Mattijs van de Port
For over a hundred years, writers, artists, anthropologists and tourists have traveled to Bahia, Brazil, in search of the spirit possession religion called CandomblÃ©. Thus, successive generations of followers have seen a long, steady stream of curious outsiders coming to their temples with notebooks and cameras, questions and inquisitive gazes, or ogling eyes and the hope of inclusion.Â This study asks what seduced these outsiders to seek access to the Afro-Brazilian religious universe and, conversely, how did believers respond to the overwhelming interest in their creed and to becoming an object of the outsidersâ€™ imaginations.,â€œThriving in the gap between the sensuous fullness of life and the impossibility of its cultural representation, ,Ecstatic Encounters, opens mind-blowing vistas for 'writing culture' in anthropology today.â€â€” Birgit Meyer, Free University of Amsterdam.
Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian CandomblÃ© and the Quest for the Really Real