The subject of Roger Sansi's Fetishes and Monuments is the formation of Afro-Brazilian culture in Salvador da Bahia, starting with the post-slavery years of the latter part of the 19th century and continuing through to the present day. The book describes a ‘historical transformation of practices, values and discourses’ (p. 3) and as such contributes to an already quite considerable literature on the cultural history of this region. Sansi's analysis is refreshingly different, however. Unlike earlier historical, sociological, and anthropological approaches, which turned on notions of essentialised cultures, relatively fixed religious systems, and clashes of civilisations, Sansi describes the formation of Afro-Brazilian culture as a two-way process of mutual exchange between the Brazilian cultural and political elite and the leaders of prominent Afro-Brazilian religious centres of Candomblé. Although Sansi maintains an understanding of culture as transient, constructive and always changing, his description narrates how this process of dialectical exchange has ultimately engendered a pervasive notion throughout Brazil of an objectified Afro-Brazilian ‘Culture’ – a stable, permanent institution that one can value, belong to, uphold, discuss, use and appropriate.

This is Sansi's central question: ‘How did Candomblé become “Culture”?’ (p. 2). The answer, he claims, lies partly in the processes whereby particular people, places, and things of Candomblé have come to be recognised as bearers of unique, inalienable value; in other words, the processes of the ‘Objectification of Culture’ (p. 6). Sansi's exploration of these processes begins in earnest in Chapter two, after an introduction to the main analytical and historical themes, and an opening chapter on various aspects of Candomblé practice, tradition and transformation. The recognition of an Afro-Brazilian culture, Sansi argues, begins with a tradition of academic studies that set Candomblé apart from Brazil, as a separate, autonomous cultural entity. This discourse on ‘Afro-Brazilianism’ filtered through to national elites and to the Candomblé houses. In the exchange between intellectuals and Candomblé leaders – an exchange in which intellectuals often became Candomblé priests and Candomblé priests became intellectuals – definitions of Afro-Brazilian culture have shifted from malady to folklore to philosophy and eventually Culture. The subsequent chapter describes how this newly objectified Culture was appropriated by Candomblé leaders, contributing to an anti-syncretic reformation process initiated in the prestigious Candomblé houses of Bahia. This process of ‘re-Africanisation’ took up the discourse of pure African culture as separate from Brazilian culture, appropriating it in legitimating the expurgation of Catholic elements (such as the worship of the saints) from traditional Candomblé practice. In the following chapters, the construction, valorisation and transformation of Afro-Brazilian Culture are traced with reference to the specific objectifications of Candomblé items in museum collections, public places and monuments, and art exhibitions, literary discourses, and commodity-crafts. In each case, Sansi explores how Candomblé persons and objects have been transformed into cultural values, symbols of Afro-Brazilian Culture.

Sansi doubts that these transformative processes may be accurately interpreted as invention of tradition or political ideology, as previous theorists have proposed. Rather, he argues, ‘Candomblé practices had value in themselves, not only as a means of attaining some other end, and Candomblé practitioners tried to preserve this value. But in the effort to preserve it, they changed everything, giving birth to Afro-Brazilian culture’ (p. 61). He objects to the reduction of historical processes of exchange to calculated resistance and political instrumentalism: ‘What if people practicing Candomblé were really interested in the forms of value produced and reproduced in Candomblé, not necessarily in function of something else like the “nation”?’ (p. 75). Sansi is to be praised for drawing attention to this potentially more parsimonious interpretation of events. Nevertheless, the ethnographic data on these processes appear to allow for the possibility of co-existing interpretations. Candomblé practitioners doubtless regard Candomblé as having intrinsic value; but where they could, and certainly where assisted by the cultural elite of artists, musicians and writers, they seized opportunities to portray its value to the wider Brazilian public and thereby to be treated with the dignity and respect equivalent to that of members of other religions, in particular Catholic priests (hitherto the uncontested patrons of Brazilian ‘Culture’). Although the birth of Afro-Brazilian Culture may be the ‘outcome of a historical process of exchange between intellectuals and the elites of Candomblé houses’ (p. 76), Candomblé practitioners across Brazil continue to see its valorisation as a process of ‘struggle’ (luta), as something that has been hard fought for, and that even today exists only patchily across the wider Brazilian population. Candomblé as the epitome of authentic Brazilian identity, as a unique African nation in Brazil, as the treasured heritage of the slaves, and so on are powerful discourses that are frequently and publicly proclaimed in this struggle for equality.

This minor observation hints at a broader concern with Sansi's analysis of Candomblé as Culture, namely its almost exclusive focus on the leadership of a handful of privileged terreiros (or Candomblé houses) of Salvador that have gained broad public recognition and acceptance. One cannot help but ponder whether Sansi's demotion of strategic struggle and resistance in his account of the formation of Afro-Brazilian Culture and his elevation of processes of mutual exchange reflect, in part, his focus on the bohemian Bahian Brazil of museums, art galleries and exhibitions, and public sculptures. Whatever the case, the question of how Candomblé became Culture is potentially relevant to a rather narrow domain of Candomblé practice and to a relatively small and elite group of Candomblé practitioners. For many practitioners across the region, the notion of their candomblé – an intensive, personal, consuming relationship with the orixá deities mediated via possession, ritual obligations, and animal sacrifices – being celebrated as Culture remains largely hypothetical. Issues of representativeness, however, should not detract from the impressive research and sensitive analyses that make this book an important and original contribution to the cultural history of the region. Anthropologists and historians interested in the development of Candomblé in twentieth-century Bahia, and in the processes of objectification and appropriation of everyday practices and things as symbols of collective identity, will certainly find much of interest in Sansi's work.