After slavery trade in Brazil, the destruction of previous social structures and the separation of families and ethnic groups, the Africans recreated social bonds through religious traditions, that later gained spatial organization in the so-called terreiros. The worship of òrì?à, that, in Africa, is based on lineage, in Candomblé and other Afro-Brazilian religions, is determined by the oracle and all the òrì?à gathered in the same terreiro, where the so-called “family-of-the-saint”, whose belonging is established through initiation, gathers.
For long, literature has considered the two forms of kinship – the family-of-blood, determined by consanguinity and affinity relations, and the family-of-the-saint – as complementary and, the family-of-the-saint, as a creative form of reconstructing sociality and ancestry in the new social and environmental context. Recently, Clara Flaksman has questioned such separation, basing on the composition of a traditional terreiro, the recurrence of the same òrì?à in the same family and the ritual importance of blood.
The present research proposes to go in the same direction, blurring the border between the family-of-the-saint and the family-of-blood and rethinking the principles that sustain both categories (in parallel to nature-culture-separation) through an analysis of ethnographic material collected over more than seven years in Candomblé terreiros in Rio de Janeiro and two years in a temple of Ifá and Òrì?à worship (from Oyó, Nigeria) in Italy. Based on the notion of person, the concept of orí (the head, that constitutes the main components of human beings and determines destiny) and myths concerning its formation, the relationship with ancestry and the earth, bodily construction, the initiation process, ritual practices, personal and collective taboos (especially those concerning food and sexual relations), food sharing and motherhood, I propose to think kinship through relations and the circulation of materials and forces between humans and with spiritual and natural beings, objects.
