Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770

By James H. Sweet

Book Overview

Exploring the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial Portuguese world, with an emphasis on the more than one million Central Africans who survived the journey to Brazil, James Sweet lifts a curtain on their lives as Africans rather than as incipient Brazilians. Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came -- Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others -- Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African for some time.

Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies. Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships. In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism.

Sweet's analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil's slave society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of creolization and cultural survival.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807854824
• ISBN13: 9780807854822
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Original, fascinating

The ubject of the slave trade has been written about before but this bookcovers the more interesting topic of the Protuguese trade in the 15th-18th century, and particularly its affects on Africans and the relationship between the church and the slaves, as well as 'others'. This book is scholarly and perhaps slightly dry, but not startinly so, in fact it is also readable and interesting, refreshing and original. Surely this book adds scholarship to the period, espcially illuminating the relationship between slaves, brazilian society and the church in both Brazil and Portugal. Of particular interest is the work regarding the inqusitions attempts to snuff out tribal religons that remained among slaves brought to the new world. Seth J. Frantzman