logic of domination by way of treacherous friendships between slave and master-in short, the themes of a morallycontradictory social space as conceived through characters whom we can no longer comfortably describe as stereotypes.

big house and slave quarters: the plantation as moral space Before we get to these more richly articulated, novelesque representations, some background is in order. The examples I will present-two preto velho life stories-are moral odysseys staged within the context of the paradigmatic constructed space of Brazilian conceptions of slavery. This is the domestic space of the plantation; it is divided between the master's dwelling, known as the casa grande ("Big House"), and the slave quarters (senzala), the space that Umbanda reconstructs when spirits such as Congo King sit on their little white benches consulting with their clients. The Big House is the center of power, the fountain of terror-but it also represents freedom from the crushing labor and privation of the field for those slaves privileged to enter the household staff. It also represents a higher cultural station, its white "civilization" starkly contrasting with the rustic senzala. The senzala, in its turn, is also an ambivalent space: on the one hand it is a rude, hungry space where bodies recuperate from labor and torture; on the other, the senzala represents the higher moral space-indeed it represents an ideal moral community, a place suffused with the combined ethos of Afro-Braziland the Christian charity engendered by the slave's "second passion, second crucifixion" (Bastide 1978:309). The two preto velho biographies I present here explore this contradictory space of the plantation by way of histories lived within and between its two poles: those of the senzala and the Big House. Underlyingthe ambivalent space ofthe senzala is a theory accounting forthe allegedly benign aspects of Brazilian slavery. Now thoroughly embedded in popular representations, the theory emerged in scholarly discourse through the writings of the pioneering Brazilian social historian Gilberto Freyre, first published in the 1930s. Freyrepleaded for "special" conditions that (he claimed) had made Brazilian slavery less dehumanizing and cruel than its North American counterpartand that had led to the development of a markedly less racist society. His argument hinges on the incorporation of (mostly female) slaves into the Big House. Sharingphysical space in itself worked to reduce social distance and foster human connections, as opposed to the merely instrumental relationships of the fields; but far more significant, Freyretells us, was the specific configurations of two roles played by Afro-Brazilianfemales in the Big House (Freyre 1956). One of these was the nursemaid, who assumed the role of surrogate mother, forging deep bonds of maternal affection with the master's offspring; the latter retained strong, lifelong

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emotional attachments to, and identifications with, their Afro-Brazilian "mother"whom they called aunt or grandmother-fictive kin terms that, by adding the distance of a sibling or generational link, clearly imply that the maternal relationship is metaphorical and affective and not biological (cf. Montero 1985:210-213). (In Umbanda, this figure and its attendant affective complex is evoked by many female pretas velhas in dealing with clients who seek a warm, forgiving, understanding "motherly" bosom of comfort and counsel for their problems.) In addition to the nursemaid, the domestic staff provided other roles conducive to relatively humanized, affectionate relations between master and slave; these included that of the elderly manservant, retired from decades of loyal service, living out a pleasant dotage, puffing on his pipe, sipping wine, and telling stories-a kind of Brazilian Uncle Remus not infrequently encountered among Umbanda's pretos velhos. The other Big House role for Afro-Brazilianwomen, one that Freyreargues led to a milder form of slavery and weaker racism in latertimes, was that of sexual partner. The masters were not racist to the point of exhibiting a sexual disdain for African women. In Freyre'swords, "the Portuguese always [were] ... inclined to a voluptuous contact with the exotic woman" (1956:185). Indeed, Freyre indicates they preferred slave women to their own wives, whose "charms"were prematurely exhausted by climate, diet, sloth, and childbirth. This preference was repeatedly cited by literaryartistsand intellectuals as a key factor in breaking down racism, and is still part of popular-but no longer of intellectual-historical discourses. The argument was that miscegenation blurred biological boundaries between races (an argument that assumes, incorrectly, that social constructions of race follow genetic facts). Second, more relevant to our material, they contended that sexual relations, even within contexts of gross inequalities of power, were essentially human and humanizing.10 The role of sexual object would seem to be decidedly absent from the representationsof and by pretos velhos. Pretas velhas are invariably old, and most follow the model of the elderly surrogate "mother."Paula Montero (1985) suggests a crucial motive behind this exclusion: the preto velho, male or female, is a desexualized being, a resolution of fears and anxieties concerning Afro-Braziliansexuality. The "aunt"or "grandmother,"the erstwhile nursemaid, is an emotional, not a biological, "mother";her generative, sexual powers are sublimated to the nurturancerole. The possibility of a genetic link is implicitlyobviated bythese constructions-as if the "drop"of African blood were a stain, not a markof national identity. The male preto velho is equally neutered; typically, he is old and broken-down-again, a sexually nonthreatening figure. Likethe "grandmother"who did not want coconut shells that reminded her of the time in captivity, Umbanda, Montero's argument suggests, does not want its pretos velhos to remind it of the threatening, ambivalent issues of (especially) Afro-Braziliansexuality. Montero's argument can be convincingly applied to many-perhaps most-representations of pretos velhos. Even in cases where pretos velhos fall outside the desexualized stereotypes, its insights are highly suggestive. They will prove useful as we look at two preto velho life stories in which the issues of sexuality and power are highlighted as they play against the social space of senzala and Big House.

the crucifixion of Father Geronimo It is not difficult to relate the spirits of the Congo Kings and Father Joaquim to the life circumstances of the mediums who receive them and the Umbandistas who seek their advice and celebrate their martyrdom.The Congo Kingwho stuttersis the preto velho of a dark-skinned man who has every reason to feel that his moral and intellectual qualities-symbolized, perhaps, by Congo King'snoble ancestry-have not been rewarded because of his color. Mario, medium for the Congo Kingwho prays convulsively over his clients, is an elderly man whose white skin has done no more for his life chances than Congo King's royal lineage: Mario lives in a

