Abstract

LINO E SILVA, Moisés. Ontological confusion: Eshu and the Devil dance to the “Samba of the Black Madman”. Etnográfica [online]. 2019, vol.23, n.2, pp.515-532. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.6938.

Religious grammars of confusion may enable the recognition and understanding of a wide variety of other (ontological) forms of confusion in the daily life of different groups living in Favela da Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro. The method used in this investigation is ethnographic and recursive. Part of the confusion manifested in the capacity to recognise “a confusion” derives exactly from the fact that there is no fixed or neutral epistemological position that would serve as a basis to decide accurately about the existence of confusion as a form. I describe and analyse particular events that I experienced during an Afro-Brazilian (Umbanda) religious celebration and other more quotidian episodes with a different group: my Evangelical friends. What are the struggles and conflicts of power that warrant the existence of certain confusions? What confusions would normative sexual, religious and class-based orders rather prevent? I argue that the disruptive power that Eshu and Pombagira offer against an oppressive social order is part of the political dimension that informs acts of recognition of confusion as a form, revealed when we interrogate and confuse the context of order against which “a confusion” may emerge.

Keywords : Brazil; confusion; favela; ontology; religion.

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