Concept Paper for Dissertation - 12.06.05
Working Title
Changing Rhythms, Changing Myths: The Play of Innovation, Memory and Place in Candomblé Ritual Drumming and Myth
Introduction
The eminent Nigerian master drummer, Babatunde Olantunji once stated,
Where I come from we say that rhythm is the soul of life, because the
whole universe revolves around rhythm, and when we get out of rhythm, that's when we get into trouble. For this reason the drum, next to the human voice, is our most important instrument. It is special. (Maxfield 157).
The drum is the central heartbeat of ritual in Candomblé. Its rhythms connect a collective group of people to the memory of their homeland, while at the same time expressing the transformation of ritual presentations. This dissertation will explore the dynamics of Candomblé, a mythically and rhythmically rich religious tradition, by following the many facets of drumming through a cross-cultural investigation of myth and ritual. Important aspects of Candomblé ritual and myth connected to the drum and rhythm making will be analyzed in order to illustrate specific changes that have taken place within the religion. One area of focus will delve into the women’s roles in Candomblé ritual and how they have shifted from accepted, traditional “feminine” roles, such as trance dancer, to new occupations traditionally held only by men, such as ritual drummer. This will suggest that in spite of its tightly structured hierarchy and initiation rites, rules in Candomblé traditions are often re-aligned to revision its rituals and myths.
Although this dissertation incorporates research from the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, ethnography and philosophy, mythology and archetypal psychology are the primary disciplines through which drumming, ritual and myth in Candomblé will be amplified. The dominant approach throughout the work will be that of James Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology. Hillman places soul at the center of psychology, and says that through it images of the Self are born. Soul is the impetus of the imagination, the “poetic basis of mind” (Hillman Re-Visioning, xi):
…by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy–that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. (Hillman Re-Visioning, x)
The drum itself is a metaphor for the embodied soul. In the Candomblé worldview, the drum may be considered an ancestor, or perhaps even a god.
“Befriending” the poetic images that are connected to drumming, myth and ritual allows for many perspectives to come forward in the dissertation, keeping to the polytheistic nature of Candomblé itself. The power of the archetypes that will be amplified in this study, such as the orixás, the gods and goddesses of Candomblé, come through in a remembering and a reimagining of images, which are Protean in nature and prone to multiple transformations. An underlying premise of this study is that the ritual rules and structure of Candomblé are as fluid as the orixás, allowing for reinvention and revisioning of drumming, myths and gender roles.
Another advantage of applying the archetypal psychological approach in this dissertation is to open up the images of Candomblé in order to “see through” them into such contemporary arenas as popular music and digital music sharing. For example, in a November 2004 issue of Wired magazine interview with Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s new Minister of Culture, music sharing technologies and open source computer programming were the topics of discussion. A practicing believer of Candomblé, Gil is internationally famous as one of the founders of tropicalismo, a popular form of Brazilian music. Gil thinks that opening the borders of multicultural music through technology is not only advantageous, but inevitable:
“A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property [...] No country, not the US, not Europe, can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world, of the postmodern world - and there's no use resisting it.”
Gil’s vision interestingly mirrors the cultural openness that started with the formation of Candomblé, perhaps as a religion of resistance against slavery and oppression.
The Candomblé group of religions was birthed from Africa and brought to the new world by slaves who survived the trans-Atlantic crossing. After reaching their destined new home, Brazil, and being forced to convert to Catholicism, they continued to worship their African deities in new, innovative ways. Although ritual innovation will be a key area of research, maintaining tradition through remembering the origins of ritual practice is also paramount to the study. Paul Christopher Johnson, historian of religions, elaborates that Candomblé is a tradition that transmits knowledge orally and ritually, through “bodies-as-secrets” (Johnson 6). The ritual is the “place” where embodied knowledge is passed down, generation after generation. Without a deep connection to its past, to memories of its African homeland, Candomblé would not possess the tremendous innovative ability to transform its myths and rituals.
