Diffracting Ruth Landes on candomblé : agency and complicity

Abstract

Ruth Landes is historically a most impacting and controversial scholar on studies about the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé. A feminist methodology that attends to her own position as a scholar in knowledge production, besides much a biased discussion bolstering her claim that candomblé is matriarchically structured and Landes’ complex positionality, and her awareness of it, as an outsider-within; all these are capable of impacting not only the academia for decades after her publications, but even candomblé as an institution, bearing consequences up to nowadays. This thesis aims at a double move: it sets to examine whether diffraction as a western academic methodology can contribute to the decolonial project, how do they interfere and resonate as bodies of thought, while concomitantly pursuing a feminist reading of Landes in twenty-first century. After a brief introduction to Karen Barad’s agential realism and the decolonial project in my first methodological chapter, I center, in chapter two, on demonstrating Landes’ ambiguity regarding her feminist political commitment implicit in her research project and her complex complicitous positionality as a relatively powerful, external authoritative academic who grapples with this very complicity. The value of this research is, thus, the nested problematic of the critical and uncritical accountability in Landes’ research conducts. Chapter three envisions a reworking of agency in order to ponder whether Landes’ research was not also responding the otherwise unnoticed inputs of Afro-Brazilian religions gathered under the umbrella-term candomblé de caboclo – religions syncretized with the cult of native-indigenous beliefs and entities. I conclude with a vast interference between diffraction and decoloniality in terms of (i) multivocal knowledge production, (ii) a commitment to be committed and especially (iii) through the complex relations dealt with in diffraction, and pervasive in the current colonial matrix of power. In short, this thesis performs an attempt to move from individualist to collective responsibility.