Page 55 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

40 Mattijs van de Port

production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic
of material production. (174)

It is astonishing just how much of this can be pointed out in Ilê Axé Opô
Afonjá’s answer to the perceived threat of the simulacrum. Time and again,
the terreiro shows vigorous attempts to “draw the line,” to instruct the
public at large that “Candomblé is not a matter of opinion” but “a religious
reality that can only be realized within the purity of its propositions and
rituals” (Mãe Stella, in Campos 2003, back cover).
This striving for “purity” takes the form of an antisyncretistic ideology
that seeks to restore Candomblé to its African origins. Thus, in 1983, Mãe
Stella initiated the penning of a public manifesto to break with syncretism,
which she dismissed as “a relic of the past,” which may have been necessary
to help the cult survive under slavery but is no longer useful in the present
time. She called for the removal of all catholic saints from the terreiro’s altars
(in the little museum at the terreiro’s compound, I found them, rather uncer-
emoniously, stored in an old fashioned, glass paned kitchen cupboard). She
encouraged the use of Yorubá in liturgy, naming practices, and education;
and in the design of the terreiro’s Web site, publications, and video produc-
tions, icons signaling “Africa” (wax-prints, wood-carvings, shields and spears,
leopard skins, etc.) produce an African look. All of this to impress the public
at large that “. . . the religion that we practice is an African religion, it’s essence
is African. We are Brazilians, but we have a religion of Yorubá origin. African”
(Mãe Stella, in Pretto and Serpa 2002, 33).
“Purity” also means calling a halt to the blurring of boundaries between
Candomblé as “religion” and Candomblé as popular culture. As will be
elaborated below, Mãe Stella is not only crusading against earlier under-
standings of Candomblé as a “cult,” “sect,” or “animistic practice,” but
most of all against the label of “folklore.” She repeatedly fulminated against
the profanation of sacred symbols from Candomblé in the field of enter-
tainment, commerce, and carnival.
The “second-hand truths, objectivity and authenticity” that—following
Baudrillard—are in such high demand when simulation abounds are deliv-
ered by a great number of anthropologists who have put themselves at the

service of the priesthood. With the prestige of the written word (in what is
largely an oral tradition), the prestige of their scientific methods, as well as
the prestige of their belonging to the white middle classes, they have become
important arbiters in an attempt to shift the “true” from the “false,” and the
“authentic” from the “degenerated.” Their books are widely known by the
Candomblé priesthood—especially the work of Pierre Verger, a French
anthropologist and photographer who makes explicit comparisons between
Bahian Candomblé and the “original” cults in West Africa.