Renata Siuda-Ambroziak

This article presents field research-based reflections on the socio-cultural contexts of religious healing practices in Brazilian folk Catholicism performed by traditional local blessing-givers (bendezeiras). Recognizing both illness and healing as socio-cultural processes and religion as an important key to understanding Brazilian culture and society, I concentrate on depicting important characteristics of the benzedeiras’ practice, concentrating on “lights” (positive aspects) and “shadows” – adverse factors limiting the possibilities of intergenerational transmission in spite of the continuing popularity and symbolic effectiveness of benzedeiras’ religious healing in Brazil.

The Xangô religion of Recife is a the cult of the orixás, gods of West African (mainly Yoruba) derivation syncretized with the saints of Lusitanian popular Catholicism. The essential act of the cult consists of sacrifice and feasting: animal slaughter, during which the faithful sing, dance and experience trances. The cult characteristics imply a whole set of responses to environmental pressures of various kinds, with oppositions of a dialectical character between the community and domination; the initiate as a ritual son and the initiate as a client; the meat and the feast; and the sacrifice and the party. In other words, between the practical requirements of culture and its surplus that transpires as the feast and as the holy and the beautiful.

In the article the author stresses the role of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé in health therapies, showing that, in spite of linking Candomblé mostly with Black Brazilians from lower social strata, successfully applied religious therapies based on the strategy of “refueling with axé” nowadays attract many well-educated, rich, white representatives of the local elites. These new adherents find in Candomblé ways of improving their health, but also a sense of community and support that sometimes even make these “clients,” in spite of still existing prejudice, take a decision about initiation.