Violence and chaos in Afro-Brazilian religious experience

Drawing on material concerning the Recife Shango and Jurema cults (among others), this article shows how ritualized violence and disorder, associated with the manifestation of “heavy”, evil spirits and attributed to cults of a more syncretic nature, remain a constitutive aspect of Afro-Brazilian ceremonial activity. A parallel with the dionysian cult as portrayed in The Bacchae is used to argue that the performance of meaning-subverting ritual violence points to the existence of a pre-representational “third state”, neither structure nor anti-structure, which is to be recognized as a distinctive mode of religious experience

Cult · Epistemology · Humanities · Sociology · Theology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Philosophy

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