“The Terreiro as an Ethnic Expression”

This essay examines the history and culture of African-Brazilian religious houses (also called terreiros do candomblé) in Brazil’s modern urban cities. It was first published as chapter 3 of Cunha’s master’s thesis, which she defended in the Department of Anthropology at the University of São Paulo in 1986. Her son, João Alipio Cunha, later published this thesis for her posthumously as a book in 2022. Cunha argues that enslaved Africans and their descendants organized their communities and their religious rituals culturally and linguistically according to their African ethnic genealogies during and after slavery. As formerly enslaved Africans moved to urban cities after slavery, candomblé cultural practices continued to shape their social organization and further translated into defining “rituals, and some mythological figures, in reference to geographic areas and ethnic and linguistic groups linked to the African continent.” This essay presents Cunha’s sociohistorical analysis of this cultural evolution. It represents an early look into the conceptual and methodological inroads that one Black woman made into the field of anthropology in Brazil at a time when Black voices were marginalized and silenced within the discipline.