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shantytown, most of his teeth are missing, his eyes are failing, and his body is wracked by a life of hard labor, disease, malnutrition, and psychic traumas and emotional sufferings of which I heard hints but never an explicit account. As for their clients, most display the phenotypic signs of a greater or lesser degree of Afro-Brazilian ancestry and, like the Congo Kings (albeit less graphically), live the economic and social consequences of that fact. It is not so easy to see how the personnel at the Temple of Prayersidentify with the sufferings of their pretos velhos. With few exceptions, most who come there would be emically identified as white and middle-class. Despite its official self-designation as a temple, it is actually a very small group of Umbandistas who meet weekly in the apartment of its leader, a woman in her late seventies. Dona Marta, as I will call her, makes no claim to the "drop of African blood" found in the myth of Brazilian identity; she is white, the daughter of Portuguese immigrants. When she receives her main preto velho, FatherGeronimo, she embodies many things-virility, or a kind of rustic, innocent goodness (Dona Marta's imaginings about one of the many stereotypes of Afro-Brazilians)-but she does not embody her own ancestry. Racial and economic insults are not part of the experience lodged within her body; she does not suffer those specific pains of racial oppression so fluently and palpably articulated by a Congo King's language of stutterings and convulsions. That language brings forth a response from within; Dona Marta'sFatherGeronimo, on the other hand, must mediate outward, bridgingthe distance between middle-class white experience and the profound otherness of the Afro-Brazilian,while making the latter speak in some way to the former. Many Umbandistas in Dona Marta's racial and social position decline this challenge and resortto the stereotyped performances to which Diana Brown (1994) alludes, cutting short the preto velho's potential as a vehicle for knowing self and other. We would not expect mattersto be otherwise; unlike those persons of color and poverty who seek the protection and heroic example of a FatherJoaquim, the white middle-class does not experience the questions of race and identity as pressing issues. Others transcend these narrow interests,fleshing out the stereotypes in nuanced explorations. Dona Marta,for example, uses her considerable talents as a raconteur to construct a preto velho whose story at once explores the moral dimensions of the suffering of others while metaphorically expressing her (and her mostly white clients') experiences through those of FatherGeronimo. Torture and privation are not inscribed on the body of the preto velho Father Ger6nimo. Although Dona Martais a small woman, when she incorporates FatherGer6nimo the impression is one of strength, physical robustness, virility, and a quick, cheerful mind.11 FatherGeronimo does not limp, his voice is firm, and he gives no sign of age or trauma. That is because Father Ger6nimo, although a slave, lived a charmed life between senzala and the Big House until that fateful day when, in the prime of his life, he learned the truth underlying the appearances of friendshipand sexuality in a regime of domination. Here follows the story of FatherGeronimo's life and death. Father Geronimo was born in the senzala of a large plantation in the northeastern state of Bahia, nucleus of the slave-driven sugar economy. The state's chief city, Salvador, was once the colonial capital and is today synonymous with Afro-Brazilianculture and religion. Young Ger6nimo, of course, was never aware of these facts, nor even of the century in which he lived. He had a bucolic, pleasant childhood that Brazilian novelists describe as fairly common for plantation children of both races-before adolescence. With the onset of adolescence black children became the objects of labor and sexual exploitation. Ger6nimo was fortunate to have the master's son as his playmate. They bonded into a deep friendship; at an age when other young slaves took up labor in the fields, Geronimo was given the far pleasanter offices of groom in the stable and squire to his friend. When the latter became master, Ger6nimo's lot became even happier: because he was unusually strong, robust, and blessed in appearance and disposition, he was given the role of reprodutor(reproducer).That meant that he was assigned to father children of the plantation's most desirable slave women, on the theory that these

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offspring would fetch a premium at market. Ger6nimo, who does not count beyond his fingers, could give no precise number, but told me that he had fathered many, many children. His life as a reprodutor, he said, was ideal, except for two problems. First,it pained him greatly when his children were sold away to other plantations, never to be seen again. Second, his friend and master, who otherwise treated him like a brother, had denied him one thing. He could have all the slave women he wanted-except for a certain Catherine, a Creole slave assigned to the Big House as a servant. Catherine, who must have been some 20 years younger than Ger6nimo and the master, had been brought up in the domestic circle. She had been taught to read, play music, and dance in the Europeanstyle; in short, she was a young, white lady in dark skin.12It seems that the master (now in early middle age, perhaps about 40, as best I can gather from Ger6nimo's numberless descriptions) was enamored of Catherine; he intended to make her his own and live out his declining years in her company. But as it happened, Geronimo, too, was smitten by Catherine, and Catherine by him more than by the master. Discreet though they were, the affairwas discovered. The master had his lifelong friendtied to the stocks and whipped to death. This story of Father Ger6nimo resonates and dissonates with Montero's observations about preto velho sexuality and the Hegelian paradigm of the master-slave relationship in some interesting ways. Most obvious, in regard to Montero's argument, is the fact that Father Ger6nimo does not fit the stereotype of the weak, feminized old male slave. Butthere is a sense in which his virility and his career confirm her larger point about the threat of Afro-Brazilian sexuality in the construction of preto velho characters. According to Montero, the old slave is desexualized to allay anxieties over the stereotypical sexual potency of Afro-Brazilians:the old slave is nonthreatening because that slave is controlled. FatherGer6nimo's virilityis controlled; indeed, it is an economic asset of his master. But when it exceeds the master'scontrol, when it becomes threatening, FatherGeronimo is obliterated. His case is an exception that, even if does not prove the rule, surely affords a deeper appreciation of its valid foundations. The story asserts the primacy of a power structure relating master to slave over ideology and sentiment. Brotherlylove gives way to a bloody reassertionof the master'sclaim to power when Father Geronimo's transgression threatens his sexual prerogative. There is an understanding here that good intentions and liberal ideas are ultimately feckless when fundamental inequalities of power are in play. In the end FatherGer6nimo learns who the boss is and what that means. But is there something more, or different, than a threatened sexual prerogative behind the master's rage? I returnto the Hegelian idea that the master's sense of being fully human rests on his moral victory over the slave: the slave declines the bloody contest and acknowledges the master's authority and his own degraded condition. Benevolent, even affectionate though the master may be toward Ger6nimo, his ultimate authority is tacitly recognized: Ger6nimo owes his good life to him; the master is in control even of Ger6nimo's reproductive forces. The crisis occurs when Ger6nimo bests his master in this sexual contest for recognition as a man-no less primordiala venue than the bloody contest postulated by Hegel. (Thathe contests the master without wishing to-caught out, as it were, as opposed to calling out a challenge-suggests the novelesque dimension of this representation:unlike FatherJoaquim, Geronimo is no epic hero, only a man caught up in the self-revealing twists of his own character and of fate.) It is then that the master revertsto archetypalform, although in a show of violence that ultimatelyfails because it can signify overwhelming power but cannot restore honor.'3 Again in line with Montero's argument, the preto velhos, whether or not desexualized, are tragically alienated from their reproductive forces. The nursemaid is a mother-but to someone else's children. Father Geronimo is a genitor-but not a father, his name and his intentions notwithstanding. His children are sold away from him. His is a sexuality cut off from itself, fragmented by the institutionof slavery. The master's prohibition concerning Catherine further atomizes what should be whole, by denying Geronimo a unified sexual and romantic expres-

