Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the conflicts and accommodations between Ketu and Nagô Candomblé as the members of this terreiro grapple with their unquiet family dead. It shows the imbrication national traditions and ritual lineages and explores the role of the dead in the lives and deaths of the living.

Paper long abstract:

Cachoeira, Bahia Brazil is known throughout the Northeastern interior as a place of extraordinary power and danger. Since the 1930's Cachoeira's Candomblé has transformed. Ketu Candomblé and the lineage of Menininha de Gantois has come to the fore. They have displaced the autochthonous and deeply syncretic traditions known locally as Candomblé Nagô. This transformation has not always gone smoothly.

This paper charts the conflict in a blood and ritual family over its mortuary shrines. Members of the family built an altar according to the Ketu conventions that was supposed to supplant offerings to the dead rendered at a nearby hogplum tree (pé de cajá). Soon afterwards people began to die suddenly and under increasingly mysterious circumstances, throwing the leadership of the temple into disarray. This was interpreted as ancestral or perhaps divine vengeance for the betrayal of the Nagô tradition.

This paper explores the conflicts and accommodations between Ketu and Nagô Candomblé as the members of this terreiro grapple with their unquiet family dead. These conflicts take shape in the Axexé mortuary rituals, in Ebós de Egum and in the innumerable and interminable discussions and divinations about who should control the temple. It shows the imbrication national traditions and ritual lineages and explores the role of the dead in the lives and deaths of the living.