In Candomblé, “place” is not only an imaginal space embodied in ritual, but also sensed in the land. The Brazilian landscapes––or “placescapes” as Edward S. Casey refers to them in Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology––play an integral role in how the rituals are presented in new, innovative ways. One particular example of how the placescape shaped the mythology and ritual of Candomblé is the importance of the ocean goddess, Iemanjá along the Brazilian coastal cities of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador da Bahia and Pernambuco. During the festival of Iemanjá on December 31st (corresponding to celebrations of New Years), devotees come to the shorelines, placing candles and flowers on the beach and in small boats that float on the water. The drums are as strong of a presence at the outdoor festivals, as they are in the terreiros (houses of worship). She is the mother of all creation, of humans, of marine animals and the orixás. Iemanjá has protective, nurturing and destructive qualities, and is imagined to be the mother of death as well as the mother of life. During the trans-Atlantic crossing, Iemanjá’s body, the ocean, carried her surviving African devotees to the new world, and brought the others who perished back into her watery womb. This study will argue that the significance of each orixá, and each myth, depends on the shift in placescape and environment, transforming the ritual manifestations, drumming and dance.
Today, as practitioners of Candomblé migrate to different areas around the world, coming into contact with new landscapes and other cultures, the rituals and myths continue to transform. These metamorphoses are reflected in the drum rhythms and mythological narratives as mythopoetic responses to a change in “place.” Mythopoesis is both the creative, artistic process as well as the psychological process through which myths are made. Mythopoetic expression weaves backwards and forwards, from past, to present, to future, creating new myths that sustain and carry forward a collective body of people. This dissertation will demonstrate how mythopoesis springs out of the interplay between three inseparable components: innovation, a moving forward into the new, memory, a moving backward into the old, and place, the containing womb of all new myths and rituals.
Since Brazil is the center of Candomblé, the place where it began, much of the fieldwork and research will be focused there. I will observe festivals in Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro that correspond to the different orixás. Rituals take place frequently in terreiros all over Brazil, which will allow for many opportunities to observe how each liturgy varies in style and content from place to place.
The drums regulate the ritual universe in Candomblé: each orixá is called down in a specific order via their own drum rhythm pattern and song. The dancers, who are also signaled by the drummers, only dance the movements for the orixá that is being celebrated at the moment; otherwise chaos and pandemonium would ensue. In Brazil, master drum teachers, religious leaders of terreiros and practitioners will be interviewed for their stories as well as their perspectives regarding the transformation of Candomblé.
Fieldwork will also take place in the United States, primarily in New York. San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, where there are healthy numbers of Candomblé practitioners. Because “placescapes” make such a strong impact on the human psyche, and subsequently on how rituals are performed, this dissertation will include a cross-cultural comparison of Candomblé practices in both North America and Brazil. The interviews, stories and fieldwork observations will provide an additional hermeneutic to the explicit, theoretical aspect of the study. Stories, of both a cultural and personal nature, often hold implicit knowledge that can transcend pure theoretical explanation. Mythology and depth psychology, where the examination of story and of the unconscious are the reigning areas of focus, are deep, embodied ways to understand and approach theoretical understandings of the “other,” in this case, another culture.
Brief Review of the Literature
James Hillman is best known for his “re-visioning” of Jungian psychology that brought image and soul to the forefront of psychic reality and psychic transformation. Many of his works will be applied to this study of Candomblé, including Re-Visioning Psychology and The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World.
In Hillman’s view, staying with the image and allowing it to have a life of its own de-emphasizes the egocentricity of the personal psyche and opens up the archetype to its multidimensionality. In a related concept, Hillman prefers to gestalt an entire myth within his praxis. In other words, do not just identify with the hero of a myth; personify using other secondary characters, including animals, plants and inanimate objects. For Hillman, the psyche is inherently polytheistic and multivalent, two qualities existing in abundance in the Candomblé traditions, as seen through its many orixás, or archetypes.
Hillman’s psychology is primarily a living, breathing psychology of soul. To paraphrase him, if psyche is image, than it can be said that image is soul.
Only when myth is led back into the soul, only when myth has psychological significance does it become a living reality, necessary for life, rather than a literary, philosophical or religious artifice.
(Hillman, quoted in Doty, Mythography 194)
The soul, in its personal and collective aspects, has a life of its own even as it is intimately attached to a body, or a body of people; in other words, soul is embodied. Hillman’s approach to mythology and depth psychology is embodied, which lends it to be the main theoretical point of view in this dissertation because Candomblé is an embodied, oral tradition.
Historian of religions, Paul Christopher Johnson, provides a historical in-depth account of the innermost workings of Candomblé, its secrets and its revelations. His work is seminal for this dissertation because he outlines the transformation of the religion through a historical perspective, focusing on the dynamics of change in Candomblé traditions. According to Johnson, the dynamics exist due to the “active milling, polishing and promotion of the reputation of secrets” (Johnson 3), leading to multiple interpretations and inviting pluralism. His post-modern approach supports the thesis that Candomblé is a living, world religion that continually transforms over linear, historical time. In this study, the theoretical divergence from Johnson’s work is the emphases on cross-cultural ritual innovation in Candomblé and the poetics of place, mainly through the perspective of archetypal psychology, rather than history.
Edward S. Casey bridges the fields of archetypal psychology and philosophy in order to show how imagination and memory work together as co-creators of image within the grounding of place or “placescapes:”
“The places of landscape––“placescapes”––provide a circumambience, a setting, for archetypes as well as for structures of presentation” (Casey, Spirit xx).
Candomblé is a transcendent tradition that allows for deep, philosophical reflection and Casey’s Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World lays out a phenomenological approach that is appropriate for this dissertation in field of mythological studies. His is a viable methodology because it unpacks the mystery of why “being-in-place” holds so much power over humanity by means of analyzing how the place-world is the primary source of the psyche’s outpouring of images. In particular, Casey makes the point of how forced exile can be the most painful form of separation, which is highly relevant to this study because of the trans-Atlantic crossing African slaves made to come to Brazil. “As Freud, Bachelard, and Proust all suggest, to refind place...we may need to return, if not in actual fact then in memory or imagination, to the very earliest places we have known” (Casey, Getting x). In the case of Candomblé, this study shows that its exiled practitioners get back into place by reconnecting to their ancestral homeland through ritual.
Clarence Bernard Henry specifically studied drumming with Candomblé master drummers in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil while researching his dissertation, Religious and Musical Expressions of Candomblé in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and Los Angeles, California. One of his most intriguing discoveries that ties into the theme of innovation in this work, is how the role of women in these traditions is changing. One of the changes he noted was that there were a few women being trained in ritual drumming, although they were not yet allowed to perform on drums during ritual.
This dissertation’s fieldwork research closely mirrors Henry’s on many points, such as the cross-cultural aspects of Candomblé ritual drumming. However, the main difference is the focus on mythological and depth psychological aspects of Candomblé, as opposed to its ethnomusicological aspects. The interviews and observations will focus mostly on story and myth, and the drumming will be amplified as a model for embodied ritual, instead of pure musical presentation.
Anthropologist Victor Turner, who spent years studying the Ndembu of Northwestern Zambia, heard ritual drumming at almost all hours of the day and night during his fieldwork: “the term for ritual performance is ng'oma, which literally means ‘drum,’ and where three drums, as in Umbanda , are considered indispensable components of all ritual” (Turner, V. Anthropology, 51). Much of the theoretical basis of ritual applied to the research in this study comes from Turner’s lifelong passion, the study of ritual as a performance process.
In Turner’s essay, “Social Dramas in Brazilian Umbanda: The Dialectics of Meaning,” he discusses the “meta-languages” of cultural performances as “genres of cultural performance” that “are not simple mirrors but magical mirrors of social reality: they exaggerate, invert, re-form, magnify, minimize, dis-color, re-color, even deliberately falsify, chronicled events. They resemble Rilke's ‘hall of mirrors’” (Turner Anthropology, 42). In this statement, Turner supports the importance of fluidity, innovation and play in ritual that is largely the foundational thesis of this dissertation.
Organization of Study
Chapter two, “Candomblé Foundations,” will outline the history and development of the religion within Brazil. Myths and religious practices of the Yoruba people will provide the initial historical backdrop and imaginal basis for the development of Candomblé traditions brought by African slaves. An outline of a “traditional” Candomblé ritual will be presented as a prelude to chapter three, which illustrates ways in which ritual manifestations have transformed to express changes in place.
