Pensar a morte com os espíritos: a experiência negra na diáspora à luz das religiões de matriz africana

Abstract

Death appears as an unavoidable part of the Black diaspora experience, since it is inevitably rooted in slavery, racism, and their consequences. This thesis seeks to explore other meanings when considered from the perspectives present in Africanbased religions, which were both at the heart of movements to create possible spaces of existence and the target of violent processes of existential annihilation. The central hypothesis is that thinking with the presence of spirits changes everything: if death is a movement toward the total destruction of the other, it can also be understood in its dimensions of transformation and passage between different realms, traversed in different ways by various entities—orixás, voduns, caboclos, spirits, the dead, enchanted beings. In the resonance between ethnographic contexts, this work aims to elaborate the meanings and nuances of the idea of death when thought of in the presence of the entities that populate the universe of African-based religions and the discursive and non-discursive practices present in these communities.