By Luis Nicolau Parés

Professor J. Lorand Matory's thorough critique of the English translation of my book, which was first published in Brazil in 2006, did not come to me as a complete surprise. He and I have known each other for some years, and we have shared with each other interests in the cultural history of Candomblé, in particular the place and role of the Jeje nation. We have discussed our interpretative divergences in private and in public, and I have referred to some of them in writing (Nagôization, 2005; Birth, 2005; Formation). I do appreciate and feel honored that such a distinguished scholar has devoted some of his precious time to reviewing my book, giving me the chance to revisit my over-a-decade-old argument in the light of his provoking challenges. Yet, after reading his essay (certainly more than a standard review), I wondered why he had taken the effort to write 15 single-spaced pages of meticulous criticism on a work he ultimately dismisses as theoretically old-fashioned and full of errors and inconsistencies. If it is so worthless, why care about it in the first place?

In this sense I much appreciate the editors of The Americas giving me the opportunity to reply. There is no way I can answer all the issues raised by Matory's review, so I will focus on those I judge to be most relevant for advancing our debates concerning Afro-Brazilian cultural history. My understanding is that the book, already in its third edition in Brazil, stands for itself and should be my best defense. Anybody curious enough to read it will easily realize that in many instances Matory's assessments have deliberately silenced, flattened or misread part of my argument, regrettably portraying my position under what I consider to be a distorting light.

To frame his critique Matory resurrects the classic debate that has long dominated Afro-American studies and became central from the 1970s onward. This interpretative and to a certain extent ideological antagonism opposes the scholars who highlight cultural continuities between Africa and Afro-America and those who underscore discontinuities and the cultural creative synthesis developed in the New World. The former approach, mostly preoccupied in identifying “Africanisms,” is associated with a Herskovitsian memory retention model and is usually contrasted to the Mintz and Price creolization model that emphasizes the critical role of slave societies in shaping the new Afro-American cultures. At this stage, one would have liked to see this reductionist polarization passed by, but that, it seems, is not so easy.

After hammering the reader with more than 18 mentions of Herskovits and the Herskovitsian model, Matory's strategy to corner me on one side of the debate becomes very obvious. According to him I am interested only in privileging African origins and the tracing of precise African configurations of belief and practice in Bahia. This linear “out of Africa” movement, narrowly focused on cultural survivals, would have led me to ignore transformation, change, agency and the Atlantic dialogue.

The problem with this biased assumption is that from the start of the book I invoke this debate and very explicitly place myself somewhere else: “I argue the need to understand the simultaneity or synchronicity of continuity and discontinuity processes, as well as the importance of understanding the proportion between these dynamics. The problem is a question of emphasis, and my own stress does not fall on ‘africanisms’ or ‘inventions,’ but on the complex interaction between the two” (Formation, p. xv; my italics).

Throughout the book and by means of the Jeje case, my aim is to both describe and understand this complex interaction. I present continuities and discontinuities in the attempt to assess the interplay between them. If anything, my theoretical alignment in the debate assumes an in-between position, though this runs the obvious risk of dissatisfying both sides. The Jeje-Mahi diacritica I examine in the two last chapters of the book can be interpreted as resulting from the combination of two main cultural processes that, though apparently contradictory, are not necessarily incompatible.

On the one hand, I distinguish a series of deities and ritual segments that I identify as continuities (for example, Legba, Aziri, zandro).Footnote ¹ However, I point out others for which it is not easy to find African antecedents, considering the possibility that they were gradually created in Brazil (for example, gra, boita, Azonado). I also indicate rituals clearly elaborated in Brazil (the fechar o balaio ceremony, Saint John bonfires) that stem from the interpenetration of African practices with Catholic or Iberian traditions (Formation, pp. 294–295). At one point my reviewer very eloquently summarizes my argument about the coexistence of retentions, adaptations, and innovation (621, 622, 2), though subsequently he seems to ignore this recognition, which contradicts his overall critique. On the other hand, following Fredrik Barth (1969), I insist on the simultaneous relational contrastive process among competing groups (for example, Jeje versus Nagô and Angola) by which diacritica are selected and the boundaries between the different Candomblé nations constantly redefined. In fact, it is this second Brazilian identity dynamic that I privilege in my interpretation (Formation, p. xvii). Matory may not be convinced by my approach, but in my opinion he is unfair when he intentionally misreads the text and shelves the book under one of his preconceived theoretical categories without daring to recognize variation or nuances.

