The “Orisha Religion” between Syncretism and Re-Africanization

Bibliographic Data

ID20085404
AuthorsCapone (0000-0001-7374-3081, corresponding author), Stefania Capone (0000-0002-2272-120X)
Year2007
Pages219-232
Publication date2007-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueCultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230606982_11
OpenAlexW2490868422
ISBN9780230606982
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited9

Afro-American religions are historically distinguished by their extreme fragmentation and lack of a superior authority that could impose orthodox rules and practices on its followers. Nonetheless, some religious leaders today aim for a unification of their practices that highlights the existence of a common ground in all Afro-American religious modalities. Since the early 1980s, there have been various attempts to standardize the different Afro-American religious practices on the A merican continent. The International Congresses of Orisha Tradition and Culture (also called COMTOC or Orisa World Congresses) have helped to create a wider network between the initiates of Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería or Regla de Ocha, Haitian Vodu, North American Orisha-Voodoo, and Yoruba “traditional religion.”1 These attempts generate new ways of religious “creolization,” in which the syncretic work—the historical base of these types of religions—is resignified, giving preference to African or Afro-American endogenous variables instead of European or Catholic exogenous influences. In the Lucumí religion of Cubans living in Miami, the ritual borrowings of practices that originated in Brazilian Candomblé are a telling example of this founding tension between unification and fragmentation within these religious phenomena

Ethnology · Sociology · Syncretism (linguistics) · Unification · Yoruba · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Philosophy · Religious studies

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