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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1197

Part of Session 116: God in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Spirit possession and sense-making processes in Brazilian Umbanda

Authors: Duppé, Alexandra Maria
Submitted by: Duppé, Alexandra Maria (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany)

Symbolic systems in urban religious contexts have been extensively discussed in socio-scientific research. The syncretistic religion of Umbanda, documented as an urban phenomenon from its beginnings in Rio de Janeiro during the 1920's, is often described as “a mirror of Brazilian society” (Negrão 1996). This metaphor seems to be appropriate with regard to its members’ socio-economic diversity and, at the same time, because of its spiritual origins that represent a cross-cut through Brazilian history and includes European, Indigenous and African traditions as fundamental elements of its ritual.

The inclusion of different forms of belief provides an access to a specific kind of language practices in urban contexts that opens up for the religious community’s members a virtual space which creates an in-group factor and reduces the impact of metropolitan anonymity. What this amounts to is not the emergence of new language varieties in a strict sense but that of new discursive traditions which are of considerable interest for sociolinguistic analyses.

The  presence of embodied spirits that form part of a “coherent symbolic system” (Lambek 1981) opens up settings for communication based on a mythical world that is always connected to the social reality of its members. The possibility of communication in the Brazilian Umbanda in form of dramatic transcendent states like possession and trance behavior, allows for the emergence of religious spaces that unify the members on the basis of a corresponding “spirit idiom” that provides a social network system far away from the ordinary social roles of the adepts. 

Taking into account the conversational mechanisms mentioned by Linell (2009), it can be claimed that spirit possession “allows a two-way communication among mediums channeling spirits and other participants” (Wirtz 2007:101). Sense-making processes in Umbanda are stimulated by the social construction of identities and contribute to consolidating knowledge and belief systems. Taking as an example the discourse of selected spiritual entities of Umbanda I will analyze some of the linguistic features and mechanisms that lead to the above mentioned construction of mutually accessible mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994). On the basis of these examples it will be shown how agency and positioning features provide an integration of different social classes and cultural identities.

References:

Fauconnier, Gilles (1994 [1985]): Mental spaces. Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge

Lambek, Michael (1981): Human spirits: a cultural account of trance in Mayotte. Cambridge.

Linell, Per (2009): Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically : interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC.

Negrão Nogueira, Lísias (1996): Entre a Cruz e a Encruzilhada. São Paulo.

Wirtz, Kristina (2007): Ritual, discourse, and community in Cuban Santería : speaking a sacred world. Gainesville, Florida.