Abstract
After a yearlong battle with several undefined illnesses, Iyá Oba Biyi, as Mãe Aninha was known inside the temple walls, was aware her time on this earth was running short. Gathering the temple leadership to her side, she made preparations for her transformation and passage into the realm of the ancestors carefully arranging the clothes in which she wished to be buried.1 One day, after her passing on January 3, 1938, her body was transported by car to the church of Our Lady of the Rosary in Pelourinho, the centuries-old home to the African nações of Salvador. Located near the old whipping post, it stood as constant reminder of the brutal force with which Bahia was formed. Nearly three thousand mourners attended her funeral while thousands more lined the streets for a final glimpse of the Yoruba queen born of Grunci parents, who had done perhaps more than any other of her era to faithfully preserve and reinvent a true center of African spiritual power in the New World.
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Notes
Deoscoredes Maximiliano Dos Santos, Historia de um Terreiro Nagô (Carthago e Forte Editoras. São Paulo, 1994).
Ruth Landes, The City of Women (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1994), p. 28. See also Box 19, Folder 117, Herskovits Papers.
Waldir Oliveria Freitas and Vivaldo da Costa Lima, Cartas de Edison Carneiro a Artur Ramos de 4 de Janeiro a 6 de dezembro de 1938 (Editora Corrupio, São Paulo, 1987), p. 43.
Kim D. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1998, p. 205).
The papers presented at the 1937 conference were published by Edison Carneiro and Aydano do Couto Ferraz in O Negro no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1940).
Scott Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil (University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2013, p. 67).
Paul Johnson, Secrets, Gossip and Gods: Transformations in Brazilian Candomble (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, p. 95).
Gilberto Freyre in Julio Braga, Na Gamela do Feitiço: Repressão e Resistencia nos Candombles da Bahia (Editora da Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, 1995), p. 77.
Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1942), p. 222.
Edison Carneiro, Candombles da Bahia (Edições do Ouro, Rio de Janeiro, 1937), p. 128. See also Braga, Na Gamela do Feitiço, p. 170, for a list of those serving on the Executive Commission and other elected bodies of the União. Out of 26 names, only three were easily identifiable as being female.
Manuel Vega, “Mãe Menininha,” in Joseph Murphy and Mei-Mei Sanford (eds), Oşun across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001), p. 79.
Carneiro, Candombles da Bahia, p. 128; and Roger Bastide. The African Religions of Brazil (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1978).
João Jose Reis, “Candomble in 19th Century Bahia: Priests, Followers, Clients,” in Kristin Mann and Edna Bay (eds), Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (Frank Cass, London, 2001), p. 120.
Frances Herskovits (ed.), The New World Negro (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1966), p. 322. See also Melville Herskovits. “Some Economic Aspects of the Afrobahian Candomble,” in Frances Herskovits (ed.), The New World Negro.
Luiz Vianna Filho, Pai Agenor (Editora Corrupio, São Paulo, 1998).
Carneiro, “The Structure of African Cults in Bahia,” Journal of American Folklore 53 (1940): p. 272; and
Pierre Verger, “A Contribuiçao das Mulheres Ao Candomble do Brasil” in Artigos, Tomo I (Corrupios, São Paulo, 1992).
Manuel Querino, Costumes Africanos No Brasil (Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Recife, 1988), p. 41.
Artur Ramos, A Acculturação Negro No Brasil (Companhia Editora Nacional, São Paulo, 1942), p. 151.
J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005). In addition, a review of customs records and passport registries in the state archive yielded similar results including some reviews of similar records from England.
Luiz Sergio Barbosa, “A Federação Baiana do Culto Afro-Brasileiro,” in Braga (ed.), Encontro de Nações de Candomble (Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais, Salvador, 1984), p. 71.
Carneiro, Negros Bantus (Civilização Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, 1937), p. 27.
Braga, Na Gamela do Feitiço, p. 96. For more on Spiritism in Brazil, see David J. Hess, Samba in the Night: Spiritism in Brazil (Columbia University Press, New York, 1994).
Landes, “A Cult Matriarchate and Male Homosexuality,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 35 (1940): 392.
Landes, “Fetish Worship in Brazil,” Journal of American Folklore 53.210 (1940): 261.
Herskovits, “A Review of the City of Women,” American Anthropologist 50.1 (1948): 234
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© 2014 Miguel C. Alonso
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Alonso, M.C. (2014). The Reassertion of Male Participation in the Candomble Priesthood. In: The Development of Yoruba Candomble Communities in Salvador, Bahia, 1835–1986. Afro-Latin@ Diasporas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486431_6
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