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sion, while allowing him (with one exception) unlimited genital freedom in emotionally unmarked (but economically productive) liaisons. The fact that the medium who receives FatherGeronimo and most of the persons who seek his advice and intervention are white suggests that his story and character lend themselves to questions other than race. Indeed, Father Geronimo is a versatile figure, an apt metaphor for a great variety of situations. For example, when Mario, fed up with his dead-end job, wanted to quit and devote himself full-time to the computer consulting business he and a partner had launched some months before, FatherGer6nimo pointed to his own experience as a caution: I

too was over-confidentonce and leaped without looking.... Be careful;your desires can destroyyou.... And what about this friend,yourpartner?Youtrusthim now, but look what happenedto my friendwhen love (whichis like money)got in the way.... Infact,mostof the timepretosvelhosaremoreconcernedwithpracticalproblemsthanwiththe moraldimensions of Brazilianhistory;the historyis invokedas a way of talkingaboutmorality. FatherGer6nimo's exuberant sexuality and its tragic consequences are perhaps more relevant to his role as a counselor than is his ethnicity. Inthe largely white, female context of the Temple of Prayers,sexism, not racism, is often at the root of client's complaints. Here FatherGer6nimo can be seen as reinforcing certain hegemonic structures. Forexample, women frequently seek his help in dealing with adulterous husbands, an endemic problem in this macho society. Father Ger6nimo-who, like pretos velhos generally, favors accommodation in resolving domestic disputes-plays on the cultural stereotype of men as naturallypromiscuous; there is a sense in which the thoroughly good, beloved Father Ger6nimo's happy-go-lucky promiscuity is not so different than that of the straying husband. Better to forgive and accept this aspect of men's character than to precipitate the violent rupture of a long-term relationship, as the master did at the whipping post. At the same time, Father Ger6nimo's tragic end reinforces the message that illicit sexual expression, naturalfor men, is dangerous for certain types of people-for slaves, of course, but by metaphorical extension, for women. LikeAfro-Brazilians,women are at once structuralinferiorsand culturally constructed as possessors of a potentially intractable, dangerous sexuality. Women's sexuality, again like that of Afro-Brazilianmen, is a threat, and when its expression escapes patriarchalcontrol, husbands or lovers are liable to turn on their erstwhile intimate friends with the fury displayed by FatherGer6nimo's boyhood companion. Paradoxically, by standing as a graphic example of the consequences of transgression, FatherGer6nimo reinforces the structuresof domination against which his life story speaks so eloquently.

Anastscia and Catherine: distaff modes of resistance and redemption So farwe have focused on explorations of the moral dimensions of slavery (and more), carried out through the vehicles of male characters. Congo King,FathersJoaquim and Geronimo-these are male characters, whose odysseys signify within culturally given understandings of masculinity, as, indeed, the quasi-Hegelian paradigm of bloody conflict and mastery is thoroughly engendered. What of resistance, redemption, suffering, the slave experience, as explored throughthe charactersof Umbanda's old slave women? What are the moral parametersexplored and expressed through female biographies and embodiments of Afro-Brazilianslavery? I found this question more difficult to investigate than the struggles of male pretos velhos. Female spiritstended to speak of captivity in vague terms-difficult times, privations, hard labor, cruel overseers, and masters-and with rare exceptions produced neither the dramatic signs of a Congo King,which elicited (fromothers) histories of agony and torture, northe cohesive moral tales of FathersJoaquim and Geronimo. In part this can be attributedto chance; relatively few people are gifted storytellers, and this holds as true for Umbanda mediums and spirits as for the remainder of the population. I was fortunate to have found a Father Geronimo. But I believe that there is more to the reticence of the women spirits, and it has to do with the gendering of

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domination. Where Hegel would have the bloody battle of master and slave as the archetypal scene, that is clearly a male avenue. For women, the salient field of resistance and submission was sexual; the rape, not the beating, the primordialinsult. Itis understandablethat there would be a greater reluctance to let either the anthropologist or the coconut shells of the song evoke these memories. Sexual violation leaves the victim with a culturally constituted stain of guilt and shame, all the more silencing when the would-be listener is, as I am, a man. That, at least, is my theory, and I find tenuous support for it in two stories of slave women-both of which, significantly enough, came to me by way of male interlocutors. The first I need outline only briefly. In the course of my interviews with Congo King, he directed me to the legend of the slave woman Anastacia-a story that, he said, captured the essential truth of preto velho experience. The legend, which has numerous variants, is widely disseminated through Umbanda literature and the mass media (including a miniseries that I viewed in the company of Umbanda friends). It begins in Africa with the birth of a blue-eyed girl, variously identified as a princess and as an emissary, who is chosen by the deities. It is her mission to bring the spiritual force of African religion to the New World. She is captured by slave-raiders and sold to a plantation in Brazil. Extraordinarilybeautiful, she becomes the object of her master's lust. He brings her into domestic service, the more effectively to seduce her. She steadfastly refuses his advances and is banished to the senzala. In one version, the rejected owner allows her to be raped by his white visitors and sons, producing numerous blue-eyed offspring;this is perhaps symbolic of the miscegenational Brazilian people. In another variant, she somehow succeeds in remainingchaste. In both cases, her refusalto submit, combined with the jealous intrigues by the master'swife against her, lead the overseer to place an iron muzzle over the lips that refused to kiss those of her tormentors (cf. Teixeira n.d.:13) She lives out her years in the senzala, serving the spiritualand moral needs of the slave quarters, and, using the powers vested in her by the deities, she cures illnesses. She contracts gangrene fromthe muzzle. As she lies dying, the master's child takes ill, and, as a last resort, is brought to Anastacia. The parents beg her forgiveness. With her last strength, Anastacia cures the child. She gives up the ghost, and the master and his wife repent of their cruelty and seek redemption for their sins. The legend of Anastacia is, as Congo King indicated, a paradigmatictale of preto velho ethos and experience. As a legend (like FatherJoaquim), Anastacia does not exhibit the ambiguous humanity of a FatherGer6nimo; she instead emblazons the moral lessons to epic clarity. There is brutality and defiance, the latter eventually sublimated toward the nurturance of a moral, quasi-Christian community represented by the senzala. Anastacia's body suffers mortification but she forgives her tormentors,who are (as she is) redeemed through her Christ-likemartyrdom. What is most striking about Anastacia is the sexualization of her struggle-the pursuit of the master, the emphasis on her physical beauty, the jealousy of the wife, and the rapes and the threat of rape. The values expressed in this paradigmatic tale are at once crucially engendered and boldly highlighted. Anastacia is larger-than-life-pure good in an evil world-but preto velho spiritsare always drawn on a human scale. Even FatherJoaquim, hero that he is, describes himself as a sinner like the rest of us; indeed, I heard on numerous occasions that one feels comfortable talking to the pretos velhos because they understand human frailty from their own experiences. In the following biographical sketch of GrandmotherCatherine, which I pieced together from numerous conversations with the spirit, her medium, and individuals who have consulted with her over the years, many elements famiIiarto us from Anastacia's legend appear, but they are woven around the story of a woman caught up in moral weakness. Grandmother Catherine, like FatherGer6nimo, is a regular visitor at the Temple of Prayers. Her medium, a middle-class white man, is the nephew of Father Ger6nimo's medium; his Grandmother Catherine, like his aunt's Father Ger6nimo, is a rather complex character who resonates with the romantic literaturethat both mediums read as parochial school students.