When he makes charges against my supposed exclusive fixation with continuities and linear “out of Africa” interpretation, it may be that he is simply reacting to the fact (a fact upsetting to him) that I did not fully embrace or give what he considered due credit to his “Afro-Atlantic dialogue” theory. In his review, Matory takes good care to outline and campaign for his narrative about the formation of Afro-American identities and cultures. It is worth noting that the review's bibliography—apart from a single paper of mine—consists of no less than six of his own publications. Perhaps in the end Matory has gone to such an extent in criticizing my book as a way to shed some light onto his own.

His Gilroy-inspired Black Atlantic model rightly insists on avoiding, as I also do, any primordial notion of bounded, fixed, internally systematic local cultures. Instead, he emphasizes translocal or supralocal cosmopolitan flows and exchange mediated by migration, commerce, and the circulation of literature and ideas, as responsible for exogenous cultural transformation. Thus, Matory's narrative intends to transcend the linear model that has dominated the cultural history of Candomblé, presupposing a unique movement from Africa to Brazil determined by the slave trade. He also dismisses the memory metaphor for explaining the logic behind cultural reproduction and proposes instead the dialogue metaphor, involving multiple heterogeneous agents engaging in what he calls the “live dialogue between Africa and the Americas” (611; Matory Reference Matory and Yelvington2006; Reference Matory, Gates and Appiah1999a).Footnote ² His model strongly relies on the agency of an elite of African and Afro-Bahian merchants and priests who throughout the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth imported goods and ideas from West Africa into Bahia, and vice versa. He also claims that these Atlantic travelers, particularly during the Lagos Renaissance in the 1890s, were responsible for propagating a discourse of Nagô racial and ritual purity and superiority. His renewed attention to the South Atlantic, pioneered by Verger, and the focus on the bidirectional cultural dynamic of the post-slave trade period were certainly original and significant contributions.

Let me make clear that I have always acknowledged (not reluctantly, and not “at the margins,” or following the advice of the press reviewers of the book) the critical role of nineteenth-century Atlantic travelers for a full understanding of Afro-Brazilian cultural and religious history (Nagôization, 2005; Birth, 2005). My disagreement with Matory lies in the relative importance we attribute to this Atlantic bidirectional flow. Matory considers that “discourses, values, ideas and collective identities” imported into Bahia in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century by a discrete number of travelers were pervasive to the point of changing not only priestly thoughts about themselves and the meanings they attributed to their religious practices, but of transforming the ritual, practices themselves (621).

I do not deny the capacity of the discourse of a few individuals to affect the cultural practice of many. The Atlantic dialogue contributed to the circulation in Bahia of new orixá mythological narratives and was instrumental in the promotion of the Nagô nation, though not so much of the Jeje nation, as I will argue. Imported goods from the African coast were also symbolic capital in the Africanization of Candomblé. Yet I also argue that the influence of these travelers in shaping religious practice must have been “tangential” (which is different from “non-existent”). By “tangential,” I mean this: that though the Atlantic dialogue may have been outwardly transforming, I doubt it was significant or powerful enough to modify the systemic or structural order of Candomblé, or its mode of organization and operation, already institutionalized by the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, we know the case of the diviner Martiniano Eliseu do Bomfim, who after his many years in Lagos helped the priestess Aninha to create in the 1930s a new African-inspired institution, the Obás of Xangô, in the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá. This innovation, however, was limited to her temple; famous as it is, it was not replicated in Candomblé as a whole. In my view, the Atlantic travelers were influential on the few Nagô-Ketu temples they were associated with, like the Ilê Iyá Nassô or Axé Opô Afonjá, and less so on others of the same nation, like the Alaketu or Gantois, with which they had less contact and whose leadership succession was determined by kinship (Castillo and Parés, Reference Castillo and Parés2010; Castillo, Reference Castillo2011).