Chapter three, “Mythopoesis and Innovation in Candomblé” will explore the drumming, ritual and mythic aspects of the tradition through the perspectives of Archetypal Psychology, particularly that of James Hillman. This section will be subdivided into two topics: 1. “Rhythm Making, Image Making and Soul Making: Aspects of Innovation in Candomblé Drumming, Ritual and Myth;” 2. “Being-in-Place: Remembering the Past and Keeping Tradition.”
Within the subchapter “Image Making, Rhythm Making and Soul Making: Archetypal Presentations in Candomblé Drumming, Ritual and Myth,” the archetypal significance of the orixás and their distinctive personifications, as well as the drums, rhythms and dance movements, will be examined.
The second subchapter “Being-in-Place: Remembering the Past and Keeping Tradition,” reveals how Candomblé continually transforms, yet at the same time stays connected to its ancestral soil. As Candomblé practitioners have migrated from Brazil to North America, the tradition reinvents itself to express the new sensibility of “place” while maintaining a memorial link to its source. Edward Casey’s phenomenological approach to the study of “place” and “placescapes” will amplify the Exile and Home archetypes in this subchapter.
Chapter four, “Cross-Cultural Perspectives of Tradition and Innovation in Candomblé,” will compare and contrast contemporary drumming and ritual practices of Brazilian Candomblé in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil and the United States. This chapter will document each interviewed person’s perspective on the tradition of Candomblé and how it has changed the face of modern music and society. Other questions and concerns will be addressed, such as, how do they think Candomblé has transformed the Brazilian culture as well as how has contemporary Brazilian culture transformed Candomblé? For the interviewees that have moved to the United States, an additional question will be offered: how have their religious practices and spiritual beliefs changed after moving to the United States?
Fieldwork observations and discoveries, such as how the role of women in the tradition of Candomblé has changed, will be included at the end of this section in order to smoothly transition to the next chapter, which opens up the images explored in the study to the most recent innovations now taking root in the religion.
Chapter five, “Contemporary Metamorphoses,” will place the Candomblé traditions in the present moment and show their continued transformative and innovative tendencies through Candomblé’s influence on popular music and lyrics, as well as music sharing technologies.
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Changing Rhythms, Changing Myths: The Play of Innovation, Memory and Place in Candomblé Ritual Drumming and Myth
Introduction
The eminent Nigerian master drummer, Babatunde Olantunji once stated,
Where I come from we say that rhythm is the soul of life, because the
whole universe revolves around rhythm, and when we get out of rhythm, that's when we get into trouble. For this reason the drum, next to the human voice, is our most important instrument. It is special. (Maxfield 157).
The drum is the central heartbeat of ritual in Candomblé. Its rhythms connect a collective group of people to the memory of their homeland, while at the same time expressing the transformation of ritual presentations. This dissertation will explore the dynamics of Candomblé, a mythically and rhythmically rich religious tradition, by following the many facets of drumming through a cross-cultural investigation of myth and ritual. Important aspects of Candomblé ritual and myth connected to the drum and rhythm making will be analyzed in order to illustrate specific changes that have taken place within the religion. One area of focus will delve into the women’s roles in Candomblé ritual and how they have shifted from accepted, traditional “feminine” roles, such as trance dancer, to new occupations traditionally held only by men, such as ritual drummer. This will suggest that in spite of its tightly structured hierarchy and initiation rites, rules in Candomblé traditions are often re-aligned to revision its rituals and myths.
Although this dissertation incorporates research from the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, ethnography and philosophy, mythology and archetypal psychology are the primary disciplines through which drumming, ritual and myth in Candomblé will be amplified. The dominant approach throughout the work will be that of James Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology. Hillman places soul at the center of psychology, and says that through it images of the Self are born. Soul is the impetus of the imagination, the “poetic basis of mind” (Hillman Re-Visioning, xi):
…by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy–that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. (Hillman Re-Visioning, x)
The drum itself is a metaphor for the embodied soul. In the Candomblé worldview, the drum may be considered an ancestor, or perhaps even a god.
“Befriending” the poetic images that are connected to drumming, myth and ritual allows for many perspectives to come forward in the dissertation, keeping to the polytheistic nature of Candomblé itself. The power of the archetypes that will be amplified in this study, such as the orixás, the gods and goddesses of Candomblé, come through in a remembering and a reimagining of images, which are Protean in nature and prone to multiple transformations. An underlying premise of this study is that the ritual rules and structure of Candomblé are as fluid as the orixás, allowing for reinvention and revisioning of drumming, myths and gender roles.
