Luis Nicolau Parés has written an important and necessary book that makes a major contribution to the understanding of the African-diasporic sacred tradition of Brazilian Candomblé and its various West and Central African influences as Candomblé came into being in Latin America. As someone who teaches courses on the various African-diasporic or African-based healing and ritual traditions within the context of the Caribbean, and in North, South, and Central America, it has always been curious to me that most people with interest in these important sacred traditions tend to think that Brazilian Candomblé is merely the Brazilian equivalent of Cuban Santería/Lucumí, and the other various Orisha traditions that trace their sources to the Yoruba peoples of present-day Nigeria and Ghana. Haitian Vodou, for example, and its diasporic presence in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other Caribbean countries, is often held to be distinct from the Yoruba influences attributed to Brazilian Candomblé and Cuban Santería. I know this because my own particular area of expertise happens to be Haitian Vodou in the Haitian Diaspora of the U.S. and, specifically, in Greater New York/New Jersey areas, where there is a considerable Haitian diasporic community and its descendants as well as a number of non-Haitian servitors of the Lwa (Spirits) of the Vodou pantheon. All of this is to say that, knowing much about the topic, I learned in greater detail by reading The Formation of Candomblé that there is considerable influence upon many of the African-Diasporic traditions which must be attributed to the ancient West African Kingdom of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin and also Togo).These traditions were brought to the Americas by Fon and Ewe peoples who were the primary ancestral sources from which Vodou out of the enslaved Africans and Carib/Arawak/Taino First Peoples who inhabited the Island of Hispaniola, now split up into the countries of the Republic of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Divided into eight chapters, Parés's book traces the influences of Vodun (though they share a common ancestral source, one should not confuse West African Vodun with Haitian Vodou) on the formation of Candomblé in Brazil, starting with the slave trade and the complexities of ethnicity, nations, and ports of departure for the so-called New World, through the many permutations and transferences of lineages of such traditions and practices in Brazil, to a fascinating study of the deities and ritual practices of Candomblé from its West African sources to the present. Drawn primarily from archival and print sources, Luis Nicolau Parés meticulously documents his research, thus providing for the reader a convincing argument that Vodun is not to be given a minor role in the development and continued evolution of the dynamic and fluidly adaptable system of Brazilian Candomblé. In the many social science sources Parés references in his book, he demonstrates and reinforces what has been suggested by other social scientists (sociologists and anthropologists alike) such as Roger Bastide, Melville J. Herskovits, Pierre Verger, just to name a few, who describe the African-based sacred traditions of the New World as being plastic, adaptable, absorbent, innovative, and embracing of individual differences on the part of practitioners within the context of a loosely shared structure of symbol, ritual, and myth.
As someone who is a voracious and disciplined reader, I must confess, much to my embarrassment, that it has taken me three years to finally finish reading Parés' book and to write this review. Given that in the interim I have read numerous other books, the reader might ask why it it has taken me so long to finish reading The Formation of Candomblé and then to write this review. This points to the challenge that Parés's book poses for the reader, and perhaps to some of the book's limitations. This is not a book for the average curious reader, but rather for the scholar who is deeply engaged with and interested in African-derived traditions of the Americas and their relationship to the various African indigenous traditions which provide an important base for their development in places such as Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the USA. While I appreciate immensely documentation of scholarly sources and their proper citation, an author must evaluate how those sources are to be used within the context of the book; but at same time scholarly documentation should not reach a point where it interferes with the flow of the narrative and the book's capacity to draw in and sustain the interest of the reader.
This book is so replete with citations and endnotes that it renders the narrative of the book dry and abstract. Each of the eight chapters is so thoroughly documented that there is barely a sentence that does not have an endnote reference. Since I am someone who feels obligated to read the footnotes or endnotes of any book, I found that in this case there was such an abundance of references that they seriously detracted from making the book a good read that could capture the imagination of the reader. Further, Parés spends at least four of the eight chapters of the book meticulously tracing genealogies of who succeeded whom in priestly transmission and community as well as all of the geographical movements on the part of one priest or priestess and the ritual and healing community over which he or she presides from one parcel of land to another. Admittedly, this is important information but it makes for slow and ponderous reading.
For this reader, the two most interesting chapters are 7 and 8. Chapter 7 has to do with deities and their transformative evolution from specifically Dahomean/Fon deities to the deities they have evolved into in Brazil and within the context of the Candomblé pantheon and all of its various influences, not only those from Vodun. Chapter 8 addresses the ritual characteristics and the Jeje-Mahi Liturgy which is also fascinating and very informative, especially for anyone interested in the ways that ritual plays an important role in the development of habitus. This is a valuable book for any scholar with a specialization in Brazilian Candomblé and the African-based traditions of the Americas, and for this reason I highly recommend it to the specialized scholar.
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[Review length: 1028 words • Review posted on February 22, 2017]