Contesting Climate Transitions through Afro-Religious Praxes in Salvador, Brazil

• In Event: Environmental Struggles in Africa and the Diaspora

Description for Program

This presentation examines how Afro-Brazilian religious praxes, specifically those of
Candomblé, impact and are impacted by Brazil’s shifting urban environmental governance in a
context of national climate transitions. Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic and archival
research in the São Bartolomeu Conservation Unit, located in the northeastern city of Salvador, I
show how Candomblé practitioners interact with state-led conservation and climate adaptation
while sustaining ecologies grounded in ancestral relationships with more-than-human spiritual
entities such as Orixás. This paper asserts that Candomblé ritual praxes and relationalities with a
pantheon of spiritual beings are distinct standpoints from which practitioners encounter and
negotiate environmental conservation developments as Salvador transitions into a green city. In
so doing, I reveal how state-led urban climate adaptation and conservation strategies engage
with, appropriate, and marginalize the ecological knowledge and practices of Afro-descendant
communities.

Author

• Chazelle Rhoden, Columbia University