One also wonders why Matory emphasizes the Afro-Atlantic dialogue, “Africa and Afro-America in tandem” (Matory, Reference Matory2005, p. 291) over other geographies. Why not consider the continental Afro-American dialogue between Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and the United States? Why not the national Afro-Brazilian dialogue between Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, Maranhão, and Bahia? Why not the regional Afro-Bahian dialogue between Salvador, the Recôncavo, and the Sertão? These are, on different scales, similar flows of people, goods, and ideas that also have the potential to shape local religious discourse and practice. If we agree that the local is always affected by the global or the external, why should one privilege the faraway over the near, or any of the in-between spaces?

My concern about Matory's Atlantic model is the apparent over-determination granted to the effects of translocal exchanges from distant Africa, and the insufficient attention paid to other regional or local internal interactions that also led to ritual and institutional change. For example, the Bahian colonial antagonism between Africans and Brazilian-born blacks or creole, perpetuated in the nineteenth century between African-founded temples privileging the devotion of African gods and creole-founded temples often worshipping the caboclo Brazilian gods (Rodrigues, Reference Rodrigues1935, p. 171), had its own strong effects. This contrastive ethnic local dynamic was already conducive to strengthening the African identity of a predominantly Nagô Bahian elite, who was active since the first half of the nineteenth century and gathered around temples such as the Ilê Iyá Nassô. This internal antagonism provided fertile ground for the imported discourse of Yoruba superiority brought in by the Atlantic priests, thus contributing to the “Nagôization” of Candomblé (Birth, 2005). This integrative and complementary approach, which takes into account both internal and external forces, questions the exclusivity or predominance of the ideology brought by an Atlantic merchant elite and allows more space for the less self-conscious, cooperative, and competitive dynamics of neighboring temples. Let's call it “the local dialogue.”

Despite discrepancies in the chronology of the Atlantic exchange that space limitations do not allow me to comment on here, I have no difficulty in admitting that traveler priests like Martiniano Eliseu do Bomfim or Felisberto Sowzer had a role in Candomblé's “Nagôization.” But not only them, the father of Martiniano and the grandfather of Felisberto, had already traveled the same route in the 1870s, long before the Lagos Renaissance (Castillo and Parés, Reference Castillo and Parés2010; Castillo Reference Castillo, Reis and Azevedo2012).

My divergence with Matory's Atlantic dialogue thesis sharpens when it comes to what he calls the “Jeje Renaissance” in Bahia. His imagination of a “battle for relative prestige” between Nagô and Jeje Atlantic merchants (625, 627; my italics), each providing Candomblé temples with distinct African cultural ammunition for the strengthening of their respective identities, is not sustained by any documentary evidence that I know of.Footnote ³ Matory's subsequent argument that iconography and knowledge of the snake worship was re-imported into Bahia in the early twentieth century—after several decades of non-existence—by Jeje Atlantic travelers and that it became the main emblem for the rebirth of a decaying Jeje nation is equally unpersuasive. The weakness of Matory's empirical data on the Jeje Atlantic merchants seriously compromises this transnational hypothesis.

