Customer Reviews

The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomble (Contemporary Ethnography)

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In his book, Jim Wafer explores not only Candomble from an anthropological standpoint, but from his very personal experience in Bahia, Brazil. Wafer skillfully weaves academic arguments with an enjoyable narration, which keeps the reader invested in his account on many levels. Wafer structures his book, appropriately, on the different Candomble spirits, and so his journey in the book leads the reader not only through his experience as an outsider but the experience of the Candomble ceremony as well, first calling the exus, then the caboclos, then the orixa. Wafer also manages to hit on key issues within Candomble: gender relations, sexual orientation, "Africanness" and racialization, class, etc. My only complaint is that Wafer does not explore these aspects of life in Bahia and Candomble enough. Despite a somewhat sensational title and a final chapter that seems to be out of place in Wafer's personal account, this book is solid, and I recommend it.

A trained anthropologist, Jim Wafer spent a year in Brazil researching Candomble for his doctorate. The result is a thought-provoking but often difficult and sometimes frustrating account. He alternates between narrative passages where he describes people he met and things he observed, and other analytical passages where he discusses theories of anthropology. Those theoretical passages are particularly dense, and leave one wondering whether specialists only seem to write obscurely because they assume so much expertise, or whether it is actually important for them to write obscurely in order to establish their insider status to other specialists. The narrative passages bring to light many aspects of Candomble that have not appeared in more popular accounts of Afro-Brazilian religion. Wafer focuses on the Exus and Caboclos, the least exalted of the Cadomble pantheon, and shows that their possessions often come outside of any ritual context. He also suggests that the personalities of the medium and those of the possessing "entity" are not entirely distinct, but tend to blur together. And he gives much valuable insight into the personality and political conflicts that go on in a terreiro. You could say he's giving the least flattering view of Candomble, in which neurotic and self-centered people use a complex religion as a semi-successful coping mechanism in their lives. What is missing is any vivid sense of the transcendant mood of the experience, or the joyful energy so evident in Candomble and Umbanda recordings. Wafer seems often to feel guilty or depressed by his status as a pretend-devotee, given unusual attention by a leader who hopes to exploit this foreign intellectual for publicity. Also, Wafer cheats by not explaining his own religious beliefs, and thus denying us a context to understand his observations. Evidently a person who is fond of hinting and being indirect, Wafer seems, at a guess, to be about 25% open to the possibility that supernatural factors are at work, and about 50% committed to a postmodernist view that there is no "objective" reality anyway. I'd say the book is worth reading selectively for the interesting observations that emerge here and there. A more sympathetic and idealized account of Umbanda, a closely-related Afro-Brazilian tradition, is available in Macumba: The Teachings of Maria-José, Mother of the Gods.