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There are interesting structural parallels: Father Geronimo, a youngish-to-middle-aged man, works through the body of an elderly woman; GrandmotherCatherine, who is very old indeed, is received by a man in his late thirties. In both cases, the juxtaposition of spirit and medium gender identities has strategic implications for the practical work of consulting: Ger6nimo's masculinity mediates between women and theirtroublesome husbands; femininity, on the other hand, constitutes a bridge between Catherine's male medium and the women who seek her counsel, effacing what would otherwise be constraining impediments of shame and embarrassment in discussing intimate matters with a man. Her medium's relative youth-he is younger than about half the people who consult her-is compensated by the wisdom of Catherine'sold age; on the other hand, Geronimo, being young, has a more empathic grasp of the passions of younger clients than would a preto velho of the age of his medium. More important for our exegesis, Grandmother Catherine's story constitutes a discourse on the moral dimensions of feminine sexuality as seen from a frankly conservative perspective. In that regard it provides a telling complement and contrast to Father Ger6nimo's object lesson concerning the consequences of transgression. Grandmother Catherine (who was not the same Catherine with whom FatherGer6nimo fell fatally in love) was born in the senzala but, in a gender-specific variation on Ger6nimo's story, befriended the daughter of the master and was chosen, thanks to her appearance and manners, to serve in the Big House as the young woman's maidservant. LikeFatherGer6nimo's Catherine, this woman, too, learned music, dancing, and reading-in short, all the elite social skills. But this Catherine was not protected by the master'sjealous infatuation;from adolescence, the white boys and men of the household pursued her and she eventually became something of a courtesan, entertaining visiting gentry. Catherine reported mixed emotions at this time of her life. On the one hand, she had internalized the values appropriate to a young woman raised, as she was, in an aristocratic, white, Catholic environment. Her ideal was a faithful marriage resulting in numerous legitimate offspring-hardly a realistic goal, given her circumstances. On the other hand, Grandmother Catherine described her youthful self as vain, coquettish, and enamored of luxury. She felt both guilt and pleasure at the fact that her beauty and charm were affording her a lifestyle far more exciting than if she had continued as a mere maidservant. Eventually,of course, time and lascivious excess took their toll on Catherine's charms, and she was banished to the senzala to live out her days. Itwas initially a terrible blow to be taken away from a life of parties, gifts, and liaisons, but Catherine eventually found new purpose in life, teaching her fellow slaves to read, attending to their ailments, and mediating on their behalf with the master. She rediscovered her Catholic sexual morality as well, although by then it was too late for her to have children. She lived out the rest of her long life in the senzala-as she put it, she spent two years serving her people there for every year she had previously spent in sinful dissipation. These-her later years-were spiritually rich, materially impoverished, and physically barren, but she was surrounded by her surrogate children of the senzala. Catherine's story directs our attention to the centrality of gender in the dialectic of master and slave. According to Hegel, the slave falls because he will not risk his life in a fight to the death with his master. This is clearly a male-centered metaphor and theory of power. It is a man who submits and a man who vanquishes another through physical force or by threatening to use it. But when men dominate women in slavery, the idiom of power is that of sexual possession, a point richly developed by Gilberto Freyre. Unlike Hegel's slave, who (understandably)falls to fear and is thus diminished but not guilty, however, Catherine is complicit in her own moral degradation: she told me herself that she had enjoyed her earlier life with its lovers and luxuries, and she speculated that her sterility-she wanted children-might have been a sign from God, punishing and marking her guilt. Congo King, FatherJoaquim, and FatherGeronimo achieved redemptions from-or, in FatherJoaquim'scase, rebellion against-domination. Catherine also found redemption from sin, a redemption specifically tied to deep-seated cultural conceptions

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of female sexuality. Iwill returnto this but would firstlike to point out the relationshipof agency, gender, and preto velho-ness suggested by Catherine's story. Confining our attention to the time before she returnedto the senzala, Catherine's life story displays a strikingabsence of agency. Things happen to her: she is born attractiveand intelligent; she is for that reason taken fromthe slave quartersand raised to have all the social graces; she is desired bymen who reward her favors; age diminishes her charms and finally she is returned to the senzala. (The agency she does exercise-coquetry, taking lovers, and so forth-largely falls under the category of sin.) Congo King, who falls within Montero's category of the "feminized" preto velho, is similarlya passive victim: slave traders capture him, his master beats him, and so forth. Anastacia, likewise, is a victim, albeit one who is not defeated. Contrasttheir patience with the masculine FatherJoaquim and FatherGer6nimo, both of whom are the agents in their own tragedies and redemptions: FatherJoaquim rebels; Father Ger6nimo "steals"the object of his master's desire. It is in the moral dimension that Catherine possesses agency. Catherine is not a passive victim of moral turpitude; indeed, she is a willing partnerin her descent from virtue, unlike Anastacia, who remains chaste (even though violated) until the end. She indulges her vanity; she craves luxury and ease; she excels at the game; and she enjoys her debauchery. Butthere is something else within Catherine, certain moral concerns, that lead her to a tortuous crisis, a dark night of guilt and suffering. When her master banishes her to the senzala, she is ready to take up the cross of charity. With two years of good works for every one spent in dissipation and sin, she redeems herself in the construction of the utopian moral community. It is Catherine who lays herself low and lifts herself high. Catherine, like Congo King, another "neuter"or "feminized" spirit,finds agency along with redemption in the senzala, where, instead of rebelling, she works toward the construction of a moral community where forgiveness, egalitarianism, and charity reign. (There is something disturbing about this split between objective helplessness and moral agency, a suggestion that the practice of men dominating other men [and women] is somehow beyond control, like a fact of human nature; while at the same time the real, eternal rewards can be obtained by focusing energy within-in this case on the community contained within the walls of the senzala. One would hope that this split applied to the specific instance of imagining slavery and not to contemporary reality-but, given the evolution of Braziliansociety over the last several decades, perhaps the recognition by slaves of their objective helplessness accurately mirrorsthe condition of their modern descendants.) It is strikingthat pretasvelhas are almost always called "grandmother"and, less often, "aunt," but never, in my experience, "mother."They are invariably beyond childbearing age (Brown 1994; cf. Montero 1985). Pretos velhos, on the other hand, are very often called "father,"and many-although only a minority-are, like Ger6nimo, in their vigorous middle years. The implication is that female sexuality, like male rebellion, threatens the moral foundations of the Christian utopia and must be extinguished by age as a condition of redemption, just as male rebellion is extinguished by bloody death and violent beatings such as those endured by Congo King.And, indeed, GrandmotherCatherine offers a revealing tale of the moral dimension of the life cycle and female sexuality. Catherine is born innocent and dies redeemed. Her moral descent begins in adolescence and ends with menopause, understood as the desexualization of the body. Female sexuality, it seems, poses a moral threatto its vehicle-certainly not a novel notion; in fact, the dangerous intractabilityof female sexuality is a recurrenttheme in Brazilian culture. Perhaps it is not entirely her fault that she succumbs to this powerful force. The fact that she does succumb places the stain of sin on her-while more or less equivalent behavior leaves FatherGer6nimo morally untouched. In any event, menopause and then old age coincide with her quest for redemption, suggesting that the female body, once activated, must close before the spiritual road can open.

