Spirit Song

Abstract This book explains how a multi-faith community in Brazil uses music both to combine and segregate three Afro-Brazilian religions: Batuque, Umbanda, and Quimbanda. It is the first book-length study in English about music in Afro-Brazilian religions, which have synthesized African religions, folk Catholicism, Amerindian traditions, and in some cases European Spiritism. Through devotion, offerings, and musically lively spirit-mediumship ceremonies, believers seek healing, supernatural consultations, and community. The book focuses on Porto Alegre, the capital of the southern ranching and agricultural state of Rio Grande do Sul, where the multi-ethnic religious community publically calls itself “Afro-gaucho” to highlight African contributions to the predominantly European state. Because both the community and its pantheon are ethnically diverse, the book interprets relationships between ancestry, cosmology, and religious affiliation as ethnic spiritual heritages. Combining ethnomusicology and symbolic boundary studies, the book advances a theory of musical boundary-work to explain the use of music to reinforce, bridge, or blur boundaries, whether for personal, social, spiritual, or political purposes. The Afro-gaucho religious community uses music and rituals to promote innovation and egalitarianism in Umbanda and Quimbanda, whereas it reinforces musical preservation and hierarchies in Batuque. Religious and musical leaders carefully restrict the cosmologies, ceremonial sequences, and sung prayers of one religion from affecting the others so as to safeguard Batuque’s African heritage. Members of disenfranchised populations have also used Umbanda and Quimbanda as vehicles for empowerment, whether based on race-ethnicity, gender, or religious belief; and innovations in ritual music reflect this activism.