Candomblé, bodies and powers

Abstract

This paper aimed to understand the social mechanisms founded in candomblé, understood as a religion of African roots in Brazil. By entering this religious system of treatment, subjects will try and confront a number of innovations in their daily lives, broadening their views and perceptions about the causality of the disease, resulting in the consideration of the relationship between “body/mind/orixás (divinity)”, thus opening a new option in terms of therapeutic options for these. Given the complexity of this religion, the group in question – supporters and external customers – reaffirm their solidarity with intra and extra walls, by ensuring the physical and social health of its members, to the extent that precludes antagonistic instances represented by its world view: health/illness, life/death. The balance between these is necessary to assert what becomes indispensable for this: the maintenance of health.