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It is significant that Catherine's encounters are sterile. Catherine's sterility can be compared and contrasted with FatherGeronimo's numerous progeny. In both cases, slavery is considered in terms of sexuality cut off from itself, compartmentalized, and turned to wrongful purposes. Father Ger6nimo generates offspring who cannot be his (indeed, his fertility is a factor in production) and indulges in pleasures that cannot involve love; but, at least at the level of biology, the natural condition of fertility is maintained. With Catherine the cut is more fundamental. Her sexuality is radically unnatural, sterile. Unlike Father Ger6nimo, whose behavior does not requireyears of redemptive labor-after all, he is a man, exercising his natural urges-Catherine's promiscuity is marked as sinful. It involves a self-interested refusal of feminine virtues and responsibility, an indulgence in dangerously heightened sensuality. By prevailing standards, FatherGer6nimo is blameless. He boasts of his exploits. Catherine suffers guilt, shame, and privation. She must redeem herself. And yet, when she speaks of her luxurious years, there is a delighted, playful, pleasured innocence about it all, a gay vibrancy that subverts any simple reading of this as a morality play. Instead, it is more like a playing with: a revealing, speculative working out of such themes as the life process, prettiness, images of plantation life, fine touches of elegance, luscious decadence, and selfless, serene old age.

the dark one Whether they conduct themselves toward a bloody confrontation with the master or instead chose the religious route to redemption, preto velho spiritsembrace a Christianethic that Hegel identified as "slave religion." Even such stalwarts as FatherJoaquim advise their clients to be forgiving, to set aside arrogance and anger, to serve others and the Lord,to live virtuously, and to seek peaceful accommodation with power.14 Pretos velhos, critical though they may be in their exploration of domination, ultimately work toward a strengthening and restoration of the social fabric. But the preto velho does not exhaust the possible responses to domination. There is another type of Afro-Brazilian caught in slavery, one who radically departs from the Christian ethic. Among the most compelling and enduring of the models of the Afro-Brazilian,the sorcerer, or feiticeiro is a recurrent figure in Brazilian literature and folklore (e.g. Alencar 198711871]; Macedo 1869; cf. Sayers 1956). The feiticeiro is the Afro-Brazilianman or woman, the slave, who commands the deadly power of African magic. During the slavery era masters are said to have relied on the herbal medicines and knowledge of these sorcerers, but, at the same time, lived in fear of them because the feiticeiros could translate their resentment into the deadly magic of poisons and spells. Renato Ortiz (1978) lamented the feiticeiro as a vanished species in A Morte Branca do Feiticeiro Negro (The White Death of the Black Sorcerer). According to Ortiz, Umbanda, in adapting itself to the values of the dominant white society (embranquecimento, or whitening, as he calls it), has pulled the fangs from the deadly black sorcerer, leaving the nonthreatening preto velho as the denatured image of Blackness. Butthe feiticeiro remains a living presence in Umbanda. As Ortiz points out, the Black sorcerer is invoked in the black-magic double of Umbanda known as Quimbanda;15indeed, much of the charitable work of the good spirits of Umbanda consists of the discovery and undoing of evil spells performed against clients by the shadowy practitionersand feiticeiro spiritsof Quimbanda. Moreover, the feiticeiro has not been entirely banished from Umbanda itself. In one of the groups with which. I worked, special sessions were held after midnight in which the spirits of powerful feiticeiros were called upon to perform magic that was considered too "heavy"-and, I would add, too morally ambiguous, given that the these magic performances addressed desperate conflicts in which the client's victory entailed more or less dire consequences for the other party-for the good spiritsof pretos velhos. Even with those Umbanda groups (the majority,in my sample) who would not consider

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entertaining these spirits,the image of the feiticeiro remains a shadowy, threatening presence within the otherwise humble, nonthreatening preto velho. A song that invokes the spirit of the preta velha, known simply as "the Bahian Woman," tells us: O! Bahiana,O Bahiana, ela e velha feiticeira (bis) com sua toalhade la, dela sorriam; com sua pembana mao ela Ihesdesafia.

O Bahianwoman,O Bahianwoman she is an old sorceress (bis) with herwool towel they madefunof her [but]with herchalkin herhand she defiesthem

(The wool towel that they laughed at was-according to one informant-the old woman's woolly, white hair. Pemba is an instrumentof preto velho magic; it is the chalk that the spirits use to draw their identifyingpontos riscados'6-and to make the designs that focus, direct, and shape sorcery.) Another song, again directed toward an apparently nonthreatening, humble old preta velha assumes the voice of a client seeking the spirit'scounsel. The supplicant admits being frightened of the old woman, because she knows that in the smoke of the preta velha's corncob pipe her secrets will be revealed. The sorcerer within draws a line beyond which the preto velho's patience and benevolence give way to potent magic. Even good-hearted, cheerful Father Ger6nimo can be dangerous when pushed too far. Indeed, in one confrontation a woman consulted FatherGeronimo several times concerning her brother,whose drinkingand carousing were spoiling domestic tranquillity, to say nothing of constituting a real threat to his own existence. The woman wanted the brother to stay at home, off the street, and to turn his life around. Father Ger6nimo went through the usual preto velho procedures-good advice, offerings, prayers-all to no avail. Finally, faced with the woman's growing doubts, the young man's increasingly dangerous lifestyle, and his own impatience, Father Geronimo gave the woman an option: he would do what is known as a "strong"work of magic, but she should be prepared for the consequences. A few weeks later, the woman reported that her brother was bedridden, the result of some accident, but that it was really a blessing in that he had seen the light and was enjoying (enforced) sobriety. Some remarked that FatherGer6nimo was indeed a feiticeiro with whom one had better not play games.

conclusion The preto velho explores, at times deeply, the existential dimensions of an imagined, historical moment that lasted nearly four centuries. Everyone of these stories depicts a working-out of the fundamental existential dilemma of the slave: the loss or denial of full humanity under a regime of domination. Domination is inscribed on the body as physical marksof chronic sufferingand acute trauma. The crippling effects of labor and hunger, and the sadism written in the idiom of convulsions and brain damage shape the preto velho's body, producing the posture of an individual worn by accusation. Collective memory is embodied through these performances and is given voice through narrativesthat speak to betrayal, sexual violation, and utter cruelty. One could read such experiences as a warning about the consequences of challenging injustice and their humility as an endorsement of submission. But such a reading would be misleading because it ignores a root paradigm of the Umbanda ethos. Most Umbandistas identify themselves as Catholic and are all steeped in the Catholic traditions and Christianethos of Brazilian culture. The mortification of the pretos velhos is thus to be understood in the context of transcendent martyrdomepitomized firstby Christand then by the Catholic saints. I have quoted Diana Brown's allusion to a "radicallydifferent interpretation"of the preto velho, one that she associates with Afro-Brazilianconsciousness. She puts the matter very effectively when she