In fact, oral tradition recalls that Ludovina Pessoa, the co-founder of the Seja Hundé temple (and perhaps the Bogum), traveled yearly to Africa. Though this has not yet been documented, I do not doubt the possibility of these nineteenth-century trips—not twentieth-century—and, contrary to Matory's affirmation (614, 615), I do mention their potential as a vector of change in aspects of the Jeje religious culture (Formation, pp. 143–144, 328n112). Yet there is no evidence so far that Ludovina “participated actively in [the] trans-Atlantic trade” or directed “a commercial operation (Casa Estrela) that marketed African goods shipped by the owners’ close relatives from West Africa” (613, 622; Matory, Reference Matory2005, pp. 100, 310–311n21).

Matory's basis for this affirmation is an early text by Cachoeira local historian Luiz Claudio Nascimento (Reference Nascimento and Isodoro1988, pp. 21–23), not particularly famous for his scholarly rigor. He informs us that the Casa Estrela was the religious headquarters of the Seja Hundé temple and the Boa Morte devotion and that African goods were sold there, though as usual he is quite vague about his sources. Even so, though Pessoa may have circulated in this house, Nascimento never says she was involved in the trade. Matory's other support is Fayette Wimberly (Reference Wimberly and Kraay1998, pp. 86, 89n41) who refers to Tia Julia, the owner of Casa Estrela, and her brothers and business partners in Africa, though again no written or oral sources are provided for this alleged kinship. Wimberly further complicates the narrative when she refers to Tia Julia as the high-priestess (mãe de santo) of the Seja Hundé, which erroneously leads Matory to confuse Tia Julia with the founder of the temple, Ludovina Pessoa. Hence, while waiting for more grounded evidence I am reluctant to identify Pessoa as an example of an Atlantic merchant. On the other hand, the absence of direct commerce of African goods in Cachoeira in the 1940s, which Matory readily dismisses as relying “on one present-day informant” (614), comes from the 1970s recollections of Miguel Santana, a prominent businessman and Candomblé priest of Axé Opô Afonjá temple, who was in Cachoeira at the time and heard it from his local Candomblé friends (Castro, Reference Castro1996, p. 27). So, though I do not discard the possibility of commercial exchange between Cachoeira and West Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, we still need more solid evidence to give it credibility.

The other single example of a Jeje Atlantic traveler presented by Matory is Joaquim Devodê Branco.Footnote ⁴ This merchant exported religious goods from Porto Novo and Lagos to Bahia and embraced the Mahi identity at the time of his death in 1924 (Matory, Reference Matory2005, pp. 95–99, 101). He may have been a friend of Aninha and Senhora, high-priestesses of the Axé Opô Afonjá, a friendship Matory seems to infer from Olinto (Matory, Reference Matory2005, p. 96; Olinto, Reference Olinto1964, p. 269), though the latter's assumption that Branco was Senhora's godfather is not confirmed in her Catholic baptism record (Lisa Earl Castillo, personal communication, December 23, 2014). Matory then uses Ferraz's report (Reference Ferraz1941, pp. 273–274) of the presence in the Axé Opô Afonjá of some snake rings belonging to Aninha, and knowledge there of the vodun Idagbe, to support his hypothesis that representations of the snake vodun were imported into Bahia between the 1890s and 1930s. One has to trust Matory's suggestion that Jeje snake iconography and knowledge in the Nagô temple were brought in by Branco, though Ferraz is silent about this. And even if that was so, what proves this merchant had any impact on the Jeje temples?

Matory curiously relegates to the notes all other evidence given by Ferraz showing the presence of the snake worship in various Angola and Nagô temples in Bahia and Recife. He similarly minimizes my data on the existence of the Jeje snake devotion at the turn of the nineteenth century (Formation, pp. 239–240). Oral tradition recalls two devotees who were consecrated in the 1870s to the snake vodun Bessen and who became high-priestesses of the Seja Hundé temple, one of them in the 1890s—the precise period Matory argues the worship had disappeared from Bahia. To bypass this evidence, my reviewer challenges my assumption that the snake vodun Bessen was the “spiritual master” of the Seja Hundé at the time of its foundation in the 1890s, arguing that priests can change any aspect of their liturgy according to their strategic interests, whims, and caprice (626).