Another advantage of applying the archetypal psychological approach in this dissertation is to open up the images of Candomblé in order to “see through” them into such contemporary arenas as popular music and digital music sharing. For example, in a November 2004 issue of Wired magazine interview with Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s new Minister of Culture, music sharing technologies and open source computer programming were the topics of discussion. A practicing believer of Candomblé, Gil is internationally famous as one of the founders of tropicalismo, a popular form of Brazilian music. Gil thinks that opening the borders of multicultural music through technology is not only advantageous, but inevitable:
“A world opened up by communications cannot remain closed up in a feudal vision of property [...] No country, not the US, not Europe, can stand in the way of it. It's a global trend. It's part of the very process of civilization. It's the semantic abundance of the modern world, of the postmodern world - and there's no use resisting it.”
Gil’s vision interestingly mirrors the cultural openness that started with the formation of Candomblé, perhaps as a religion of resistance against slavery and oppression.
The Candomblé group of religions was birthed from Africa and brought to the new world by slaves who survived the trans-Atlantic crossing. After reaching their destined new home, Brazil, and being forced to convert to Catholicism, they continued to worship their African deities in new, innovative ways. Although ritual innovation will be a key area of research, maintaining tradition through remembering the origins of ritual practice is also paramount to the study. Paul Christopher Johnson, historian of religions, elaborates that Candomblé is a tradition that transmits knowledge orally and ritually, through “bodies-as-secrets” (Johnson 6). The ritual is the “place” where embodied knowledge is passed down, generation after generation. Without a deep connection to its past, to memories of its African homeland, Candomblé would not possess the tremendous innovative ability to transform its myths and rituals.
In Candomblé, “place” is not only an imaginal space embodied in ritual, but also sensed in the land. The Brazilian landscapes––or “placescapes” as Edward S. Casey refers to them in Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology––play an integral role in how the rituals are presented in new, innovative ways. One particular example of how the placescape shaped the mythology and ritual of Candomblé is the importance of the ocean goddess, Iemanjá along the Brazilian coastal cities of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador da Bahia and Pernambuco. During the festival of Iemanjá on December 31st (corresponding to celebrations of New Years), devotees come to the shorelines, placing candles and flowers on the beach and in small boats that float on the water. The drums are as strong of a presence at the outdoor festivals, as they are in the terreiros (houses of worship). She is the mother of all creation, of humans, of marine animals and the orixás. Iemanjá has protective, nurturing and destructive qualities, and is imagined to be the mother of death as well as the mother of life. During the trans-Atlantic crossing, Iemanjá’s body, the ocean, carried her surviving African devotees to the new world, and brought the others who perished back into her watery womb. This study will argue that the significance of each orixá, and each myth, depends on the shift in placescape and environment, transforming the ritual manifestations, drumming and dance.
Today, as practitioners of Candomblé migrate to different areas around the world, coming into contact with new landscapes and other cultures, the rituals and myths continue to transform. These metamorphoses are reflected in the drum rhythms and mythological narratives as mythopoetic responses to a change in “place.” Mythopoesis is both the creative, artistic process as well as the psychological process through which myths are made. Mythopoetic expression weaves backwards and forwards, from past, to present, to future, creating new myths that sustain and carry forward a collective body of people. This dissertation will demonstrate how mythopoesis springs out of the interplay between three inseparable components: innovation, a moving forward into the new, memory, a moving backward into the old, and place, the containing womb of all new myths and rituals.
Since Brazil is the center of Candomblé, the place where it began, much of the fieldwork and research will be focused there. I will observe festivals in Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro that correspond to the different orixás. Rituals take place frequently in terreiros all over Brazil, which will allow for many opportunities to observe how each liturgy varies in style and content from place to place.
The drums regulate the ritual universe in Candomblé: each orixá is called down in a specific order via their own drum rhythm pattern and song. The dancers, who are also signaled by the drummers, only dance the movements for the orixá that is being celebrated at the moment; otherwise chaos and pandemonium would ensue. In Brazil, master drum teachers, religious leaders of terreiros and practitioners will be interviewed for their stories as well as their perspectives regarding the transformation of Candomblé.