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writes that "these figures here demonstrate the heroic ability not only to survive but to transcend their experience of slavery, retain their humanity intact, and still be able to care and to give to others despite the horrors of their oppression" (1994:71). That seems to be the interpretation given to the preto velho in the four Umbanda groups with which I work intensively; what Marx and Engels, as well as Nietzsche, characterized as a slave's survival ideology of submission and escapism, is understood by participants as transcendence and spiritual and moral reclamation. And then there is the feiticeiro's path. The feiticeiro does not openly resist, like the heroic FatherJoaquim or Anastacia. The sorcerer does not forswear anger and vengeance in favor of an ethic of Christian love but instead chooses to struggle, surreptitiouslyand bitterly, using the weapons of deadly magic. Uncommon though these characters are in Umbanda, their presence, usually repressed but always available within the personalities of many pretos velhos, lends threatening edge, anger, ambivalence, and complexity to the kindly old slaves. It could be that the strongly contestatory tone of some preto velho discourse is an emerging trend. Diana Brown did her research in the late 1960s; Roger Bastide's research on Umbanda dates from before 1960. Dramatic political and social changes have since occurred. The mid-1980s saw the end of two decades of military rule that had silenced dissent (especially around the time of Brown's research) as brutally as the iron muzzle of Anastacia. Equally important, Afro-Brazilian political and cultural consciousness has increased dramatically, bringing with it a critique of history and a valorization of Africa and of Braziliansof color. There are now movies and miniseries condemning slavery, glorifying Africa and the Orixas, and depicting the resistance of runaways and old sorcerers in a properly heroic light. Of course, the light has penetrated unevenly and, in some cases, been almost entirely blocked by thick curtains of conservative ideology. At the House of Saint Benedict, where an old slave told me that Umbanda came from the planet Cabal and was corrupted by the "primitive" Africans who brought it to Brazil, the preto velho embodies racist mythology. Another old slave there, who goes by the name of Mane, told me that being brought to Brazilwas a blessing; hard though his slave-life was, it brought him to Christ,taught him the rudiments of civilization, and rescued his soul from the consequences of the unspeakable sins commonly practiced in his homeland. The medium who receives this spirit is an elderly woman whose political and racial ideology is breathtakinglyreactionary; she once explained the devastating poverty in Africa as a consequence of Karma-Africans are poor, she said, because spiritually speaking, they are little more evolved than apes. Even for the House of Saint Benedict, her attitude was extreme-but then I recall near-unanimous agreement when this same leader contrasted the saintly, humble demeanor of the old slaves with the "bad manners" and "immorality"of contemporary Afro-Brazilians. The starkcontrast between the messages embodied in Mane and FatherJoaquim suggest that old-slave spiritscan be understood in terms of the racial and class positions of participants.The man who receives FatherJoaquim tells me that his own great grandmotherwas a slave; the man who first told me the story of Father Joaquim's heroic resistance is a politically aware Afro-Brazilianwho lives in a shantytown. During visits with the family of Jorge, the man who made sure I got the point about the Feast of the Old Slaves, the conversation inevitably turned to the issue of racism;against the myth of racial democracy, his wife Deolinda and their daughter Vera cited example afterexample of how they personally experienced mistreatmentdue to "this dark skin." Deolinda's preta velha spirit in turn pointedly protests against the humiliations she suffered at the hands of supposedly benign owners. At the opposite pole of identification with Afro-Brazilianexperience, I have already suggested that for Umbandistas, who are white and middle class, these spirits provide metaphors for speaking, not so much about race and Afro-Brazilianness(which is after all not of central concern to them), but about other issues. But there is a danger of reducing a very complex, ambivalent picture to a reduced sketch of interest and ideology. The correlation of spirit and class-race locations of mediums is to some

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extentoverriddenby the ambivalence,complexity,and multiplicityof Umbandistas'attitudes towardtheirown (andothers')ethnicities.While FatherJoaquim'sbiographyis one of heroic resistance,he counselshumilityand forgiveness.The ambivalenceis not only withina given spirit;a mediummay receiveseveralpretovelho spirits,drawnfromdifferentand sometimes opposed perspectives.The woman who receivesthe threateningold sorceressBahianaalso receives,in herlittleUmbandacenteron a mudstreetwindingthroughan impoverishedhillside a warm,nonthreatening spiritwho counsels slum,the old slavewomanBrazilianGrandmother, forgiveness,humility,and kindness. While her FatherGeronimospirit is only tenuously connectedto the issuesof contemporaryracism,Irecallan instancewhen DonaMarta-middle class and of Portugueseancestry-received the spiritof a little Afro-Brazilian boy named party"forthechildspirits.Verytimid, Rog6rio.Rogeriocame atthe end of the annual"birthday Rog6rioeyed the candyandcake hungrily,too shy to askforany. Unlikeall otherspiritsI met, Rogeriohadbeendeceasedonly a shorttime. Homelessas longas he couldremember,Rogerio representedthe untoldthousandsof children abandonedto the streetsof Braziliancities. Betweenmouthfulsof cake and swallows of a soft drink,Rog6riotold of his shortlife on the street,stealingandbeggingforfood,goinghungry,beingbeatenbypolicemenandshopkeepers, and finallybeingkilledby the deathsquad"becauseI am black,poor,and havenowhereto go and no one to care for me."Rogerioengages contemporaryracism,and his messagecontests prevailingmiddle-classattitudesthat constructstreetchildrenas victimizerspreyingon lawabidingcitizensratherthanas the victimsof racismand deathsquads. Andyet Rogerioconteststhe statusquo throughthe white, middle-classbodyof a decidedly conservativewomanwhose experienceand identitycould not be moredistantfromthatof the streetchild:this is not like Deolinda'sold slave woman, symbolizingher medium'spersonal experienceof racialprejudice.Two explanations,not at all mutuallyexclusive,come to mind. One is thatthese spirits,as we have alreadyseen, providemetaphorsfortalkingaboutall kinds of otherconcerns;it couldwell be, as I believe,thatRogerio'stragedyrepresentsthis medium's own experienceof abandonmentand abuse. Rogeriorepresentsa deeplywoundedinnerchild. Anotherexplanation,one thatleadsus beyondthe closed circleof psychologicalinterpretation, is suggestedin one chapterof JaniceBoddy'sinsightfulstudy(1989)of Zarpossessionin the Sudan.In the Zar,women closed withinthe circles of domesticand village life receive (amongothers)the spiritsof outsiders,including"loose"women traderswho periodicallyvisit the village and behave scandalouslyby local lights, colonial officials,and those Westerners-expatriate businessmen,researchers,charactersportrayedin media-who are an increasing presencein the local imagination.These outsidersare decidedlyOther,butthey are also importantplayersin these villagers'social universe.The Zar allows women to bridgethe distance, to imaginethese others,to "know"them throughbodily performance.Something similarhappensin Umbanda.Thekindlyold slave,the sorcerer,the heroicrebel,the murdered streeturchin:these maybe one's ancestorsand countrymen,but, in a realsense, they are also as alien as it is possibleto be. Likethe outsidersof the Zar,they are not-self,yet they embody self-identity; throughthem,formsof Brazilianbeing-intimate andyetdistancedby historyand (sometimes)race-are embodiedas collective memory.Deeply identifiedwith the self-after all, these spiritsenterthe body and speak and act throughit-they, likethe Zarspirits,act as vehicles for imagining,exploring,and knowingthe Other.17

notes Thefield researchon which this articleis basedwas supportedby a Fulbright-Hays Acknowledgments. Researchgrant.I thankRichardAdams,JamesBrow,JohnBurdick,LisaHale,James DoctoralDissertation Hutchinson,Dan Lefkowitz,LouiseMeintjes,GregUrban,MariahWade, participantsin the 1995 AAA panel "RethinkingRace, Class, Sexuality,and Identityin ContemporaryBrazil,"and the anonymous