There are indeed all sorts of possibilities in Candomblé, yet the replacement of the temple's “spiritual master” (who, as in this case, usually coincides with the personal god of the founding priestess) is not a common practice at all. But the fact that priests can manipulate their discourse and liturgy is not my main point here. Rather, the point is that in all likelihood the Jeje snake worship was alive and well by the time Matory affirms it had virtually disappeared. To reinforce his snake worship rebirth hypothesis, Matory resorts to Edison Carneiro, who in 1948 referred to a snake painting on the walls of the Bogum temple (though the Bahian ethnologist says nothing about this being a “novelty”) and to a couple of Jeje priests familiar with the snake vodun. Carneiro concluded that “Dã is present in all of the Jeje candomblés left in Bahia” (Carneiro, [Reference Carneiro1948] Reference Carneiro1985, pp. 64–65). Yet, according to my reviewer, this visibility of the snake in the 1940s would be a contagious innovation allegedly incited by Jeje traveling merchants, namely Branco. Matory refers to another snake painting in Falefá's temple, but this happened in a complete different period, after a trip this priest made to West Africa in 1968 (Formation, p. 202).

Matory's other main argument is that “dignified textual representations of EGAF [vodun] religion, replete with endorsements of the snake god Dã made their way into Bahia between the 1890s and 1930s” (Matory, Reference Matory2005, p. 101; my italics). Matory is here referring mainly to Nina Rodrigues as disseminator of Lieutenant-Colonel A.B. Ellis’s work on the Ewe-speaking peoples published in 1890, and to Carneiro who in 1938 had access to the works of the Herskovits on Dahomey (Matory, Reference Matory2005, pp. 92, 101; Herskovits, Reference Herskovits and Herskovits1933, Reference Herskovits1938). The relative influence of intellectuals and printed material on Candomblé is a well-known debate in Afro-Brazilian studies (for example, Dantas, Reference Dantas1988; Castillo Reference Castillo2010). Given the publication history of Rodrigues's books it is improbable that they had any significant circulation among Candomblé practitioners at the turn of the century.Footnote ⁵

The snake worship in Dahomey was certainly one of the “Jeje things” Carneiro “discovered” in Herskovits's ethnography (Oliveira and Lima, Reference Oliveira and da Costa Lima1987, pp. 185–186), and this learning may have been critical in later identifying the snake devotion in the Jeje Bahian temples. Yet this is far from supposing that the snake knowledge arrived at the temples through the mediation of the ethnologist, or that it was promoted by him! The limited circulation of these erudite and brief textual references in the temples are, in my opinion, not likely to have been a key factor in inspiring Jeje priests to paint their walls with snake representations, unless this devotion was already in place. Moreover, in Bogum and Seja Hundé, aside from the generic Dan denomination, the principal snake voduns are identified by names (Bessen, Bafono, and others) not recorded in the ethnographic literature of the time.

Hence, to suppose that from the 1870s to the turn of the century the snake worship disappeared from Bahia and that from the 1890s up to its peak in the 1930s and 1940s the appearance of snake iconography and knowledge resulted from the Afro-Atlantic dialogue—that is, that it arrived in the parlance of Jeje merchants like Branco and in West African ethnographic representations disseminated by Rodrigues and Carneiro—and that the snake vodun Dan was then to “rise to prominence as a banner of Brazilian Jeje distinction” (626) is to me a rather frail and unconvincing argument. To admit that the snake worship may have had a continuous though transformative presence not only in the Jeje temples but also in those of other nations, and that this knowledge was shared and exchanged among temples, seems to me a more likely and persuasive argument.Footnote ⁶ And if indeed there was any such rebirth of the Dan diacritica in the Jeje temples in the 1940s, it could well be explained, not necessarily in terms of the Atlantic dialogue, but in terms of the “local institutional history” by which each Afro-American culture “took shape and changed over time” (Richard Price, as reported in Matory, Reference Matory2005, p. 281; my italics).