Fieldwork will also take place in the United States, primarily in New York. San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, where there are healthy numbers of Candomblé practitioners. Because “placescapes” make such a strong impact on the human psyche, and subsequently on how rituals are performed, this dissertation will include a cross-cultural comparison of Candomblé practices in both North America and Brazil. The interviews, stories and fieldwork observations will provide an additional hermeneutic to the explicit, theoretical aspect of the study. Stories, of both a cultural and personal nature, often hold implicit knowledge that can transcend pure theoretical explanation. Mythology and depth psychology, where the examination of story and of the unconscious are the reigning areas of focus, are deep, embodied ways to understand and approach theoretical understandings of the “other,” in this case, another culture.
Brief Review of the Literature
James Hillman is best known for his “re-visioning” of Jungian psychology that brought image and soul to the forefront of psychic reality and psychic transformation. Many of his works will be applied to this study of Candomblé, including Re-Visioning Psychology and The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World.
In Hillman’s view, staying with the image and allowing it to have a life of its own de-emphasizes the egocentricity of the personal psyche and opens up the archetype to its multidimensionality. In a related concept, Hillman prefers to gestalt an entire myth within his praxis. In other words, do not just identify with the hero of a myth; personify using other secondary characters, including animals, plants and inanimate objects. For Hillman, the psyche is inherently polytheistic and multivalent, two qualities existing in abundance in the Candomblé traditions, as seen through its many orixás, or archetypes.
Hillman’s psychology is primarily a living, breathing psychology of soul. To paraphrase him, if psyche is image, than it can be said that image is soul.
Only when myth is led back into the soul, only when myth has psychological significance does it become a living reality, necessary for life, rather than a literary, philosophical or religious artifice.
(Hillman, quoted in Doty, Mythography 194)
The soul, in its personal and collective aspects, has a life of its own even as it is intimately attached to a body, or a body of people; in other words, soul is embodied. Hillman’s approach to mythology and depth psychology is embodied, which lends it to be the main theoretical point of view in this dissertation because Candomblé is an embodied, oral tradition.
Historian of religions, Paul Christopher Johnson, provides a historical in-depth account of the innermost workings of Candomblé, its secrets and its revelations. His work is seminal for this dissertation because he outlines the transformation of the religion through a historical perspective, focusing on the dynamics of change in Candomblé traditions. According to Johnson, the dynamics exist due to the “active milling, polishing and promotion of the reputation of secrets” (Johnson 3), leading to multiple interpretations and inviting pluralism. His post-modern approach supports the thesis that Candomblé is a living, world religion that continually transforms over linear, historical time. In this study, the theoretical divergence from Johnson’s work is the emphases on cross-cultural ritual innovation in Candomblé and the poetics of place, mainly through the perspective of archetypal psychology, rather than history.
Edward S. Casey bridges the fields of archetypal psychology and philosophy in order to show how imagination and memory work together as co-creators of image within the grounding of place or “placescapes:”
“The places of landscape––“placescapes”––provide a circumambience, a setting, for archetypes as well as for structures of presentation” (Casey, Spirit xx).
Candomblé is a transcendent tradition that allows for deep, philosophical reflection and Casey’s Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World lays out a phenomenological approach that is appropriate for this dissertation in field of mythological studies. His is a viable methodology because it unpacks the mystery of why “being-in-place” holds so much power over humanity by means of analyzing how the place-world is the primary source of the psyche’s outpouring of images. In particular, Casey makes the point of how forced exile can be the most painful form of separation, which is highly relevant to this study because of the trans-Atlantic crossing African slaves made to come to Brazil. “As Freud, Bachelard, and Proust all suggest, to refind place...we may need to return, if not in actual fact then in memory or imagination, to the very earliest places we have known” (Casey, Getting x). In the case of Candomblé, this study shows that its exiled practitioners get back into place by reconnecting to their ancestral homeland through ritual.
