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Accepted Paper:
Of Re-Africanisation, New Traditions, and the Making of Diaspora Babaláwos: Ifá Temples and the Orisa Economy in Contemporary Brazil
Félix Ayoh'OMIDIRE
(Obafemi Awolowo University Humboldt University, Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Within the past 20 years, there has been a boom in Ifá adherence in Brazil where, for centuries, the Erindinlogun tradition had almost completely obliterated the role and place of babalawos in the orisa economy. Such a deverlopment has generated a new dynamics in the re-Africanisation of Candomble.
Paper long abstract:
Candomblé historiography since the 19th century has revealed a gradual but systematic side-lining of babalawos, priests of the Ifa oracular traditions, in the consolidation of the candomblé terreiros otherwise known as Ilê Axé, where a combination of factors gradually placed the leadership of the emerging Afro-Brazilian religious models in the hands of the iyalorixás, making American Anthropologist Ruth Landes to errorneously label the terreiro world of the Brazilian orixá tradition as a "Cidade das Mulheres" in her 1940 book of the same title. Despite the lingering memories of great Bahian babalawos such as Felisberto Souza, Rudolfo Martins (Bamgboxé-Obitiko) and Martiniano Eliseu do Bonfim (Ojelade) whose imprints in the annals of the oldest Candomblé temples are still evoked in the appropriate "esa" litanies today, the bulk of oracular traditions was systematically shifted into the hands of the Iyalorixás with pre-eminence given to "Oosa dídá", otherwise known as Erindinlogun. This is a major contrast with the Cuban Santería tradition of the same period which upheld the Ifá traditions and has rigorously maintained a strict division between the persons and functions of a babalawo and an oba oriaté. The present paper seeks to analyse and problematise the process of re-introduction of Ifá-Orunmila traditions in Brazil in the past 2 decades and the implications for what this author has discussed in other research moments as the Orixá Economy.