Umbanda and quimbanda: Black alternative to white morality

Abstract

Quimbanda is an African-Brazilian religious modality generally presented as a mere ethical and moral inversion of Umbanda that has been preserved through rituals made with spiritual entities that supposedly contest or reverse the prevailing morality. In this study, we followed rituals and collected interviews with priests in African-Brazilian religious communities, aiming to verify if there really is influence of an ethical standard from the surrounding society that could have moderated or modified subjacent African conceptions. Contrary to analyses that implicitly assume African-Brazilian cults as subjected to a single conception of morality, we found that the sacred experience involving Quimbanda and Umbanda is not attached to the prevailing morality, and that none of its manifestations can be properly described as amoral.