ABSTRACT
This paper addresses some cultural meanings associated to calundus, religious and therapeutic ceremonies of Central African origin practiced in Brazil during the 17th and 18th centuries. Calundus offered a therapeutic practice to treat a kind of spiritual illness caused by the interruption of ancestor worship. As I intend to argue, the “disease of the calundus” disseminated among slaves and freedmen in the Atlantic territories of the Portuguese empire because slavery created significant encumbrances for the regular practice of ancestor worship. Concepts of ancestry, disease and cure embedded in the calundus will be discussed as expressions of a Central African system of thought that offered a critical counter-discourse against slavery, represented as a kind of disease, and gave birth to new forms of utopian consciousness for Africans in America.
Keywords:
calundu; slavery; ancestry; African-American religions; Central African diaspora