Interweaving three centuries of transatlantic religious and social history with historical and present-day ethnography, Luis Nicolau Pares traces the formation of Candomble, one of the most influential African-derived religious forms in the African diaspora, with practitioners today centered in Brazil but also living in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas. Originally published in Brazil and not available in English, The Formation of Candomble reveals...

"Reality does not comply with our narrations of it. And that is most certainly the case with the narrations produced in academia. An anthropologist in Bahia, Brazil, fears to become possessed by the spirits he had come to study; falls madly in love with an 'informant'; finds himself baffled by the sayings of a clairvoyant; and has to come to grips with the murder of one of his best friends. Unsettling events that do not belong to the orderly world...