Planting Axé in the City: Urban
Terreiros
and the Growth of Candomblé in
Late
Nineteenth-Century Salvador,
Bahia,
Brazil
Samuel Lira Gordenstein
Núcleo de Arqueologia,
Superintendência do Instituto do Patrimônio
Histórico e Artístico Nacional
na Bahia, Brazil
Documentation from the second
half of the nineteenth century suggests that Candomblé, the religion formed
by African slaves and their descendants in Brazil, flourished in the
crowded urban blocks of Bahia’s capital city. Nonetheless, in contrast to some of the
surviving, large congregations established in the sparsely populated outskirts
of Salvador, very little is known about the spaces of worship located in
the ground-level houses and basements where
much of the city’s
Afro-Brazilian population lived. This article suggests that their existence hinged on an
ability to neutralize the police repression and procure natural resources for
ritual use. But even more so, their practices demanded access to the ground
to “plant” the prerequisite materials underground before inaugurating the space
for religious observations. Evidence from archaeological research in
a late nineteenth-century house basement is presented to discuss the role
played by buried “axés” in the religion. Ethnographic analogies with past and
contemporary Candomblé practices are used to demonstrate
continuities in the choice of locations and some of the characteristics of the objects
whose roles were to protect the space and consecrate the soil for ritual practices.
Keywords Salvador, Candomblé,
nineteenth century, urban archaeology.
ACESSE NA ÍNTEGRA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yjaf20/5/2