It is well known that in its 1930s quest for national identity, projected as it was into an international context, the Brazilian intelligentsia began selectively to value the country's African heritage, offering a few Candomblé temples an unprecedented social visibility in which published material certainly played a part. This public exposure may have encouraged competitive dynamics in which new emblems of a nation's purity and distinctiveness—like snake worship in the case of the Jeje—may have been promoted. And these emblems could well have been selected from among preexisting cultural repertoires by priests themselves, not necessarily imported by merchants or intellectuals. I reiterate, to avoid any doubt, that I do not negate the significance of the Atlantic dialogue or the potential impact of textual representations. I am only suggesting that their force in the religious field may have been variable and was always also dependent on the no less influential internal dynamics.

Overall, one could say that Matory highlights the supralocal flows and focuses on a particular period, namely the post-Atlantic slave trade, while I tend to explore the local dialogue together with an interest in a greater temporal depth that necessarily includes the slave trade period.Footnote ⁷ These approaches can be complementary rather than mutually exclusive routes into the history of Candomblé. Yet my concern with the formative process of the institution has led me to pay special attention to the longue durée structural dynamic.

Indeed, one of my book's main arguments sustains that the Jeje's most significant Atlantic transfer was of a structural order, namely the “organizational model” for the establishment of “ecclesiastical” groups (based on initiation, hierarchical priesthood, the altar-offering complex, and other elements), and the “principle of aggregation” that gathered multiple deities within a single temple. As I have noted, following Robin Law, part of this organizational process may have been facilitated by parallel but independent social conditions existent in cosmopolitan urban centers on both sides of the Atlantic (Formation, pp. 85–86). Yet the parallelism of specific gods, ritual protocols, and terminology obliges one to consider the very real possibility of some direct continuity too. My understanding is that the structural model of religious organization transferred by the Jeje priests constitutes a cultural configuration that stands between (once again) the broad cognitive orientations proposed by Mintz and Price and the specific isolated cultural features proposed by Herskovits.

My argument proceeds by positing a progression in Bahian Candomblé from individual divination and healing practices to domestic devotions around a single god, and from those devotions to “institutional” and “ecclesiastical” multi-deity organizations, the latter greatly inspired by the Jeje model. I explicitly caution the reader that this process, which for the purpose of analysis can be schematically characterized as going from simplicity to complexity, from the individual to the collective dimension, should not be understood as a linear evolution, a warning that Matory simply prefers to ignore (620). I note that the extra-domestic congregations functioned alongside the individual practices and that the same religious expert could alternate between both modus operandi. I also discuss the case of the Tundá dance in Minas Gerais as an example of “ecclesiastic” structure operating as early as the eighteenth century; this very fact constitutes a negative proof of the evolutionist assumption (Formation, p. 84).

Another relevant theoretical proposition of my book is that religious identity in some manner replicates the situational, relational dynamics of ethnic identity, and therefore that diacritica are to some extent arbitrary, replaceable, and historically situated. I take the example of the decá ceremony, which grants seniority to a priest. Perhaps Jeje in its origin, in Bahia this ritual became a common feature among the Nagô, while today some Jeje-Mahi priests altogether deny its practice (Formation, p. 295). This movement of values and practices from one group to another and their later re-elaboration is a good example of the plasticity, eclecticism, and historical transformative dynamic I underscore. Such an interpretative angle envisions vodun worship and religious affiliation, in both Africa and Bahia, as lively and creative with no fixed boundaries, and with a lot of variation among the different local cult complexes. So I will take a pass on Matory's criticism of my alleged “Jeje-isolationist model” (624), which according to him portrays the Jeje nation as a stable, homogenous group that has perpetuated itself continuously and equally distinct from neighboring Afro-Brazilian nations (615). It is obvious that this assumption is contradicted in many places in my text.Footnote ⁸

