The I Congress of Umbanda Spiritualism (1941) and the discourse of deafricanization of Umbanda:: the grammar of repression

• Autor(a) principal: Barros, Valquiria
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Internacional de Folkcomunicação
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.uepg.br/index.php/folkcom/article/view/21865
• topic: Umbanda;; Desafricanização;; Discurso religioso.; Umbanda;; Deafricaning;; Religious discourse.; Umbanda;; Desafricanización;; Discurso religioso.

The objective of this study is to understand how the Umbanda movement of the early twentieth century, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, outlined a white religious ethos with clear racist overtones. We started by analyzing the discursive construction of texts presented at the I Congress of Umbanda Spiritualism (1941) and widely published by religious periodicals and other sympathizers of the movement. The proposed approach starts from the announcement of Umbanda as an organized religion based on the historicization of the announcement of the religion by Caboclo das Sete Encruzilhadas, on November 15, 1908, as an event responsible for the construction of the ideology of Brazilian religion strongly linked to the political assumptions of the construction of national identity. From a theoretical and methodological point of view, this is a qualitative research with an exploratory approach and discourse analysis that sought, from a specialized literature review, to elucidate concepts that could relate the discursive construction of the religious ethos to the process of whitening religion. The results of the investigation indicated that the de-Africanization of religion was a strategy of intentional "cleansing" of religion articulated by the white middle class in order to amalgamate the process of legitimating religion in urban society.