Clarence Bernard Henry specifically studied drumming with Candomblé master drummers in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil while researching his dissertation, Religious and Musical Expressions of Candomblé in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and Los Angeles, California. One of his most intriguing discoveries that ties into the theme of innovation in this work, is how the role of women in these traditions is changing. One of the changes he noted was that there were a few women being trained in ritual drumming, although they were not yet allowed to perform on drums during ritual.
This dissertation’s fieldwork research closely mirrors Henry’s on many points, such as the cross-cultural aspects of Candomblé ritual drumming. However, the main difference is the focus on mythological and depth psychological aspects of Candomblé, as opposed to its ethnomusicological aspects. The interviews and observations will focus mostly on story and myth, and the drumming will be amplified as a model for embodied ritual, instead of pure musical presentation.
Anthropologist Victor Turner, who spent years studying the Ndembu of Northwestern Zambia, heard ritual drumming at almost all hours of the day and night during his fieldwork: “the term for ritual performance is ng'oma, which literally means ‘drum,’ and where three drums, as in Umbanda , are considered indispensable components of all ritual” (Turner, V. Anthropology, 51). Much of the theoretical basis of ritual applied to the research in this study comes from Turner’s lifelong passion, the study of ritual as a performance process.
In Turner’s essay, “Social Dramas in Brazilian Umbanda: The Dialectics of Meaning,” he discusses the “meta-languages” of cultural performances as “genres of cultural performance” that “are not simple mirrors but magical mirrors of social reality: they exaggerate, invert, re-form, magnify, minimize, dis-color, re-color, even deliberately falsify, chronicled events. They resemble Rilke's ‘hall of mirrors’” (Turner Anthropology, 42). In this statement, Turner supports the importance of fluidity, innovation and play in ritual that is largely the foundational thesis of this dissertation.
Organization of Study
Chapter two, “Candomblé Foundations,” will outline the history and development of the religion within Brazil. Myths and religious practices of the Yoruba people will provide the initial historical backdrop and imaginal basis for the development of Candomblé traditions brought by African slaves. An outline of a “traditional” Candomblé ritual will be presented as a prelude to chapter three, which illustrates ways in which ritual manifestations have transformed to express changes in place.
Chapter three, “Mythopoesis and Innovation in Candomblé” will explore the drumming, ritual and mythic aspects of the tradition through the perspectives of Archetypal Psychology, particularly that of James Hillman. This section will be subdivided into two topics: 1. “Rhythm Making, Image Making and Soul Making: Aspects of Innovation in Candomblé Drumming, Ritual and Myth;” 2. “Being-in-Place: Remembering the Past and Keeping Tradition.”
Within the subchapter “Image Making, Rhythm Making and Soul Making: Archetypal Presentations in Candomblé Drumming, Ritual and Myth,” the archetypal significance of the orixás and their distinctive personifications, as well as the drums, rhythms and dance movements, will be examined.
The second subchapter “Being-in-Place: Remembering the Past and Keeping Tradition,” reveals how Candomblé continually transforms, yet at the same time stays connected to its ancestral soil. As Candomblé practitioners have migrated from Brazil to North America, the tradition reinvents itself to express the new sensibility of “place” while maintaining a memorial link to its source. Edward Casey’s phenomenological approach to the study of “place” and “placescapes” will amplify the Exile and Home archetypes in this subchapter.
Chapter four, “Cross-Cultural Perspectives of Tradition and Innovation in Candomblé,” will compare and contrast contemporary drumming and ritual practices of Brazilian Candomblé in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil and the United States. This chapter will document each interviewed person’s perspective on the tradition of Candomblé and how it has changed the face of modern music and society. Other questions and concerns will be addressed, such as, how do they think Candomblé has transformed the Brazilian culture as well as how has contemporary Brazilian culture transformed Candomblé? For the interviewees that have moved to the United States, an additional question will be offered: how have their religious practices and spiritual beliefs changed after moving to the United States?
Fieldwork observations and discoveries, such as how the role of women in the tradition of Candomblé has changed, will be included at the end of this section in order to smoothly transition to the next chapter, which opens up the images explored in the study to the most recent innovations now taking root in the religion.
Chapter five, “Contemporary Metamorphoses,” will place the Candomblé traditions in the present moment and show their continued transformative and innovative tendencies through Candomblé’s influence on popular music and lyrics, as well as music sharing technologies.
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