Stephen Selka's consideration of black ethnicity in the state of Bahia's capital, Salvador, and the town of Cachoeira, two centers for Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, is both a very North American and a very Brazilian study of the entanglements of race and religion. It seems Brazilian because it draws deftly from debates and categories of analysis salient in Bahia, especially claims about borders between culture and politics, the roles of syncretism in religious and national life, and the identification of blackness as an ethnic, rather than racial, status. And it feels notably late-twentieth-century North American due to its pragmatic rhetoric and folksy tone; its reliance on an anthropological “practice theory” concerned with the interplay of individual agents and structural limits on human possibility; and because Selka's parsing of debates via a wealth of mainly Brazilian and North American sources presents a U.S.-based, Brazilianist, social scientific “state of the art” circa 2007–2008. In other words, this is a nuanced study grounded in multiple traditions, yet attentive to evidence in Bahia and to the concerns of those on whom it rests.

Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Identity reflects on and reflects the mutual curiosity, influences and, at times, hostilities, of differentially situated actors concerned with African heritage, religion, and anti-racism. It takes into account history, shifting political-economic relations, and the religion's relevance to politics and identity, while emphasizing that Afro-Brazilian culture is not simply a bounded medium, but a space of contention often conceived of in and influenced by a comparative North-South framework for race relations whose contradictions catalyze black movement politics. Yet against common conventions, Selka usually chooses not to capitalize “black movement.” This choice reflects his concern with a range of quotidian practices both assailed and essentialized by supporters of Brazil's Organized Black Movement (MNU). He contends that such practices are themselves politics. Such a claim, currently accepted by most social scientists, is nonetheless significant in relation to MNU assertions that Bahia, Brazil's blackest region, fits only problematically into national-level black politics due to social movements' putative emphasis on cultural production rather than politicized organizing. Such culturalism typically is presented as a conundrum exacerbated by Brazilian nationalism's longstanding recognition of Afro-descendent culture but denigration of Afro-descendent citizens through miscegenation. And, in Selka's account, this emphasis on mixture employed to reduce color prejudice to a facet of class struggle is compounded by, and in part an explanation for, many MNU activists' inability to mobilize most Afro-Brazilians.

This is a readable and impressive portrait that, even as its details and glosses of complex debates may be open to contestation, suggests that Selka has identified something important in analyzing “overlapping but often competing classificatory practices with respect to religion and race alike” (131). Early in his argument, which opens with a history of Brazil recounted via magico-religious idioms that tie together Candomblé, Pentecostalism, and Roman Catholicism around a relatively narrow range of historical sources and debatable periodizations, Selka describes contemporary battles between Pentecostals and Candomblé practitioners. This leads to a focus on competing theorizations of syncretism, debates that both unite and divide Bahians. And this sets up the book's fascinating ethnography of members of Candomblés who defend themselves from Pentecostal attacks while negating their ties to Catholicism in favor of a purity they argue is preserved more faithfully in Bahia than Africa; of strident Pentecostals who deny racism while decrying an Afro-Brazilian culture they nonetheless appropriate; Pentecostal intellectuals who seize a theology of liberation from Catholics; mainline Protestants who shudder at Pentecostals' seemingly racist attacks on Candomblé; and clergy and laypeople who act in diverse manners in attempts to forge a black Catholicism and protect Afro-descendent Brazilians' rights. At this collage's symbolic core lies Roger Bastide's “‘syncretism in mosaic’” (40), or the layered concatenation of multiple, almost competing — but rarely blended — traditions that influence one another's development.

Thanks to its fresh rhetoric, breadth, and careful descriptions, undergraduates and lay people will appreciate Selka's concise ethnography. Yet it will also challenge specialists, due in part to its final chapter, which reconsiders the overlapping, and at times contradictory, religious idioms that spurred Bastide's “mosaic” metaphor to argue for the possibility of a more expansive, effective, and shared identity politics that might avoid essentializing blackness. The project revolves around recognition that politicized locations discussed throughout the book “are not closed sites of identity formation, but … crossroads” (152) where “classificatory struggles concerning the connection between religion and race” are waged (151). Rather than instances of a unitary and shared African heritage, they are disputes over “who is in control of the production of representations” (151). Nonetheless, control of representation does not involve simply the regulation of connections or the shape of collective images, but rather the details of how such semiotic connections are forged, or not. In other words, the ways that “order and coherence emerge out of multiplicity and contestation” (150) are not, as Selka argues, simply patterned by different categories' subjects' or their authors' social power: In fact, this book's novel approach to Candomblé's, Catholicism's, and Pentecostalism's shared optics suggests much more than Selka's explicitly constructivist, praxis-based argument that a heterogeneous religious field is nonetheless fashioned in the image of or through the categories of competing and differentially empowered historical actors. It is instead an incitement to consider the details and materiality of sense-making occasioned by multiple modes of being in, and of making significant, the world as they relate to the specific semiotic techniques or representational habits that bind putatively distinct objects, contexts, and interpretations within mutually influential and hence related representational logics. And this possibility, still inchoate yet gestured at insistently by Selka's ethnography, is one of many reasons the book is a must-read for all those interested in race, justice, and religion in Bahia and beyond.