Transnational Migrants and Transnational Spirits: An African Religion in Lisbon

Abstract

Portugal, for long a country of emigration, has in recent decades become one of immigration. One of the largest groups of newcomers is constituted by Africans from the former Portuguese colonies. This paper focuses on how religion and ritual traditions from their home country are manipulated by people from Guinea-Bissau in order to recreate their identity in the urban world of Lisbon. Based on fieldwork conducted among the Pepel of Guinea-Bissau from 1997 to the present and on ongoing research on a Pepel religious healer in Lisbon, this paper specifically dwells on the issue of transnational spirits. It explores how such entities are constructed, and the rituals around them. This entails a complex and ceaseless relation between the world of the living and the world of the dead, as well as a constant flow of goods and symbols between the physical original grounds, in Guinea-Bissau, and Lisbon: people, money, goods, practices and ideas, as well as spirits, circulate and create bridges between Europe and Africa.

Keywords:

• Migration
• Transnationalism
• Spirits
• Religion
• Africa
• Portugal

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Ralph Grillo and Valentina Mazzucato for patiently reading and commenting on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Field work has been carried out since 1997 in the Biombo region, based on periodic stays of several months a year; the research in Lisbon started with contacts, previously acquired in Guinea-Bissau, of families and ritual specialists in the diaspora, and has included, in this case study, participation in the djambakóss's consultations as well as extended interviews with her, the spirit and the clients.

2. The Pepel were the owners of the grounds where the Portuguese founded, already in the seventeenth century, a fortress, and where the Portuguese were defeated by the Pepel in 1891; much later, in the twentieth century, Bissau became the capital of the colony, and this area, along with the connected Biombo region, remains to this date known as Pepel territory.

3. As Celeste Quintino (2004: 281) points out, the term trabadjo means both witchcraft to cause trouble to someone, and the treatment to overcome the spell.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clara Saraiva

Clara Saraiva is Senior Researcher at the Lisbon Institute for Scientific Tropical Research (Instituto de Investigacao Cientifica Tropical) and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa