“Eu sou uma mulher miscigenada e sou uma mulher sincretizada”: uma análise das relações entre atores e símbolos “sincréticos” na umbanda nagô do Grupo União Espírita Santa Bárbara

Abstract

This dissertation departs from a field research carried out at the Grupo União Espírita Santa Bárbara (GUESB), an terreiro of Ubanda ritual intertwined with Nagô, placed in Maceió - AL. It presents an ethnographic description of two central events for the GUESB community: the Feijoada da Vovó Maria Conga and the Santa Bárbara Mass, held together with Toque de Iansã. These two events are important because they highlight how the relationships among African, indigenous and Catholic elements, symbols and practices occur in this specific terreiro. To understand the history of Umbanda Nagô in Alagoas and at the GUESB, I discuss the sociopolitical context post-Quebra de Xangô in 1912 and also internal events of the terreiro that have changed the woshirp practices. In this way, I intend to counterpose the hegemonic understanding of Umbanda as a “mixed religion”, which does not take into account the social involved actors’ flows, sociopolitical contexts and life trajectories. Nevertheless the voluminous scholarship on the syncretism of African, indigenous religions and Catholicism in Brazilian anthropology, I aim to put into evidence my research collaborators’ perspectives on their religious practices, in order the to build native theories. Using a symmetrical and polyphonic ethnographic approach, I demonstrate how GUESB participants’ experience relates African-based religiosity with symbolic references from Brazilian Catholicism, and how they build their affection relationships, which turns out to result into their own theories about “syncretism ”. In this sense, the research also contributes to a broader discussion regarding the construction of ethnographic theories of contrassincretismo (Goldman, 2017), having as a departure point the Afro-religious context in Alagoas.