The Embodiment of the Unknown

 My eyes filled with the timid pink light of the rising sun appearing behind a palm tree. I could finally feel the rain, the soil, the clouds, the fire, the wind. I was free. How could I forget that they were all inside me? Human life…so unpredictable like the sea, defined by the unknown and the unexplainable, wrapped in fear, freed by everything we feel.

                                                                                                                        (Nobre 2018)

I recently attended several dance theory seminars at University of California, Riverside in order to inform my research on Afro-diasporic religions in Brazil. Sacred practices like Batuque[1] and Umbanda[2] are often expressed through song and dance in order to create a connection between us and the other dimension. Both practices are syncretic and share theological similarities. The Batuque religious practice and circle dance preceded Umbanda by centuries, and was introduced by primarily Yoruba-speaking West African slaves in the 1500s. Practitioners of the Batuque religion that aim to achieve healing and balance by worshipping the Orixás.[3] It is common practice for the believers to consult those divine entities through the work of the Babalawos,[4] and to offer animal sacrifices to them. Both Batuque and Umbanda syncretize the Orixás with Catholic Saints. However, Umbanda also includes elements of French spiritism and Amerindian spirituality. The music and dance of both practices create axé,[5] facilitate the trance of the mediums, and establish a communal sense of identity and belonging.

As dance theorist Barbara Browning contends, dancers who enter a trance state and incorporate the Orixás are not writers, but rather “a text written by the Orixás on their body” (1995, 50). Umbanda practitioners often use the term “incorporation” to indicate the process by which the medium connects to the spirit guides who then communicate with the devotees. The term “incorporation” suggests the prominence of a sensorial aspect of this praxis, the investigation of which may be facilitated through a mixture of ethnographic strategies. Therefore, the challenge of researching spiritual practices that are inscribed on the body of the dancers rather than in a sacred text may require alternative approaches. 

My own interdisciplinary approach includes sensorial ethnography and allows me to expand my possibilities of interpretation to non-written sources. As a scholar my initial entrée into the study of Umbanda centered around questions that I thought were fundamental: 

•       Is music a form of prayer? 

•       Are musicians the channel between this world and the other dimension?

•       What are the reasons that lead people to believe in a higher power, and worship the divine in culturally specific rituals?  

•       What do those religious and musical practices mean to those who participate in them?  

While some of these questions could be addressed through traditional ethnographic methods such as participant observation or formal and informal interviews, others remained open to philosophical and theological inquiries that were supported by sensorial and auto-ethnographic approaches.

In dealing with a topic that lends itself to theorizing beyond the structures of academic writing, artistic expressions such as poetry and music allow a possibility for emotional self-extension. I intentionally introduced this essay with one of my short poems titled “The Unknown,” in the belief that sometimes poetry and lyrics better express intense feelings and experiences than prose. These types of expressions have created a particular personal creative space to investigate my own sensorial and personal experiences with Umbanda spirituality.

Anusha Kedhar, practitioner and scholar of Indian Dance, is among several faculty members at the University of California, Riverside who encourage self-ethnography among other decolonizing approaches. Self-ethnography places the ethnomusicologist’s interpretation and experience at the center of the research, which opens the space for a subjective, introspective epistemological approach. Kedhar encourages students, like me, to consider their bodies as repositories of individual and communal memory, and to write poetry as an aspect of self-ethnography. Her suggestion gives continuity to a long history of intellectual engagement with poetry and storytelling as sites of knowledge in Afro-diasporic cultures. For instance, Afro-Caribbean author Aimé Césaire (1990) contends that poetry is knowledge that arises in the silence of scientific knowledge, and Robin D.G. Kelley claims that the radical black feminist movement in the 1960s “redefined the source of theory” by including poets, singers, and storytellers as authoritative sources (Kelley 2002, 154). The traditions of Afro-diasporic religious praxis such as Batuque demonstrates that knowledge is orally transmitted by the cultural bearers through their storytelling, songs, and the dramatization of the Orixás dances—and that these ways of knowing should be integrated into and centered in scholarly investigations.

Analyzing the personal reasons why we may decide to inquire about a specific topic is an important part of self-ethnography. My interest in spirituality began years before I attended university. The tragic loss of my father when I was only four years old resulted in a number of questions in my young mind. Recently, my own health issues, fortunately now resolved, made me feel and connect to the presence of a spiritual world. My illness reminded me that I was not in control of anything, and helped me to acquire a very different life perspective. I became more curious about the mechanisms that other people use to cope with loss, and the function of music in their healing processes. 

My illness reminded me that I was not in control of anything, and helped me to acquire a very different life perspective. I became more curious about the mechanisms that other people use to cope with loss, and the function of music in their healing processes.

