Somos Bantu : multiplicidades, agência e ancestralidade no Centro Espírita São Sebastião

Abstract

The “Centro Espírita São Sebastião” is a bantu religious community (terreiro), that has as its main reference Vó Cecília, founder and matriarchy of the CESS. Parting from an ethnographic research, built on the daily coexistence within this terreiro community, I seek in this work to explore and to produce reflections about how is it sustained, through the time and everyday life, parting from the trajectory of Vó Cecília, reported by Guaraci and other CESS’s “sons”. We also seek to point out to the strategies and partnerships engaged by this afro-religious community, which has to deal continuously with the universalist project: christian, white and patriarchal, and its associated forms of violence,played whether in Cecília’s trajectory, but also nowadays, but from distinct ways. We seek to turn our attention on to the urban context in which CESS and its agents are embedded, talking about social marginalization, provoked by the race, gender, class and religious belonging’s references, that affect the reality of bantu religious communities, as well as the trajectory and lives of them religious leaders, majority represented by black women, held and worshipped as queens, “mães de santo” e “madrinhas”, of this religious matrix.