In Hearing the Mermaid's Song, social anthropologist Lindsay Hale discusses Umbanda, a religion that combines various African, indigenous and European elements to form a new, uniquely Brazilian faith. Hale presents engaging ethnographic material, bringing spirits, rituals and individuals to life through vivid anecdotes and personal histories. The book is based on research conducted in four Umbanda centres in Rio de Janeiro, ranging from ‘White Umbanda’, as it is called by its mostly light-skinned, middle- and upper-class practitioners, to more Africanised forms, usually referred to as ‘Afro-Brazilian Umbanda’, in which mediums and visitors tend to be darker-complexioned, poorer members of the lower classes.
Hale puts forth three central arguments. Firstly, he situates the various spirits that figure in Umbanda practice within the context of Brazilian history and culture. While he does this reasonably well, his analysis does not advance significantly beyond Diana Brown's (1994) groundbreaking work. Secondly, he seeks simply to describe the Umbanda(s) he encounters. Hale's final objective is to show how Umbanda is, for its practitioners, a way of seeing the world, a special manner of experiencing and feeling. On this front, he is highly successful, and this is the work's primary contribution to the study of Afro-Brazilian religions, and to Latin American scholarship more generally.
The first chapter capably explores Umbanda cosmology, eloquently introducing several central concepts: the distinction between the spiritual and material world, the conceptualisation of the human spirit, the spiritual root of events, reincarnation and ideas of karmic debt, and the relationship between spirits, mediums and the natural world. Chap. 2 is composed of three case studies that discuss how participants come to Umbanda. Two of the paths Hale follows are those of centre leaders whose stories are similar to those described by previous scholars. The devotee first passes through a trying period of bad health or general misfortune, is brought to Umbanda despite avowed lack of interest or disbelief, and subsequently has a deep religious experience, eventually becoming initiated and opening a centre.
The following four chapters examine the manner in which Umbanda re-enchants the world for its followers. The historical roots of the religious practice, Hale tells us, like most things in Umbanda, are multiple and contested. Of particular note is the way in which religious mistura, or mixture, is framed by different Umbandistas. As one might expect, centres with a more Afro-Brazilian focus tend to embrace and place value on the African roots of Umbanda, whereas those in White Umbanda prefer to minimise or downplay these contributions, presenting their version of the religion as cleansed of so-called primitive elements.
In his analysis, Hale rightly notes the way in which issues of race and class influence practice. Yet he does not fully interrogate the ‘Africa’ that participants evoke, nor does he discuss the extent to which this Africa is imagined and constructed, both positively and negatively, in either the origin stories or in rituals regarding the old slave spirits, the subject of chap. 4. The same could be said for his treatment of Indian spirits (caboclos), which, as we learn, are often not Indians at all. Hale does well in outlining the central role that caboclos occupy for Umbandistas, however.
The final two chapters, entitled ‘Orixás’ and ‘Blood and Water’, further explore the conceptual and ritual divides between Afro-Brazilian and White Umbanda. In terms of the orixás, African gods that are combined to a greater or lesser extent with Catholic saints, Hale identifies a functional difference. In Afro-Brazilian Umbanda, they come to earth in the bodies of their mediums with frequency, playing an important role in regular ritual practice and in guiding mediums along their life paths. In the White Umbanda houses Hale studied, they do not descend at all, or they send caboclo spirits as emissaries instead.
To practitioners of White Umbanda, the body is something to be calmed and stilled. In contrast, Hale writes, Afro-Brazilian Umbanda ‘connects with the spiritual through the organic symbolism of blood, plants, food and the voluptuous envelopment and mobilisation of the body and its senses’ (p. 136). It is within this frame of belief that Hale places the practice of animal sacrifice, about which he writes in a respectful manner that goes far in helping the reader to understand the controversial practice.
Finally, a few words on theory and method, the measuring sticks for any good anthropological work. Hale writes in the conclusion that it has been 20 years since he first met the Cabocla Jurema, with the longest period of study being carried out during 1990–1. The reader gets no sense for how the groups studied have changed over time, however, or how they might have responded, just to give one example, to processes of re-Africanisation, which have been prominent in Afro-Brazilian religions in recent years.
The book poses no larger theoretical questions that would make it of interest to a broader scholarly audience. In regard to its relevance to anthropology (since the author is indeed an anthropologist), Hale presents an antiquated and outdated vision of the discipline, citing works by Mead and Malinowksi as examples of the kinds of books he once believed anthropologists were supposed to produce – books which he critiques as representing cultures as singular entities (p. 159). He writes that what he thought was the goal of fieldwork, to create a ‘concise model of a “culture”’, is now to him a fiction (p. 160). Of course, most anthropologists have been arguing this point for a long time now, and the author's construction of anthropology misses the direction in which the discipline has been moving for the past several decades.
Despite these shortcomings, Hale writes in an accessible, informal manner throughout, making his book especially well suited to undergraduate courses. His success at conveying the flavour of ritual experience and the personalities of the various spirits he encounters should go far in enticing newcomers to the study of Umbanda to further explore its enchanted worlds.