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reviewers of American Ethnologist for their comments on earlier versions. Although their comments have contributed to this article's strengths, they are in no way responsible for its eventual shortcomings. 1. Names of persons and places are changed in the interests of privacy. 2. The very same story of FatherJoaquim can be found in the P. Carlos de Araujo'sjournalistic-novelistic account of Afro-Brazilianreligion Macumba, As Forcas Vivas da Natureza (Macumba: The Living forces of Nature) published in 1989. 3. Umbanda and the other Afro-Brazilian religions are the subjects of an extensive, varied and rich literature.Even a sketchy discussion would be beyond the scope of this article and could not do justice to it. Among the works that have most informed my perspective are the following: Augras 1983; Bastide 1978, 1983; Birman 1980, 1988; Brown 1994; Camargo 1961; Carneiro 1967, 1991; Cavalcanti 1983; Concone 1987; DaMatta 1981, 1986, 1991; Dantas 1982; Fry 1982; Furuya 1994; Herskovits 1937; Landes 1947; Leacock 1972; Lima1977; Luz and Lapassade1972; Montero 1985; Ortiz 1978; Prandi 1991; Pressel 1973, 1974; Ribeiro 1982; dos Santos 1984; Seiblitz 1979; Simpson 1978; Trindade 1985; Velho 1975; Verger 1981; and Wafer 1991. 4. Bastide offers an apposite observation in this regard: And here again the blacks have the advantage over the whites because spiritualization is produced primarilyby suffering, especially unjust suffering.The slave was tortured, beaten, and cursed, like Jesus Christ. His earthly existence was a second Passion, a second crucifixion. Yet he does not answer wrong with wrong. On the contrary it is he who, in the sweat of his brow, has created all the wealth of Brazil, the fortunes of his masters, the greatness of his new homeland ... a new myth emerges-the myth of messianic salvation through the blacks, the mysterious alchemy that makes goodness out of injustice. [1978:309] Bastide goes on to juxtapose the two options-revolt on the one hand, Christian "martyrdom"on the other-with Brazilian(and Umbanda) ideology constructing the latteras the "glorificationof the oppressed, redeeming race" (1978:309). 5. I am reconstructingthis line from my memory of the film, which I saw several years ago, so, while this is not a literal translation, it catches the sense of the utterance. 6. In his film, Diegues depicts several themes and characters that appear in Umbanda performance and discourse. There are the cruel tortures, already mentioned. Palmares is presented as a recreation of the African utopia: a community where justice, traditionalculture, dignity, and plenty reign. There is a character in the movie (played by the veteran black actor Grande Otelo) who epitomizes the wise, grandfatherlypreto velho, with his cackling voice, love of children, and herbal knowledge. The movie is a story of resistance and its consequences, culminating in the final defeat of the community by slave hunters. All this is familiar to anyone who has spent much time with the pretos velhos. 7. The cruzeiro (crossing) is the place in a cemetery where the main east-west and north-south paths cross. It is a place of great moment in Umbanda, because it brings together the crossroads (where trickster spirits known as Exus lurk) and the cemetery. (For discussions of these ambivalent spirits see Hale 1994; Trindade 1985; Wafer 1991) 8. Terreiroliterally means a clearing. The word is used to designate places of worship in Afro-Brazilian religion; it alludes to the idea that ritualswere traditionallyheld out of doors-in clearings, or terreiros(from terraor earth). Although many rituals still take place out of doors, a terreiro is understood to be a building specifically consecrated to ritual purposes. 9. Beans in Brazil are a condensed gastronomic symbol of fundamental importance. The national dish, feijoada, consists of beans cooked with dried, salted meat, including jerked beef, and pork ears, snouts, tails, and fatback; it is served with greens and toasted manioc flour. It is said that feijoada was invented by the slaves, who used the castoff parts of pigs and the ubiquitous charqui (dried beef) to fortify and flavor their monotonous diet of beans, rice, and manioc. The practice of eating greens came from Africa, while manioc was an indigenous Brazilian addition. The anthropologist Peter Fry(1982:47-53) once wrote an insightful essay concerning the appropriation of Afro-Brazilianculture in the formation of a Brazilian national identity. Partof his argument concerns the respective social significance of feijoada and "soul food" (including red beans and rice) in the United States. He notes that while feijoada has become a national dish, served every Saturdayin practically every restaurant in Brazil, the consumption of soul food is limited almost entirely to individuals, mostly African American, from poor, southern rural backgrounds. It would seem that what in the United States is a sign of cultural difference is taken in Brazil as a metaphor of inclusion and cultural mixing-admittedly one that masks real inequality and exclusion. Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMattatells us that feijoada is a quintessential Brazilian food symbol for another reason: in eating feijoada, one sensuously mixes foods of very different textures, colors, and tastes, in a kind of spicy, satisfyinggustatorymiscegenation and so metaphorically expresses and participates in a key cultural value. Da Matta contrasts this with typical North American fare, with its stark segregation of meat, vegetable, potato, and sauce (DaMatta 1986:49-64). 10. Freyre was not entirely taken in by his own argument, as The Masters and the Slaves makes clear. He saw brutality, rape, sadism, the passive receptivity of women with no choice, and the inevitable moral infection of all caught up in a corrupting sexuality of absolute power and abject powerlessness. 11. It is not only an impression for the audience; when Dona Marta receives this spirit, her bodily experience is that of a strong, virile man. Dona Marta-or rather, FatherGer6nimo, because Dona Marta is