Due to my familiarity with the Brazilian communities, I addressed my inquiry towards the highly syncretic Afro-Brazilian religious practice of Umbanda. I initially got involved in the practice three years ago during fieldwork for my master’s thesis. At first, I entered the field with an inquisitive yet skeptical attitude, but eventually I found answers that typical ethnographic methods cannot generate and words cannot explain. Although I have not yet been initiated into the religion, I have been studying as a medium and attending several Umbanda ceremonies. 

Sometimes I feel that being both a scholar and a quasi-practitioner is frowned upon, because academia is still conditioned by empirical approaches. These approaches often stigmatize non-Western religions and the idea of spirit possession. In fact, scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) contend that academic knowledge is often organized around common foundations in classical and enlightenment philosophies that are grounded in colonized world views and are therefore “antagonistic to other belief systems” (68). Early theorists often analyzed trance with a pathological lens, despite early and critical dismissals from Melville Herskovitz (1941), who interpreted spirit possession as a cultural phenomenon. Other scholars like Kathleen O’Connor (2005) and Tiago de Oliveira Pinto (1997) followed Herskovitz’s direction and theorized that spirit possession is a method to resolve tensions and facilitate healing. Roger Bastide (1958) considered the Orixás dance and the trance not only as a direct connection to the divine but as a choreography that represents African myths, and, therefore, provides a moment of deep connection between Africa and Brazil. In line with the arguments of these scholars, participating in the singing of the pontos[6] to evoke the spirits, and dancing with the Umbanda members, has given me a great deal of insight into the social life of practitioners.

Sometimes I feel that being both a scholar and a quasi-practitioner is frowned upon, because academia is still conditioned by empirical approaches. These approaches often stigmatize non-Western religions and the idea of spirit possession.

The embodiment of those experiences is implied in our methodology as ethnographers. Because ethnography is an embodied practice in itself, it requires the physical presence and participation of the ethnographer (Conquergood 1991). However, academic disciplines often disassociate the mind from the body and consider the rational experience epistemologically superior to the sensual experience. Conquergood claims that masculinity is often associated with the rational realm, and femininity with the emotional one, creating a narrative that sustains patriarchal hierarchies (ibid). Auto-ethnography and sensory ethnography allow me to challenge rigid empirical approaches that are often deeply embedded in gendered and racialized ideologies. As such, my research through embodied practices becomes a decolonial and feminist act in itself. 

Engaging with self-ethnographic approaches to negotiate my own experiences with practitioners of Candomblé or Umbanda has been an essential tool for discovery because it introduces a performative, subjective, and emotional type of knowledge, which is essential when dealing with the complexity of embodied music and religious practices. Singing the pontos and embodying the unknown connects the researcher to the community in a deeper way, creating a sense of mutual trust and understanding. My initial fieldwork also suggests that Afro-diasporic religious groups like Umbanda connect the invisible to the visible through the embodiment of the unknown, and their specific musical and spiritual practices may build communitas, resist hegemonic narratives, and create a sense of agency.

Following Robin Kelley, who claims that the history of Afro-diasporic groups is a “history of movement” (2002, 16), I suggest that our methodologies as ethnomusicologists must also be able to “move” in fluid and complex ways in order to convey the richness of those cultural expressions. Therefore, practicing with a community of believers not only reflects the participant-observation approach that is central to our discipline, but also one that is kinetic and transformative.  Knowledge becomes inscribed in the body of the mediums, renewed during each ceremony, while the body itself transcends materiality—becoming its own site of worship practice, the past and the present, and a bridge between the known and the unknown.

References

Bastide, Roger. 1958. Le Candomblé de Bahia. Paris: Mouton.

Browning, Barbara. 1995. Samba: Resistance in Motion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.05945.

Césaire, Aimé. 1990. “Poetry and Knowledge.” In Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-82. Charlottesville: University of Press Virginia.

Conquergood, Dwight. 1991. “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics.” Communication Monographs 58: 179–94.

Herskovits, Melville. 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1941. 

Kelley, Robin. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.

Lara, Ana-Maurina. 2020. Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Nobre, Mariangela. 2018. “The Unknown.” Unpublished poem.

O’Connor, Kathleen. 2005. “O Outro Lado: Candomblé, Psychiatry and Discourse in Bahia, Brazil.” PhD diss., Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University.  

Pinto, Tiago de Oliveira. 1997. “Healing Process as Musical Drama: The Ebo’ Ceremony in the Bahian Candomblé of Brazil.” The World of Music 39 (1): 11–33.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies. London: Zed Books.