Theaters of War, Theaters of Religious Exchange: The Transmission of African Religious Practices to Whites in Northeastern Brazil, 1685–1759

The social environment of seventeenth and eighteenth-century northeastern Brazil has rightfully been described as a “collision of cultures.”  The confluence of a sharply hierarchical social structure, the potential for Portuguese colonists and their descendants to acquire wealth and status, and fairly constant military conflict with other European nations and indigenous Brazilians resulted in a social milieu that facilitated the rise of a unique religious culture in northeastern Brazilian regions such as Pernambuco, Maranhão, and Bahia.  Much of the recent historiography of colonial Brazil has made note of the existence of a “creole culture” and “mestiçagem” (racial/cultural mixture), and the emergence of a “popular religion” in the region which included elements of Roman Catholicism, pre-Christian Iberian traditions, African religions, indigenous practices, and popular Judaism.  However, the historiography has heretofore left the concepts of “creolization” and “popular religion” largely undissected.  This paper focuses primarily on the transmission of African-derived religious practices and symbols to whites in northeastern Brazil in the mid-eighteenth century.  Precisely, I focus on the social means of transmission of African religious symbols, rituals, and ideologies to whites in colonial Brazil. This “bottom-up” evangelization occurred through multiple avenues, one of the most significant being that of soldier to soldier.  Multiple documents from the Portuguese Inquisition detail accusations and investigations of whites in who allegedly engaged in African-derived rituals or possessed ritual objects of culturally African provenance. One of the more striking commonalities to be found among these individuals under accusation is their membership in the colonial military.  Using Portuguese Inquisition records and political correspondence drawn from Brazilian and Portuguese archives, this paper will examine how the social proximity engendered by military service facilitated the transmission of religious ideas and cultural constructions.