Moreover, an approach that privileges a dialogic, contrastive interpretation of identity presupposes the presence of active and engaged social actors. It is precisely because of my interest in people and individual idiosyncrasy that I dedicate no less than two chapters of my book to exploring the micro-history of two temples, convinced that they are the real protagonists and that they thus ought to be heard. I further argue that “the charisma of a religious leader can be a determining factor in the legitimization of a new ritual behavior and in its subsequent replication by others. Thus the individual, as a transmitter of culture, becomes an agent for change” (Formation, p. xvi). So Matory is right to call attention to individual agency, to the priests’ thoughtful choice, strategic invention, manipulative discourse, and prestige dynamics (616, 626). He is wrong, however, when he confuses my interest in respectfully registering how practitioners conceive and express their differential identity with “lack of scholarly skepticism” (616).

Ethnographic fieldwork is likely to detect priestly strategy and discursive ideological bias, the kind of internal mental agency (dispositions, motivations, and so on) that Matory argues should be revealed. Yet the historiography on Candomblé is often silent about these matters and demands a more objective approach to agency based on verifiable behavior. When evidence is available I have not failed to show it (for example, Formation, p. 171). Yet it is my understanding that personal strategy is always dialectically confronting fundamental determinations of a sociocultural and institutional order and that these cannot be ignored. That does not mean I am inclined to indiscriminately homogenize and collectivize cultural practice. I clearly insist on heterogeneity, diversity, dynamism, flexibility, and individual contribution to all of these.

Most of Matory's other criticism relates to specific themes that I cannot address for lack of space. Perhaps, however, the etymological interpretation of the term ‘Jeje,’ a contentious issue that my reviewer and I along with other scholars have been discussing for years, deserves a brief comment. Matory states that the first occurrence of the term in Brazil is from 1711, although he curiously fails to clearly acknowledge, here as in other instances, that this was my finding (following a lead by Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira) in the Cachoeira archives. It is precisely because I am aware that initially the term appeared only in Bahia and not in other parts of the Americas (Formation, p. 24) that my preferred hypothesis presupposes the agency of Lusophone speakers in its phonetic transformation and dissemination. And among them it is not Adjatché, but Idjè that I prefer (Formation, p. 29).Footnote ⁹

Matory's broader criticism targets my alleged insistence on finding an African origin for the word, still more evidence of my imputed Afro-centric bias. Yet he seems to miss the fact that both the Lusophone reduplication of the monosyllabic “Idjè” and the Gbe-Portuguese phonetic transformation of the Yoruba “Adjaché” into Jeje suggest precisely a process of Atlantic “creolization” produced in the context of the slave trade. So ultimately it would not be an African ethnonym (as he supposes I am arguing), nor a “Brazilian ethnonym” as he argues (624, Matory, Reference Matory1999b, p. 63; Reference Matory2005, p. 300), but rather a Lusophone Atlantic term produced by slave traders. No evidence? No evidence on the contrary either, nor of the term being a Brazilian invention.

Matory dedicates three pages of his review to exposing my linguistic ineptitude with orthography. I concede there are some inconsistencies that can be improved and I thank him for his meticulous effort to detect spelling errors and unsystematic transcriptions (accents, and the like) that I hope will be corrected in a future edition. The English translations of Gbe, Yoruba, French, and Portuguese terminologies (names of places, ethnic groups, gods, and other entities) coexist and transform differently in Africa and Brazil, a truth that certainly poses a serious challenge to any translator. Richard Vernon and I made some arbitrary decisions, stated in an initial note, in order to achieve a successful translation; as with any convention these are prone to contestation. For example, Matory chooses to write Màxí for the African context and Marrim for the Brazilian context; an English reader may find it difficult to pronounce either correctly.

