debates on all these issues. Font and Ran-

dall have put together a valuable addition

to Brazilian studies, one that does a credi-

ble job of sorting out a number of factors

that have led Brazil to what appears to be

a contemporary turning point.

Ecstatic Encounters. Bahian Candombleand the Quest for the Really Real. Mat-

tijs van de Port, Amsterdam: Amsterdam

University Press, 2011, 300 pp.

Roger SansiUniversitat de Barcelona/GoldsmithsUniversity of London

This is a daring, beautiful book. Van de

Port is an exceptional writer. But by prais-

ing his literary skill, I do not mean to imply

that this is one more experimental, con-

fessional, embarrassing autoethnography.

Van de Port plays tricks with the ethno-

graphic genre, but this vertiginous roller-

coaster is not a hollow facade; it is full

of content. This study is one of the more

theoretically complex, and original con-

tributions to Candomble and Bahia ever

written.

While his central object is the Afro-

Brazilian religion known as Candomble,

van de Port is not so much interested in

writing a book about Candomble as he

is entranced by wandering around it. His

ambles take him into a world that sur-

rounds Candomble, its public presences,

and the different media through which

Candomble, in his own terms, has been

“authenticated.” But van de Port makes

clear that he is not interested in decon-

structing Candomble, in questioning its

authenticity, or in revealing tricks behind

the magic. He is interested instead in show-

ing how Candomble has always played

with incomprehensibility, since “veiling at

revealing at the same time, it seeks to en-

tice outsiders with mystery while not giv-

ing anything away” (205).

This book is about the “incomprehen-

sibility” of Candomble. But it is not yet

another attempt to explain it, or to make

sense of the religion. The central chapters

are dedicated instead to an investigation of

Candomble’s presence in the Bahian pub-

lic sphere. Van de Port thus opens with a

discussion of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues,

the 19th century founding father of Afro-

Brazilian studies, and the first who at-

tempted to explain Candomble, or unveil

its secrets. This perspective is defined by

van de Port as ocularcentric and because

of its focus on observation. It is a “classical”

approach that implies a detachment from

the context of study, where “to name is to

know” (67). As opposed to classicism, van

de Port argues that Candomble is based on

a baroque aesthetics more attentive to the

failures of representation and the limits of

discourse (37).

Any attempt to reduce the Baroque es-

thetics of Candomble to a classicist narra-

tive would be doomed to failure. In the

next chapters the author addresses the

post-Rodrigues transformations of Can-

domble in the public sphere. In radical

opposition to Rodrigues, the modernists,

surrealists, and Bahian writers like Jorge

Amado, did not see Candomble in neg-

ative terms, but as a source of inspira-

tion. Still, as van de Port makes clear, they

emphasized its “primitive” character. Af-

ter modernism, Candomble became pub-

licly identified with Bahian culture, but it

could not be reduced to it. For van de Port,

Candomble cannot be “locked up in the

picturesque of museums, galleries, post-

cards or academic debates on ‘tradition’

and ‘culture’. What is more, the contin-

uing vitality of Candomble aesthetics is

364 J o u r n a l o f L a t i n A m e r i c a n a n d C a r i b b e a n A n t h r o p o l o g y

grounded in its dangerous dimensions, its

unsettling, disruptive and fear-inducing

powers.” (32).

But can anthropologists argue that

this process of artistification has only been

superficial, or that it has not touched

the “mystery” of Candomble? Has Can-

domble become more “classical,” and less

“Baroque,” across the 20th century? It is

difficult to say. It has become more popu-

lar among middle-class intellectuals, who

prefer its more “pure,” “authentic” ver-

sions, and who are also the more avid pro-

ducers and consumers of discourse around

it. On the other hand, Candomble has lost

ground among the lower classes in the last

decades, as a result of the growing influ-

ence of Pentecostal churches, even if these

churches, according to van de Port, also

partake a Baroque “ethos” in which the

confrontation between religions is framed

in terms of a mystical battle over sorcery

(see also Collins 2004; Goncalves da Silva

2007; Sansi 2007).

Perhaps scholars should think a bit

further about this Baroque “ethos.” van de

Port addresses the Baroque as an aesthetics

of absent truth (37). And Baroque aesthet-

ics are spectacular and overwhelming to

the senses, “baffling,” but at the same time

they manifest an absence: the overwhelm-

ing spectacle of the Baroque covers for the

fact that the divine is not present, hence

the visual deception, the trompe d’ oeil, the

“shallowness,” and “emptiness.” Looked at

frontally, the little angels in the churches

of Bahia are masterpieces of figurative rep-

resentation, convoluted bodies suspended

in the sky; and yet if we look slightly to the

sides, we see that the angel is just a piece

of wood, a hollow, empty image. Van de

Port reads this Baroque aesthetics from a

Lacanian notion of the Real: “the elusive,

mysterious, ungraspable, inarticulable, in-

explicable, baffling dimension of being,”

exterior to all symbolization (252).

