The Ontology of Possession in the Candomblé of Bahia

• In Event: What spirit possession “does”: the production of cosmology and change in Afro-Latin religions I

Abstract

The main purpose of my paper is to resume the analysis of a question I studied more than 30 years ago: how to analyze trance and spirit possession completely renouncing the premise that seems to guide virtually all anthropological analyzes on this topic, namely, the explicit or implicit assumption that trance and spiritual possession actually do not happen. Or, this (almost) anthropological sureness that the beings to whom is attributed the power to possess and take humans into trance do not actually exist. To develop this analysis I will seek to establish more precisely than before the connections between ‘native’ theories of trance and possession and those related to the notion of personhood, ritual and agency in the world. Thus, I believe, it will be possible to begin to establish what I would call an ethnographic theory of trance and possession, drawn from a precise empirical case: Bahian Candomblé - one of the many religions of African matrix existing in Brazil.

Author

• Marcio Goldman, Museu Nacional