Cavalo dos deuses: Roger Bastide e as transformações das religiões de matriz Africana no Brasil

Abstract

After being considered one of the major contributions to the study of the Afro-Brazilian religions, Roger Bastide's work has been targeted with hard critiques over the last thirty years. This paper builds on the hypothesis that most of these critiques do not consider one of the main statements of Bastide's work: the need to combine ethnographic and sociological perspectives in order to understand "African religions in Brazil". In other words, the need to take seriously the native's point of view and, at the same time, the need to draw a broader picture. The fact that Bastide split these perspectives in two different books may suggest that the problem has not been solved. The aim of this article is to try to show that the only way to get to the sociological generalization is by extending the ethnographic perspective - and that this possibility is already inscribed in Bastide's work.