Cruzes e encruzilhadas: sincretismo e identidade nos terreiros de umbanda

Abstract

For religions of african origins, the 1980s have been marked by the movement that became known as antisyncretism or even reafricanization. Although expressed in a more incisive way by the candomblé’s matriarchs, the theme starts the beginning of a series of questions and revisions regarding the practices and social perception of afro-brazilian religions. In 1983, the subject gained greater proportions due to the “Anti-Syncretism Manifest”, a document that would become a landmark in the face of afro-brazilian religions. With the aim of de-Christianizing and defolklorizing candomblés, some of the main authorities of the traditional Bahia’s temples articulated themselves and, on July 27, 1983, during the 2nd World Conference on Orixá Tradition and Culture (COMTOC), published a letter that would come to become a notorious movement around this theme. The articulation became a point of discussion not only about the presence of symbolic and discursive elements, but also about the need to reaffirm an afro-brazilian religious identity, thus corroborating the maintenance of the afro-religious traditions people. For umbanda, a symmetrical movement is perceived in the 1950s with the discussions that brought proposals for the reafricanization of religion. Tancredo da Silva Pinto, known as Tata Tancredo, became an icon of this movement that proposed the rescue of African cultures erased by the whitening theories of “Espiritismo de Linha”. This research intends to investigate the syncretism’s impacts produced on the people’s identity and umbanda temples, impacting an entire generation that translated the phenomenon as a technology of resistance and survival, sometimes justifying the erasure of African influences from religion