Embodied Narratives of Candomblé’s Afro-Bahian Caboclos

Abstract

At a ritual compound in Salvador, Bahia's capital city in Northeastern Brazil, the Caboclo Sete Flechas dances a sinuous samba, his bare feet marking time on the leaf-covered floor. With a serpentine spine and syncopated steps that turn on a polymetric beat, Sete Flechas rides out on the horse that is Mãe Oba's body. A priestess in the Afro-Brazilian religio-cultural matrix of Candomblé, Mãe Oba, cultivates Yoruban-oriented divinities, the Orixá, as well as Caboclo, hybrid Brazilian gods identified with indigenous histories and healing traditions. At ceremonial sessions like the one described above, Caboclos use locally harvested leaves to remove ailments and dispel negative energy. Rowdy, masculine entities that embody female, male and trans-identified practitioners, Caboclos also dance circular sambas that narrate and revel in living histories of emancipation, nationalism, eroticization and racial contact.

This paper places critical ethnographic fieldwork and choreographic analysis in dialogue with Timothy Morton's dark ecologies to develop what I call dark horse kinetics: a counter-hegemonic praxis activated through Caboclo performance. I suggest that Caboclos use dark horse kinetics to unfix, critique and revise dominant constructions of race, nation, gender and sex. Thinking about dark ecologies through performance, I ask if dark horse kinetics can move dark ecology towards a performance praxis, or a praxis that performs, in an efficacious and theatrical manner.

Notes

1 Rather than theoretically imposing Morton onto a realm outside his expertise, my intention in juxtaposing dark ecologies with Bahian ritual contexts is to productively flesh out Morton’s abstractions through attention to specific dynamics of Caboclo practice.

2 ‘Peripheria’ in Brazilian Portuguese refers to the spatial sense of distance from the centre city as well as a socio-economic sense of exclusion from the financial flows of gentrified neighbourhoods.

3 I build on the work of dance scholars including Susan Foster (1998, 2003) and Cristina Rosa (2015) who demonstrate that choreography articulates with socio-historical formations of race, nation, gender and sexuality.

4 Nancy de Souza e Silva (interview, 15 May 2018), on why Caboclos provoke one another to come down, through dancing.

5 ‘Incorporar’ is the dominant verb used by Candomblé practitioners to describe embodiment by an entidade.

6 I have heard ‘horse’ used in the context of embodiment by an African god, but much more rarely.

7 David Shorter (2016) argues that the concept of ‘relations’ circumvents the interpretative investments of colonial ideologies, which persist into the twenty-first century and are reproduced through hierarchical terms such as ‘spirits’.

8 Tristes Tropiques was first translated into English in 1961 by John Russell as A World on the Wane.

9 Tupinambá also features as a Caboclo in Candomblé.

10 Edison Carneiro (1961 [1948]) and Reginaldo Prandi (2001) also attribute Caboclo aesthetics primarily to imagery from nineteenth-century romantic literature.

11 This and all other translations mine.

12 Not explicitly in the sense of civic imagery or police surveillance.

13 Afro-Brazilians are disproportionally landless and living below the poverty line (Bijos 2010). Salvador’s terreiros, even ones granted heritage status by state bodies, are unlikely to own the land on which they sit.

14 Pravaz (2012) historicizes the samba dancing ‘mulata’ within the political context of Brazil’s gendered, sexualized and racialized discourses of African- inflected performance. Rosa (2015) explicates Globo’s central role in mediatizing Carnaval and samba.

15 Alberto Heráclito Ferreiro Filho (1999) historicizes the criminalization of samba via social hygiene policies that targeted Afro- descendent ‘women of the street’ whose apparent lack of interest in civil marriage and roles as heads of household threatened bourgeois family values of the time (248–9).

16 See Browning (1995:33–4) on experiencing samba’s autoerotic pleasures.