I hear the reviewer's point about phonetically and orthographically distinguishing African and American linguistic uses in order to underpin cultural transformation, though it must be noted that throughout the history of these terms there is much more phonetic variation than his proposed dual spelling conveys. I opted for the generic ‘Mahi,’ not in order to Africanize the name (it is the most common spelling in Brazil today, too), nor to conceal difference as he contends, but for the sake of clarity and readability. We know there is a lot of debate about this subject, but I do not think these details should obscure the main picture.

My final comment has to address Matory's persistent dismissal of the memory-and- forgetting metaphor to express the logic behind the intergenerational reproduction of culture, in favor of his preferred dialogue metaphor. He argues that the memory metaphor implies notions of collectivity, passiveness, absence of strategy, neutrality, or involuntariness. Yet, as he admits, the metaphoric “source” of “collective memory” is “personal memory,” which if anything is selective, capricious, and often responsive to social context (Matory, Reference Matory2005, pp. 282–284). Processes of remembering do not necessarily imply unconsciousness or lack of strategic agency; often they require very conscious voluntary effort, and at other times they respond to semiconscious choices oriented by personal motivations, dispositions, or ideology as well. Memory is also fundamental for identity construction, since without it there is no self.

In addition, the validity of a metaphor does not rely exclusively on its clarifying potential (Matory, Reference Matory2005, p. 284); it also depends on its evocative power and whether it establishes a precise analogy between the structural inner relations of both the source and target images. In that sense, memory's ambivalence between awareness and unawareness, and its capacity to repeat itself with variation and to confuse linear chronology by reverberating forward and backward, are in my opinion valid referents to connote the dynamic of cultural reproduction. The dialogue metaphor highlighting individual intentionality and awareness, interactivity, and heterogeneity is equally suggestive and a good complement too. In fact, there is no dialogue without memory, and vice versa.

Ultimately, Matory denounces my book as a nationalistic “passionate campaign” written “to avenge the honor of the Jeje nation.” He portrays its author as somebody who would come “to the rescue of Candomblé's Jeje nation,” taking on such roles as “advising the faithful,” and “defining the standards of religious practice” (612, 613, 614). This is certainly a derisive and contemptuous caricature. I do not deny my sympathy for the communities I have been involved with, and for the friends and interlocutors that he insidiously insists on calling my tutors or mentors, but my scholarly endeavor has been to assess and verify a cultural process of revitalization of the Jeje nation of which Matory himself is part. The importance of the Jeje in Candomblé has been noticed in Afro-Brazilian studies since Rodrigues and many others have commented on it, though my study probably gives the most in-depth empirical interpretation of its historical trajectory. Already in the preface I warn the “inattentive” reader that, because of its focus and framing, the book tends to value the Jeje nation, but “this valorization does not stem from any intent to ‘purify’ or reify this tradition . . . it is the result of an interest in justly recognizing and calibrating its contribution (though clearly not the only one) to the formative process of Candomblé. The value given in this study to the Jeje tradition does not presuppose any notion of cultural superiority, but is rather the result of prolonged research and conclusions based on relatively reliable empirical data and on proof that the vodun cults played a critical role in the formation of Candomblé” (Formation, p. xviii).

Contemporary tension among Candomblé nations is well known and my criticism of the dominant Nagô-centrism is not a partisan affiliation but an attempt to interpret the history of Candomblé under another possible perspective. After all that has been said I think there is ground to accept that I am not particularly interested in reifying a single standard type of belief and ritual frozen in time. For Matory, whose rhetorical strategy consists in either ignoring what I say or supposing that I do the contrary of what I say, thereby negating what I am actually meaning, these may sound as hollow excuses. In my opinion the debate or dialogue should allow space for divergent perspectives and nuanced in-betweens, without the need to exclude one in order to affirm the other. My point is that in any interpretative endeavor we do not need to opt for an either/or approach, as my reviewer strongly tends to support. As I have suggested throughout this reply I tend to favor conceptual additivity rather than disjunctive bipolar approaches, thus structure and agency, continuity and change, memory and dialogue.