Is a Lacanian-influenced postinter-

pretivism a helpful framework to ap-

proach Candomble? I would say that

there are some meaningful differences be-

tween Candomble and Counter-Reformist

Catholic Baroque aesthetics. In Can-

domble truth is not absent, but very

present: the Gods are there. Unlike

Catholic altars, spectacular but hollow the-

aters built to overwhelm the spectator,

Candomble shrines are concealed contain-

ers were the gods do live. They are not

empty, but full. In rituals of possession,

people do incorporate the Gods; they are

not hollow figurative sculptures that rep-

resent the divine, but actual living bod-

ies where the Gods are present. If one

looks at Catholic Baroque sculptures, the

faces are often looking upward with an

open mouth, in ecstasy. Meanwhile, the

possessed in Candomble put their heads

down, with eyes and mouth closed, in a

hieratic, wooden expression that recalls

a mask. Here it is worth observing that

sculptures are objects that look like people.

And in Candomble, the possessed are liv-

ing people who look like objects. Perhaps,

then, there is something else, something

more to Candomble than the Baroque and

the radical negativity of the Real? But how

might ethnographers describe, or get to,

that otherness, that supplement, without

falling back into classicism?

References Cited

Collins, John. (2004) ‘X Marks the

Future of Brazil’: Protestant Ethics

and Bedeviling Mixtures in a Brazil-

ian Cultural Heritage Center. In

Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and

Book Reviews 365

Ethnography in the Age of Public

Culture. Andrew Shrylock, ed. Pp.

191–222. Stanford: Stanford Univer-

sity Press.

Goncalves da Silva, Vagner (ed.). (2007)

Intolerancia religiosa : impactos do

neopentecostalismo no campo religi-

oso afro-brasileiro. Sao Paulo: Edusp.

Sansi, Roger. (2007) Fetishes and Mon-

uments. Afro-Brazilian Art and Cul-

ture in Bahia in the 20th century. New

York: Berghahn Books.

Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity inthe Backlands of Brazil. Adriana Michele

Campos Johnson, Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 225 pp.

Leopoldo M. BernucciUniversity of California at Davis

There seems little that contemporary

scholars do not know about the popu-

lar uprising of Canudos in the interior of

Brazil’s northeastern state of Bahia. The

legends, histories, literature, journalistic

news, military studies, sociological, reli-

gious, and cultural analyses of this late 19th

century revolt, under the leadership of the

messianic Antonio Conselheiro, have all

been the subject of both serious and su-

perficial investigation. In a nutshell, and

thanks especially to Euclides da Cunha’s

monumental Os sertoes (1902), Canudos

is extraordinarily well known today. Even

more importantly, it has not been con-

demned into oblivion. Curiously, however,

Adriana Campos Johnson claims that da

Cunha “wanted to wipe Canudos off the

face of the earth” (167).

Johnson’s claim is disturbing, mainly

because it creates a contradictio in termi-

nis within her account. It also exposes a

misreading: her reader is led to believe

that the Brazilian writer wants his book

to end with the end of Canudos (165).

And, for Johnson, such an “ending” means

to eliminate it from collective memory.

Yet Johnson’s reading, which charges da

Cunha with “rendering” one of the last

scenes in Os sertoes “as an end,” suggests

that by metaphorically placing a grave-

stone over the dead he would also be

closing the last chapter of the history of

Canudos; thus implying that da Cunha

would provide the last and official word

on the war, while ignoring the destinies

of many survivors. In fact, and alongside

the dramatic scene da Cunha offers at the

end of Os sertoes that may indeed lead to

an idea of closure, the author also indi-

cates that many canudenses fled before the

very final days of the war. For example, the

Vila-Nova brothers and a few more resi-

dents escaped from Canudos days before

the end of the war. This is an important

point because Johnson claims that authors

such as Manuel Benıcio, Afonso Arinos,

Sandor Marai, Mario Vargas Llosa, and

J. J. Veiga succeeded in their fictional ac-

counts of the uprising and massacre by not

isolating Conselheiro’s followers. Accord-

ing to Johnson, da Cunha fails in relation

to such texts due to his ostensible erasure

of “the everydayness of Canudos” (167).

Here Johnson conflates history and fiction

in a manner that obscures the workings of

da Cunha’s text.

At certain moments, Johnson treats

Os sertoes with dexterity. At other times

it seems that enormous effort was spent

in presenting this book as somehow inad-

equate to subaltern studies theory. Yet Os

sertoes is too complex and human to ren-

der a single body of theory truly helpful

in explaining its successes and shortcom-

ings. Nor does it make sense to judge this

monumental, admittedly strange, and

366 J o u r n a l o f L a t i n A m e r i c a n a n d C a r i b b e a n A n t h r o p o l o g y