Abstract
Brazilian spirit entities, known as owners of the land, caboclos are a strong presence in the candomblé houses of Salvador, where African gods, the orixás, are worshipped. In this paper, we discuss how these entities are connected in the Candomblé houses (terreiros) and in the body of practitioners. We try to show that these connections can be taken as examples of symbiosis in the context of what the philosopher Isabelle Stengers calls an ecology of practices symbiosis: they are partial connections between beings that go on diverging despite being related by common interests. We argue that opportunities of symbiosis are given in the spatial dynamics of terreiros and rest upon an ethics that manages the distance between entities that are attracted to one another.
Keywords:
candomblé; caboclos; orixás; ecology of practices; symbiosis; ethics