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not consciously present at those times-describes himself as feeling "good," "strong,""full of force," even "a little horny" sometimes. The spirit is, literally, incorporated, given body. FatherGer6nimo told me on occasion that I would someday receive the spiritof his brother Joaquim (not the same FatherJoaquim who led the revolt; there are relatively few names shared out among thousands of Umbanda spirits). He would tell me that he could see Joaquim leaning on me and that I could feel Joaquim's presence in the swelling of (his) big muscles beneath my skin, the stiffness in my knee (Joaquim'sknee had been injured when he was gored by a black bull), and in the restless energy of this powerful young preto velho. Those sensations, he said, were physical manifestationsof Joaquim'sspirit-Joaquim's memories of how his body had felt. Other spirits feel very different; for instance, the legs of Dona Marta's female Bedouin spirit ache from her exhausting treks through the desert. 12. This basic theme of the slave girl raised in the big house is common, not only in Umbanda. An early literaryexample is A EscravaIsaura,by BernardoGuimaraes (1988[1875]). The mulatto Isaura,interestingly enough, was not only culturally but also phenotypically white. 13. There is a fundamental paradox in the Hegelian master's claim for recognition. In defeating the slave and thereby gaining his recognition, the master produces a being who is not fully human, and whose recognition is therefore not satisfying. The failure in question here is different:the contest between master and slave cannot prove the master'ssuperior courage because the contest is fought on grossly unequal terms. 14. In many cases to which I was privy, these power-figures turned out to be bosses, business associates, relatives, and spouses. 15. Ortiz tells us that Quimbanda is an imaginary construction that was created by Umbanda to deflect criticism from itself;when critics accused Umbanda of black magic, human sacrifices, and other evil acts, Umbandistas would attributethese crimes to Quimbanda. Quimbanda thus representedthe epitome of evil, a model against which Umbanda defined itself (Ortiz 1978:133; see also Brown 1994). Ortiz is probably right about the origin of Quimbanda in the Umbanda imaginary, but, like other figments of the collective imagination, it seems to have taken on a life of its own. Now one can find books describing the performance of Quimbanda rites and advertisements for Quimbanda practitioners (e.g., Molina 1977, n.d.; Silva 1964; Teixeira 1973). In fact, during my fieldwork I interviewed a young graduate student from the Federal University who claimed to be a quimbandeiro. 16. Pontos riscados, literally "scratched points," are chalk designs that Umbanda make as identifying signatures. The designs are basically pictographs and are composed of such signs as the moon, stars, bows and arrows, swords, crosses, and so forth 17. But they do not always do so accurately or authentically; witness the case of Mane.

references cited Alencar, Jose de 1987[1871] O tronco do ipe. Sao Paulo: EditoraAtica. Araujo, P. Carlos de 1989 Macumba, as forcas vivas da natureza. Rio de Janeiro: EditoraRecord. Augras, Monique 1983 O Duplo e a metamorfose: A identidade mitica em communidades Nag6. Petropolis, Rio de Janeiro:Vozes. Barreto,Paulo (Joaodo Rio) 1976[1904] As religibes no Rio. Rio de Janeiro:Novo Aguilar. Bastide, Roger 1978 The AfricanReligions of Brazil. Helen Sebba, trans. Baltimore,MD:John Hopkins University Press. 1983 EstudosAfrobrasileiros.Sao Paulo: EditoraPerspectiva. Birman, Patricia 1980 Feitico, carreco, e olho grande: Os males do Brasil sao. M.A. thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro:Museo Nacional/UFRJ-PPGAS 1988 Fazer estilo criando generos. Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro:Museo Nacional/UFRJ-PPGAS Boddy, Janice 1989 Wombs and Alien Spirits:Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in NorthernSudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. Brown, Diana DeG. 1994 Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil. New York:Columbia University Press. Camargo, Candido Procopio Ferreirade 1961 Kardecismoe Umbanda. Sao Paulo: LivrariaPioneira Editora. Carnerio, Edison 1967 Candombles da Bahia. Rio de Janeiro:Tecnoprint Grafica. 1991 Religibes negras; negros bantos. Rio de Janeiro:Civilizaao Brasileira.

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Cavalcanti, Maria LauraViveiros de Castro 1983 O Mundo invisivel. Cosmologia, sistema ritual e nocao de pessoa no espiritismo. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores. Concone, Maria Helena Vilas Boas 1987 Umbanda, uma religiao brasileira. Sao Paulo: FFLCH/USP-CER DaMatta, Roberto 1981 The Ethic of Umbanda and the Spirit of Messianism: Reflections on the Brazilian Model. In AuthoritarianCapitalism:Brazil'sContemporary Economic and Political Development. Thomas Bruneau and Phillipe Faucher, eds. Pp. 239-264. Boulder, CO: Westview. 1986 O que faz o brasil, Brasil?Rio de Janeiro: Rocco. 1991 Religion and Modernity: Three Studies of Brazilian Religiosity. Journal of Social History 25:389-406. Dantas, Beatriz G6is 1982 Vov6 Nag6 e papai branco: usos e abusos da africa no brasil. Rio de Janeiro:Graal. Degler, Carl N. 1986 Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Foucault, Michel 1979 Discipline and Punish: The Birthof the Prison. Alan Sheridan, trans. New York:Vintage Books. Freyre,Gilberto 1956 The Mastersand The Slaves: A Study in the Development of BrazilianCivilization. Samuel Putnam, trans. New York:Knopf. Fry, Peter 1982 Para ingles ver. Rio de Janeiro: Edit6resZahar. Furuya,Yoshiaki 1994 Umbandiza:ao dos cultos populares na Amazonia: A integracao no Brasil. In Possessao e processao: Religiosidade popular no Brasil. Hirochika Nakamaki and Americo Pellegrini Filho, eds. Pp. 11-59. Osaka, Japan:National Museum of Ethnology. Guimaraes, Bernardo 1988[1875] A escrava Isaura.Sao Paulo: EditoraAtica. Hale, Lindsay 1994 Hot Breath,Cold Spirit:Performance and Belief in a Brazilian Spirit Religion. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, University Microfilms, no. AAC 9505991. Hegel, Georg W. F. 1967 The Phenomenology of Mind. J. B. Baillie, trans. New York:Harperand Row. Herskovits, Melville 1937 African Gods and Catholic Saints in New World Negro Belief. American Anthropologist 39:635-643. Landes, Ruth 1947 The City of Women. New York:Macmillan. Leacock, Seth, and BarbaraLeacock 1972 Spiritsof the Deep: A Study of an Afro-BrazilianCult. New York:Doubleday. Lima, Vivaldo da Costa 1977 A familia de santo nos Candombles Jeje-Nag6s da Bahia: Um Estudode Relacoes Intra-Grupais. M.A. thesis, Universidade Federal da Bahia. Luz, Marco Aurelio, and Georges Lapassade 1972 O segredo da macumba. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Macedo, Joaquim Manoel de 1869 As victimas algozes. Rio de Janeiro:Typ. American. Molina, N. A. 1977 Trabahosde Umbanda na foraa de um preto velho. Rio de Janeiro:EditoraEspiritualista. n.d. Despachos e trabalhos de Quimbanda. Rio de Janeiro: EditoraEspiritualista. Montero, Paula 1985 Da doenca a desordem. Rio de Janeiro: Graal. Ortiz, Renato 1978 A morte branca do feiticeiro negro. Petropolis, RJ:EditoraVozes. Prandi, J. Reginaldo. 1991 Os candombles de Sao Paulo: a velha magia na metropole nova. Sao Paulo: EditoraHucitec. Pressel, EstherJ. 1973 Umbanda in Sao Paulo: Religious Innovation in a Developing Society. In Religion, Altered States of Consciousness and Social Change. Erika Bourguignon, ed. Pp. 264-318. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1974 Umbanda Trance and Possession in Sao Paulo. In Trance, Healing, and Hallucination. Felicitas Goodman, Jeanette Henney, and EstherJ. Pressel, eds. Pp. 1 13-225. New York:John Wiley and Sons. Ribeiro, Rene 1982 Antropologia da religiao e outros estudos. Recife: EditoraMassangana.

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