HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This article by João Leal (Centre for Research in Anthropology, NOVA University, Lisbon) presents the complex anthropological legacy of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, who played a key role in the emergence of the anthropology of Afro-Brazilian religions (and especially the Candomblé studies) at the turn of the twentieth century.

Leal, João, 2020. “Nina Rodrigues e as religiões afro‑brasileiras”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906) is a key figure – albeit a controversial one – in the history of Brazilian anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century. He was a major representative of the racialist theories that prevailed in Brazil at that time, but was also a pioneer in the study of Afro-Brazilian religions, to which he devoted his best-known work, The Fetishist Animism of Bahian Blacks (1896-97). Resulting from his own ethnographic fieldwork, this paradoxical work combines evolutionary and racialist ideas with a thorough first-hand description of candomblé. It launched several themes –  such as syncretism – that were to inspire later representatives of this subdisciplinary field, namely from the 1930s and 1940s, when Arthur Ramos (1903-1949) revitalized Afro-Brazilian studies.

Authors
Sarah Pickman: contributions / sarah.pickman@yale.edu
Christine Laurière: contributions / website / christine.lauriere@wanadoo.fr / CNRS/ EHESS
Frederico Delgado Rosa: contributions / website / fdelgadorosa@fcsh.unl.pt / Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa