Magical Amulets of Bahia: the debate between Nina Rodrigues and Aurelino Leal over mandinga and the emergence of the first ethnographies of Afro-Brazilians (1896-1902)

Mandinga na Bahia de Outrora: o debate entre Nina Rodrigues e Aurelino Leal e o surgimento das primeiras etnografias sobre a população afro-brasileira (1896-1902)

Abstract

In late nineteenth-century Brazil, popular religion, madness, and crime were central concerns among intellectuals studying the lives of poor, mestiço, and Black Brazilians. Raymundo Nina Rodrigues was long regarded as the sole early ethnographer of Afro-Brazilian religions, until the 1930s saw the emergence of a generation of scholars celebrating mestiçagem and African cultural heritage. A closer look at Bahia’s intellectual scene in the 1890s, however, reveals a wider group of researchers engaging with popular beliefs, some through direct ethnographic observation. A Religião entre os Condenados da Bahia (1898), by the Bahian lawyer Aurelino Leal, sparked an overlooked debate with Nina Rodrigues over a practice called “mandinga” - carrying amulet pouches believed to hold magical powers. The two disagreed on its origins and classification: whether it was a superstition, fetishism, or the “survival” of African religions. This article revisits that debate to illustrate how ethnographic sensibility toward Afro-Brazilians - and key anthropological categories for studying religious practices - began to emerge among researchers who still upheld racial hierarchies.

Keywords:
Mandinga; Ethnography; Race; Afro-Brazilian Religions; Bahia

Resumo

No Brasil do final do século XIX, religião popular, loucura e crime eram preocupações centrais entre intelectuais interessados na vida de brasileiros pobres, mestiços e negros. Raymundo Nina Rodrigues foi por muito tempo considerado o único etnógrafo das religiões afro-brasileiras, até o surgimento, na década de 1930, de uma geração de estudiosos que celebrava a mestiçagem e a herança cultural africana. Uma análise mais atenta do cenário intelectual baiano dos anos 1890 revela, porém, um grupo mais amplo de pesquisadores estudando crenças populares, alguns por meio de observação etnográfica direta. A Religião entre os Condenados da Bahia (1898), do advogado baiano Aurelino Leal, por exemplo, suscitou um debate com Nina Rodrigues sobre a prática da “mandinga” na Bahia - bolsas com objetos supostamente dotados de poderes mágicos. Divergiam quanto às suas origens e classificação: quer se tratava de superstição, fetichismo ou a “sobrevivência” de religiões africanas. Este artigo revisita essa controvérsia pouco conhecida para mostrar como a sensibilidade etnográfica em relação aos afro-brasileiros - e conceitos antropológicos para o estudo de práticas religiosas - começou a se formar entre pesquisadores que ainda acreditavam em hierarquias raciais.

Palavras-chave:
mandinga; etnografia; raça; religiões afro-brasileiras; Bahia

The history of research on populations of African descent in Brazil - and the intellectual interest in their cultures - cannot be told without considering the transnational circulation of ideas about “race” and its transformations under the influence of broader social and political contexts. Over the past three decades, scholars have revisited the making of Afro-Brazilian studies during the 1930s, emphasising how this emerging field of research relied on transnational intellectual networks shaped by comparative approaches to “race” relations and cultural exchanges between African-descendant communities and their respective nations across the Americas (Yelvington 2011; Oliveira 2019; Sansone 2022).¹ Amidst major theoretical shifts in the social sciences, such as the rise of Boasian cultural anthropology, this generation of scholars engaged with politicians, artists, journalists, and religious leaders of Candomblé to organise two landmark congresses on Afro-Brazilian studies in the 1930s (Romo 2010; Morais 2020). While their approaches varied, they shared a broadly favourable view of mestiçagem² as a harmonising force in Brazilian racial relations.³ Their work also helped to elevate Afro-Brazilian culture by tracing “survivals” of African cultures in Brazilian life (Capone 2010; Simões 2023).

Still, recent scholarship has not fully dispelled an unproductive oversimplification in the history of Afro-Brazilian studies: the assumption that ethnographic interest in African-descendant populations and their cultural practices in Brazil only emerged once racial hierarchies were critically challenged. This narrative was reiterated by 1930s culturalist intellectuals who sought to distance themselves from the era of racialism (Ramos 1935; Carneiro 1968). In their view, Brazilian physician Raymundo Nina Rodrigues was a solitary pioneer misguided by racial theories, while later scholars cast themselves as the first to reclaim Afro-Brazilian studies from a “modern”, non-racist perspective (Freyre 1987).⁴ A similar framing was reinforced by subsequent canonical works on the history of racial thought in Brazil (Skidmore 1974; Schwarcz 1993).

A closer look at Bahia’s intellectual scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals a more complex picture. The lives of poor, mestiço, and Black Bahians increasingly drew the attention of intellectuals - especially at the Bahia Faculty of Medicine (Sepúlveda 2018; Costa 2023). A significant group of scholars began engaging with popular customs and practices, some of them based on direct ethnographic observation.⁵ While it is debatable whether these efforts formed a coherent research agenda, there is little doubt that the intersection of “race,” popular religion, madness, and crime offered a key entry point for ethnographic interest in Afro-Brazilians (Almeida 2011).⁶

They also relied on transnational collaborations. At that time, the interdisciplinary field of “criminal anthropology” served as an intellectual network for sharing publications, correspondence, research practices, and methods (Sansone 2025).⁷ Through criminological circles, two pioneering ethnographies produced in Bahia in the late nineteenth century reached an international audience. They were Raymundo Nina Rodrigues’ widely cited O Animismo Fetichista dos Negros Bahianos (1896-1897), which explored Candomblé ritual practices, and the lesser-known A Religião entre os Condemnados da Bahia (1898) by Bahian lawyer Aurelino Leal, which analysed the practice of mandinga among Bahian convicts. A follow-up publication by Leal (1902) revealed a heated debate between the two authors over the origins and classification of mandinga, bringing theoretical and methodological innovations to the study of Afro-Brazilian religions. We employ a critical analysis of these materials, drawing on a range of secondary sources, including biographical and historical studies of the authors’ intellectual scene, and engaging with existing literature on their work. Our methodological framework for this analysis focuses on how the authors’ theoretical choices were influenced by broader social and political contexts (Yelvington 2011) and challenged by their subjective tensions with the field (Ozanam 2022).

By revisiting this debate, this article aims to explore how direct ethnographic experiences in late nineteenth-century Bahia began to unsettle dominant racial paradigms, well before the concept of “race” was seriously questioned. Over time, the religious practices of racialised Bahians came to be understood less through the lens of biology and more through ideas of environment, psychology, and, eventually, culture.⁸ Through this shift, Brazilian intellectuals introduced and adapted emerging concepts for the study of social phenomena - such as “imitation” and “survivals” - that would later become foundational in the social sciences.

“RACE”, RELIGION, MADNESS AND CRIME:⁹ THE MAKING OF NEW ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITIES IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BAHIA

In the twenty years following the abolition of slavery (1888), debates in the Brazilian intellectual, medical, and political elites focused on the “quality” of their people. In 1889, through a coup d’état, Brazil became a republic. It was not inclusive: fewer people could vote than before because being literate became a precondition, even though only 5% were literate. Brazil was the first nation with a flag with words in the vernacular: “Order and Progress” - a shortened and more authoritarian version of Auguste Comte’s famous positivist quote “Love, Order and Progress.”

With the abolition, the enslaved had become citizens, but no special measures were taken to include them in society on an equal footing. Generally speaking, the sizeable non-White populations were left to fend for themselves:

[Scholars] were required to relate to the new citizens emerging from those economic, social and political changes. However, a number of issues intervened: How should they deal with this new group of freed Brazilians who were wandering along the streets in the large cities in search of their life opportunities, often calling into question the very future of Brazil as a civilised nation? How should they cure the “weak brain” of most mestiços? How should they contain the supposedly out-of-control increase in violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? (Almeida 2011: 7)

As intellectual interest in the people - understood as the lower-class, mestiço, and Black populations - began to grow, ethnography was increasingly employed by both physicians and lawyers.

In the final quarter of the century, in connection with the profound transformations undergone by society - urban expansion, difficulties in integrating freed slaves and immigrants, the growth of criminality, and increased attention to mental illness - a new figure of the physician emerged, one who also attended to a society itself perceived as ill, making extensive use of the discourse of the social sciences then in the process of formation. This form of medicine, which also conceived of itself as a guardian of society, sought to participate in its sanitation and regeneration, and likewise aimed to have a say in the formulation of “good laws.” (Marin 1997: 37)

For these professionals, medicine and law were also social sciences, disciplines that required not only technical expertise but also direct engagement with the population. The marginalised were no longer to be ignored or rendered invisible; they were to be seen, heard, questioned, documented, and, when possible, photographed, fingerprinted, and to have their cultural artefacts collected - amulets, musical instruments, ritual garments, crafts, and artistic works.¹⁰

Certain aspects, such as the popularity of religious practices and their relation to criminal behaviour, became iconic and attracted particular attention. As Yvonne Maggie shows in Medo do Feitiço (1992), the decade after abolition was marked by legal and medical concerns over the role of popular religion in Brazilian society. In the Brazilian Northeast, numerous social uprisings were fueled by religious movements. How could a country where so many people believed in magic and superstition possibly advance toward “Order and Progress”? Newspapers followed closely the actions of Antônio Conselheiro’s religious group in the Bahian sertão¹¹, along with the violent repression campaigns carried out by the government.¹² Within this context, the sertanejos came to be portrayed as the unstable, superstitious, and potentially dangerous product of mestiçagem and its adaptation to a harsh physical environment (Rodrigues 2000).

In the courts, there was a new offensive against the practitioners of fetishism, who were held by judges responsible for harming and even killing people with their magic (Maggie 1992) - that is, the republican and positivist courts, to some extent, believed that the fetish had superior powers. Intellectuals were no different. Their desire to explain popular religious practices through science often clashed with their own complex religious, regional, and racial backgrounds. Many blended positivist ideals with Catholic devotion. A few of them came from the countryside and expressed solidarity with sertanejos.¹³ Some were of African descendance, mulatos, or mestiços, as per the terminology of the period. These affiliations also influenced their perspectives and were reflected in their writings. In this article, we follow the approach proposed by Ozanam (2022), which calls for revisiting late nineteenth-century Brazilian intellectuals through a less homogenising lens. This means challenging the assumptions of “positive” objectivity and neutrality with which they described themselves - and have often been described. He emphasises that:

The ethnic difference between the observer and the observed, central to the constitution of the social sciences in Brazil at the end of the 19th century, should be historicised and not treated as a premise in research that links history and anthropology in the country. (Ozanam 2022: 49).

Their double inscription as “belonging to the people observed by science” and “science observing people” (Ozanam 2022: 52) becomes an analytical focus here as their experimental ethnographies are a privileged space for observing these contradictions. Firsthand engagement with the people reveals the emergence of not a single but multiple ethnographic sensibilities shaped by the authors’ personal and disciplinary relationship with their informants. With this in mind, we now turn to the personal and intellectual trajectories of the two authors behind the ethnographies at the centre of our analysis: Nina Rodrigues and Aurelino Leal.

NINA RODRIGUES AND HIS PATH TOWARD O ANIMISMO FETICHISTA DOS NEGROS BAHIANOS (1896-1897)

In Salvador da Bahia - one of the cities with the largest Black populations in Latin America - it was the intersection of interests between “race,” religion, madness, and crime that drew Raymundo Nina Rodrigues (1866-1906) to the study of Afro-Bahian religions. Born in Vargem Grande, Maranhão, as the son of landowners, he attended secondary school in the capital, São Luís, and soon enrolled in the Bahia Faculty of Medicine at the age of 20. In 1889, one year after graduating, he became a professor at the same institution until his last days.

He was a coroner, epidemiologist, alienist, sanitarian, and a self-taught ethnographer. His controversial work is often mentioned but rarely read in depth. For some, he was a “polygenist” (Maio 1995) and a “social Darwinist” who “denied social evolutionism” and “defended the existence of ontological differences between races” (Schwarcz 2009: 90).¹⁴ For others, he was a “hesitant racialist” with attested evolutionary leanings (Monteiro 2020), a social reformer, a critic of liberalism and a defender of religious freedom (Romo 2010). Arguably mestiço and proponent of the degenerative potential of mestiçagem, he was either called “mulatto” (Skidmore 1974) or of Sephardic Jewish descent on his mother’s side ( L. Lima 1980). He was Catholic (Serafim 2017) but also held the title of ogã¹⁵ in a Candomblé terreiro (Sansone 2025). This wide range of facets speaks to the theoretical versatility he was able to mobilise throughout his career. (Figure 1)

Figure 1
Raymundo Nina Rodrigues (1866-1906) (on the left) and his assistants at the Medical-Surgical Anatomy Lab of the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia. Source: Album (1903: 26).

His work is undeniably dynamic. Focusing on a single book - or a narrow selection - can lead to hasty conclusions. For example, consider the starkly different approaches to “race” in his first book, As Raças Humanas e a Responsabilidade Penal no Brasil (1894), and his last, posthumously published Os Africanos no Brasil (1932). The former reveals a Spencerian sociobiological tone:

Each stage in the social evolution of a people, and better still, each stage in the evolution of humankind, if we compare anthropologically different races, corresponds to its criminality, in harmony and according to the degree of its intellectual and moral development. There is a material, organic impossibility for the representatives of the lower stages of social evolution to pass suddenly in a single generation, without a slow and gradual transition, to the degree of mental and social culture of the higher stages. (Rodrigues 1938: 70)

In the latter, however, sociobiological racialism gives way to a more Tylorean evolutionism (Serafim 2017; Monteiro 2020). Though many commentators have mistakenly claimed that Rodrigues never used the term “culture” in reference to Black populations (Schwarcz 2007; A. Lima 2013), this concept appears in his Os Africanos no Brasil as a decisive shift:

There is a dispute between those who consider [Black inferiority] inherent in the organic constitution of the race, and therefore final and irreparable, and those who consider it transitory and remediable. For the former, the organic constitution of Black people, shaped by the physical and moral habitat within which they developed, does not allow them to adapt to the civilisation of the superior races, products of a different physical and cultural environment. It would be an organic or morphological incapacity. These reasons appear to be of little value or validity […] What the impartial study of Black people shows is that there are degrees among them; there is a hierarchical scale of culture and improvement. They are improving and progressing; therefore, they are suited for a future civilisation. (Rodrigues 1932: 389-90, italics added)

To understand this shift, it is essential to trace the thematic and methodological unfolding of Rodrigues’ work - a path that Mariza Corrêa (2001) emphasised and that subsequent studies have pursued in analysing the psychological phase of his intellectual trajectory (Oda 2003; 2004; 2009; Monteiro 2016; 2020).¹⁶ These works mark a progression from his clinical studies to ethnographic inquiry:

The emphasis that Nina Rodrigues himself placed on anthropometric analyses, especially craniometry, as well as the importance that some of his critics attached to this aspect of his work, may have contributed to making almost invisible a late but very important passage in his career: the shift in attention from the physiological to the psychological aspects of human behaviour. However, the more psychological Nina Rodrigues’ observations became, the more sociological his analyses turned out; madness, for example, appeared more and more as an expression of social relations. (Corrêa 2001: 113, italics added)

Corrêa (2008) argued that what distinguished Nina Rodrigues from his interlocutors was his empirical bent. His field observations often clashed with the theoretical frameworks he had adopted (Corrêa 2001; Maggie & Fry 2006; Oda 2009), prompting him to explore new conceptual tools in psychology and sociology (Monteiro 2020). As he moved from physical to psychological explanations of behaviour, Rodrigues began to focus on socially learned phenomena that were relatively independent of hereditary factors - especially what he termed the “fetishist” religion of the Blacks, which had spread widely throughout the city of Bahia, regardless of “race.”

This insight forms the central thesis of his pioneering ethnography of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, “O Animismo Fetichista dos Negros Bahianos” [The Fetishistic Animism of Bahian Blacks], published in five parts in the Revista Brazileira (1896-1897). Later translated into French, it was received by French anthropology with interest - Marcel Mauss called it an “élégante monographie” (Mauss 1900: 224). As several aspects of Animismo Fetichista have already been comprehensively analysed (Maggie and Fry 2006; Schwarcz 2007; Bakke 2011; van de Port 2011; J. Leal 2020), we will focus on its central thesis and the most pertinent points for the subsequent debate with Aurelino Leal.

To account for how the “primitive” religious feelings of Black Bahians could appear among other “races” even in the absence of physical mestiçagem, Rodrigues turned to psychological theories. On the physiobiological side, he employed the concept of “psychic atavism,” drawn from Lombrosian neuropathologists. Similar to the criminal’s atavistic regression in Lombrosian theory, White individuals could regress to earlier “psychic stages” due to what he called “the superstitious background of the White race” (Rodrigues 1935: 167). Yet he also came to consider non-hereditary explanations. He started to employ Gabriel Tarde and Scipio Sighele’s concept of “suggestion-imitation,” as well as Edward Tylor’s notion of “survivals,” to explain the social transmission of psychological phenomena and religious beliefs (Monteiro 2020). We will see later that he came to consider these three principles for some time after the publication of Animismo Fetichista.

By 1902, empirical inconsistencies began to erode his conviction in “psychic atavism” as a framework for understanding the Black religious phenomena. In his articles Atavisme psychique et paranoïa (1902) and La paranoïa chez les nègres (1903) (Rodrigues 2004; 2009), he rejected the view that paranoia, delirium, and hallucinations represented an atavistic regression to a “primitive” psychic stage. It would mean admitting that, for “races” considered “primitive” such as Blacks, these “are not pathological characteristics, but merely normal facts” (Monteiro 2016: 73). Based on his clinical work with Black patients, he argued against such reductionism. Delirium, he asserted, develops “based on ideas that are fully current and accepted by the patient’s contemporaries” (Rodrigues 2009: 776).

This reevaluation also shaped his interpretation of Afro-Brazilian religions. Already in Animismo Fetichista, he insisted on the presence of neurotic phenomena among Black Brazilians - directly opposing João Baptista de Lacerda, director of the National Museum. Rodrigues was challenging the dominant European view, and that of his colleague Lacerda, that neurosis was exclusive to “cultivated races.”¹⁷ He viewed Candomblé possession rituals as a form of “provoked somnambulism” (Rodrigues 1935: 109), possibly of a “hysterical nature.”¹⁸ While maintaining racial hierarchies and a pathological framing for Afro-Brazilian religious practices (J. Leal 2020), he nonetheless affirmed their legitimacy and recognised that such practices could be socially transmitted. To position Rodrigues’ arguments in Animismo Fetichista within the broader ethnographic debate that follows, we will return to this work in a subsequent section.

AURELINO LEAL AND A RELIGIÃO ENTRE OS CONDEMNADOS DA BAHIA (1898)

Following the publication of Nina Rodrigues’ seminal ethnography, which likely provoked considerable controversy in Bahian intellectual circles accused by him of being “fetishist”, the young jurist Aurelino de Araújo Leal (1877-1924) also turned to ethnographic research to explore the relationship between popular religion and criminality in the Bahia State Penitentiary¹⁹. Although little remembered today - despite a town in the interior of Bahia bearing his name - Leal pursued a brief yet notable career spanning the legal, political, journalistic, and academic realms.

He was born in Rio de Contas, in the central part of the state of Bahia, to modest employees of the Public Telegraph Company. Raised in the Bahian countryside, he later moved to the capital and enrolled at the Bahia Faculty of Law. He graduated in 1894 with a specialisation in criminal law. The following year, at the age of eighteen, he was appointed public prosecutor in the town of Amargosa. In 1902, he assumed the position of Director of the Bahia State Penitentiary with a mandate to oversee prison reform and, in 1904, Chief of Police of the state of Bahia. In 1914, Leal relocated to Rio de Janeiro, then the federal capital. There, he was elected a permanent member of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (IHGB), the country’s foremost historical and geographical society. That same year, President Venceslau Brás (1914-1918) appointed him Chief of Police of the Federal District. In 1915, he became a Professor of Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law of Rio de Janeiro (H. Leal 1968). From that point on, his publications increasingly focused on the history of Brazilian constitutions. Today, he is chiefly remembered in legal circles for these works (Leal 1915), whereas his early essays and book-length collections of newspaper articles on criminology - once widely circulated in Bahia - are now almost entirely forgotten.

A prolific writer from an early age, Leal published four books in the four years following his graduation: Prisão Preventiva (1895), Gérmens do Crime (1896), A Reforma Penitenciária na Bahia (1898) and the focus of this section, A Religião entre os Condemnados da Bahia (1898) [Religion among convicts in Bahia]. This short ethnographic essay drew immediate attention. The following year, it was published in the prestigious journal Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, edited by Alexandre Lacassagne and Gabriel Tarde in Lyon, with whom he corresponded. Leal was only 22 years old.²⁰ (Figure 2)

Figure 2
Aurelino de Araújo Leal (1877-1924). Source: Leal (1918: 8).

The book resulted from pioneering fieldwork in the Bahia State Penitentiary, which Leal described as “the worst such institute in the civilised world” (Leal 1898: 6). With state authorisation, he organised a spiritual retreat in collaboration with a Catholic chaplain. Although he identified himself as a “free thinker,” Leal closely followed the Catholic retreat, observing, interviewing inmates, and recording his findings in a small notebook. He noted that the fieldwork required emotional detachment due to the distressing scenes he witnessed.

The central question that guided his inquiry was: Is a “true” religion practised in the penitentiary? Leal was sceptical. He argued that if any religion did exist among the inmates, it was purely mechanical - a product of idleness. He tried to explore the relationship between convicts’ beliefs and crime, focusing on a practice known as mandinga. Most prisoners, he claimed, had succumbed to a utilitarian superstition based on the perceived power of magical objects called patuás or breves, believed to offer bodily protection and support personal goals. With the assistance of the chaplain, Father Paulino Fugnano, Leal attempted to collect as many of these objects as possible, often worn by the convicts around the neck. Though he admitted ignorance of their precise etymology, he defined them broadly: “I say that ‘patuá’ means prayers, amulets - in short, everything that the superstitious wear around their necks, in their pouches, or on their chests” (Leal 1898: 6). Some patuás were unintelligible, while others mixed prayers for Catholic saints with popular beliefs, offering protection from illness, misfortune, weapons, and death “from iron”. Some bore symbols such as the “Signs of Solomon” were believed by mandingueiros to provide powerful protection. These were sometimes painted on the body or tattooed on the chest: (Figure 3 & Figure 4)

Figure 3
“Seals of Solomon”. Source: Leal (1898: 12).

Figure 4
“Christian cross with two weapons”. Source: Leal (1898: 14).

Not all breves were prayers or symbols. Many were eclectic collections of enchanted materials believed to possess magical properties. In more extreme cases, these materials were surgically inserted beneath the skin using razors:

“D’ara stone, agnus-dei, sanguinho, cálice-bento, santo-lenho, wax from a holy candle, consecrated host, bones of the apostles, cotton from baptism, threads from priestly vestments, the “milk of Our Lady” (a white stone with an image), earth from Solomon’s grave, Indian fava beans, guará leather, bones of a quivering fish (the electric fish), bones of a pachyderm fish, bones of a crocodile, and many others.” (Leal 1898: 16)

All of these practices fell under what Leal identified as mandinga, and their practitioners were known as mandingueiros or cacundeiros. He did not underscore the African or Indigenous descent of his informants, focusing instead on their regional sertanejo identity as a racial outcome of mestiçagem. He identified the origins of the vast majority of his informants from the prison - foresters and miners from the Chapada Diamantina, in the central region of the state of Bahia. As someone born and raised in that same area, he felt especially qualified to provide an account of religion in that part of the state. He offered two explanations for the phenomenon. First, mandinga was a degraded form of Catholicism, an expression of “superstition” born of ignorance and a lack of religious education - an “old inheritance.” He cited Dupiney de Vorepierre’s (1860) encyclopedic definition of amulette, apparently recommended by a friend:²¹

The belief in the evil eye (quebrantos), sorceries (feitiços), and the supernatural power of planets and constellations implies, logically, the existence of supernatural means to counter them. Both beliefs stem from ignorance of the true causes and the misinterpretation of fortuitous coincidences. (Vorepierre [1860: 107] apudLeal 1898: 21)

Leal compares such ignorance to an earlier evolutionary stage: “The greatest proof, I believe, is the dominance of ignorance always among poorly cultivated brains, akin to the savage state” (Leal 1898: 21). Significantly, he employed Comtean categories such as “savagery” and “civilisation” to describe Bahian society, though he would later criticise Nina Rodrigues for doing so.

His second explanation introduces a racial framing. Leal attributed inherent inferiority to mandingueiros to mestiçagem, arguing that sertanejos, like the Caribbean mixed-Black populations analysed by Armand Corre (1889), were biologically predisposed to superstition:

In the realm of psychological determinism, their brain structure does not allow for the balancing of motives. If I may say so, instinct seems to dominate over intuition. Thus, superstition - which dispenses with reason - is entirely accessible to them and as natural as its consequences. (Leal 1898: 28)

This combination of “physical determinism” and “ignorance” led such individuals to adopt beliefs that placed them in proximity to “savage” modes of life: “Civilisation remains inaccessible to them due to anthropological incapacity and the insufficiency of the means available to propagate it in the interior.” (Leal 1898: 28)

His questioning of mandingueiros’ belief in God also emerged through a familiar ethnographic dilemma - the unwillingness of field informants to collaborate. He observed:

When I wanted to study the degree of religious sentiment among prisoners, I found it impossible to make sound observations; they knew I had taken their patuás and remained silent - or else assured me of their firm belief in God while denying belief in mandinga. The prejudice against me was such that the chaplain had to defend me publicly, assuring them I meant no harm. […] The informants were extraordinary people. I must stress that I am not generalising. I speak only of the most uneducated, wildest portion of the population, which, however, is quite numerous. (Leal 1898: 21-22, 27)

Leal’s ultimate goal was to combat such beliefs - at least among some inmates. He believed it necessary to demonstrate the inefficacy of mandinga, which he considered a psychological stimulus for criminality in Bahian hinterlands. He concluded that genuine Catholic faith and religious sentiment could serve as effective corrective measures, recommending that every prison be provided with religious assistance and a competent priest.

THE DEBATE OVER MANDINGA: SUPERSTITION, FETISHISM OR “SURVIVAL”?

Not long after the publication of A Religião entre os Condemnados da Bahia, Nina Rodrigues - whom Leal regarded as an authority on religious psychology - devoted several pages to reviewing the essay. He was likely among the first to take notice of it, as it appeared in the same issue of the French Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle (edited by Lacassagne and Tarde) in which Rodrigues published his own article, “Métissage, dégénérescence et crime” (1899). Leal later quoted excerpts from this review in his book Estudos de Sociologia e Psychologia Criminal (1902), where he dedicated an entire chapter to responding to Rodrigues:

With such enthusiasm, I am happy to say that Dr. Nina Rodrigues - perhaps the leading figure in contemporary forensic medicine in Brazil and a psychologist of distinction - has offered an extensive reflection on the work I refer to, which, to my great honour, forms a chapter in an unpublished book by this illustrious professor. (Leal 1902: 200)

We believe the book Leal refers to is likely O Problema da Raça Negra na América Portuguesa, a work Rodrigues had been drafting since the late nineteenth century but was unable to complete before his early death in 1906. Unfortunately, this discussion does not appear in Os Africanos no Brasil (1932), the posthumous publication of the unfinished manuscript, nor in any of the articles available to us.²² However, by comparing both religious ethnographies with the many direct quotes from Rodrigues’ review and Leal’s reply - preserved in Estudos de Sociologia e Psychologia Criminal - we can piece together, to some extent, their differing perspectives on the practice of mandinga and the theoretical frameworks they used to support their views.

Much of their disagreement centred on the origins and classification of mandinga. Rodrigues’ critique targeted three main points in Leal’s argument. First, the claim that mandinga was a corruption of Catholicism rather than a belief system rooted in different religious origins; second is the assertion that mandinga contributes to criminal behaviour among the “uneducated” classes; third, the suggestion that mandinga could be “cured” by introducing chaplains into the prison system, which would have a “prophylactic” effect on such beliefs. We will discuss each of these points below.

The first point reflected a broader disagreement about the origins of mandinga. In Animismo Fetichista, Rodrigues described this practice coming from Muslim Black populations of Bahia: “The Malês or Musulmis profess an Islam more or less impregnated with fetishist practices” (1935: 28). “They are fervent believers in talismans, gri-gris, and know high sorcery processes” (1935: 29). He linked these practices to two Muslin African peoples, the Hausas and the Mandingas: “The term ‘Malê’ is perhaps reminiscent of Malinkés, used for the Mandingas, who are also Muslims. But the old Musulmi priest confirms to me that most of the Bahian Malês are Hausa” (1935: 30). Rodrigues also pointed to the role these practices played in the Malês Rebellion of 1835: “Religion played its part in the uprising, and the chiefs persuaded the enslaved that certain papers (evidently talismans, gri-gris) would free them from death, from which a large number of these are found in the dead bodies” (1935: 32). “Most of them concern religious precepts. It is known that verses from the Qur’an, written on small pieces of paper and worn as amulets around the neck, are a highly esteemed gri-gri among Black Muslims” (1935: 33).

For Aurelino Leal, the fact that the word mandinga could be traced to an African ethnic group did not explain its origins since it was a practice completely widespread in Bahia: “Would all peoples (because none is unaware of the various superstitions I have studied) have felt the influence of the Mandês?” (Leal 1902: 218). On the contrary, he was convinced that mandinga did not come from fetishist practices but was rather a “superstition” that had long coexisted with Catholicism. Drawing on arguments of Armand Corre (1889), who studied this practice in the French Antilles, Leal argued that these superstitions came not only from Africa but also from Europe and that Catholicism itself was deeply imbued with them. He went on to show that a series of magical remedies he analysed in A Religião entre os Condemnados da Bahia and Rodrigues saw as remnants of African traditions were found in the precepts of the Book of Saint Cyprian (1902: 226) - a work based on the legend of Cyprian of Antioch, a former sorcerer converted to Christianity, widely used in Spain and Portugal in the 16th and 17th centuries and recently reprinted and popular in Brazil.²³

He argued that the beliefs of the Bahian population originated in Catholicism and that their superstitions were signs of the degeneration of that religion. He acknowledged the presence of African fetishism in Bahia but saw it as largely dependent on physical mestiçagem - meaning it was racially determined and mostly confined to people of African descent. He explained the distribution of religious practices as follows:

The White race remained Catholic, which is its religion of origin; the Black race remained largely, though not entirely, fetishist; and the mestiços could incline toward either one, depending on the predominance of Black or White blood in their physical constitution or (and I emphasise this) the environment in which they spent their early years and came of age. (Leal 1902: 206)

For Leal, fetishism was mostly limited to the Black population of Salvador and a few nearby towns in the Bahian Recôncavo - notably Santo Amaro and Cachoeira.²⁴ By contrast, the majority of the Bahian population - predominantly mestiça, both in the capital and inland - was described as devoutly Catholic, attached to saints, processions, and home altars, yet marked by a superstitious spirit. Citing Silvio Romero, Leal saw Catholicism growing among mestiços as an outcome of the population “Whitening”.²⁵ Even in Black communities, he believed fetishist traditions were fading. He pointed to the mixing of elements from different African groups as evidence of the gradual erosion of these religious practices.

Rodrigues had shown a different opinion. While he acknowledged the declining number of Africans in Bahia, he believed their religious practices would endure:

When the formal rituals of their cults have entirely vanished along with the last Africans, it will be much harder to prove that the veneration of Catholic saints by Black people is still purely fetishist. I would add, however, that this complete disappearance is not likely to happen anytime soon because these practices are well accepted by both crioulos²⁶ and mestiços, and the process of passing leadership to crioulos and mulatos is already well underway. (Rodrigues 1935: 170)

From their broader disagreement about the origins of mandinga, we can trace a more specific dispute about its classification: can it be considered a form of fetishism? To understand Nina Rodrigues’ interpretation of mandinga as rooted in African fetishism, one must return to Animismo Fetichista. As we saw, Rodrigues proposed a more complex explanation about the religion in Bahia that was relatively independent of hereditary factors. He argued that elements from different “evolutionary stages” of religion could coexist, drawing on Edward Tylor’s concept of “survivals” (Tylor 1871) and reshaping Tylor’s idea. Citing a passage from Primitive Culture (1871), in which Tylor describes Europeans on the West African coast adopting local fetishist practices, and adding his own ethnographic observations in Bahia, he proposed what he called “religious mestiçagem”. Through the existence of religious “survivals”, beliefs associated with supposedly “lower” races could be adopted by “higher” ones.²⁷ He challenged the idea that in Bahia, Blacks, mestiços, and even Whites had fully assimilated Catholicism and instead described the Bahian religion as a mixture. Fetishist practices - acknowledged by Rodrigues as African in origin and remarkably persistent - had spread in Bahia among Catholics of all “races” and social classes. Mestiçagem, as he argued, was then not only physical but also emotional and spiritual. It was, in his words, “of feelings,” “affective,” and thus “religious” (Rodrigues 1935: 186).

Rodrigues interwove two concepts evident in the title to explain the religion of Afro-Bahians. First, Edward Tylor’s idea of “animism”: “the doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings,” (Tylor 1871: 21) was the foundational material of all religions. Second, Charles de Brosses’ concept of “fetishism” which Rodrigues encountered through André Lefèvre (1892): “ancient worship of certain earthly and material objects called fetishes,” whether “animals, or inanimate beings that are deified,” or “even when objects of this kind are less gods, in the strict sense of the word, than things endowed with divine virtue, oracles, amulets and preservative talismans” (de Brosses 1760, apudLefèvre 1892: xiii).

Following Tylor, Lefèvre (1892) laid out stages of religious evolution, identifying two types of animism. The lowest, “diffuse animism,” involved “the attribution to every being and thing of a double, ghost, spirit, soul, independent of the body in which it momentarily resides” (Rodrigues 1935: 27-28), followed by a more developed “condensed animism,” where these scattered souls were absorbed into organised, deified categories. Drawing on Lefèvre, Rodrigues argued that fetishism could be found across this spectrum - from the crudest forms of animism to more complex religious expressions.

Because practitioners could distinguish between magical objects and their true deities embodied in nature, Rodrigues placed Afro-Bahian fetishism in a transitional phase between “diffuse” and “condensed” animism:

It cannot be said that the Afro-Bahians confuse their saints, quasi-idols, and sometimes true idols with sorcery (feitiços), gri-gri, or jujú. President de Brosses already implicitly established this distinction between fetishist peoples when he said that the qualification of fetishist should be extended to “even those peoples for whom objects of this kind (gri-gri) are less gods per se than things endowed with a divine virtue, oracles, amulets, and preservative talismans” [Lefèvre 1892]. (Rodrigues 1935: 57-58)

De Brosses’ definition thus allowed Rodrigues to argue that even if mandingueiros knew mandingas did not contain spirits or gods, mandingas could be qualified as “fetishes”.

In Estudos de Sociologia e Psicologia Criminal (1902), Leal finally made explicit his reliance on ethnological studies of religion to refute Rodrigues. He drew on the French theologian Albert Réville (1883), whose work focused largely on African religions. In the chapter “Animisme et fétichisme,” Réville critiqued de Brosses’ broad use of “fetishism” to describe the worship of both natural and handicraft fetishes. Réville reserved the term “fetishism” for the worship of individual objects believed to be inhabited by spirits, owned by an individual, family, or “tribe” (Réville 1883: 83). Natural features available to everyone - like seas, mountains, rocks, or stars - could not be considered fetishes. A true fetish, unlike an amulet or talisman, had not just magical power but a consciousness of its own. Using this narrower definition, Leal argued that since mandingueiros did not believe their patuás contained spirits, mandingas were not fetishes and did not derive from fetishistic religions.

Instead, Leal classified mandinga as a “superstition” - a belief “based on ignorance of the real causes of these phenomena and the false interpretation of some fortuitous coincidences” (Dupiney de Vorepierre [1860: 107]apudLeal 1898: 21). While this reflects a positivist bias, it lacks the broader evolutionary frame employed by Nina Rodrigues. For Rodrigues, superstitions were remnants of earlier cultural stages - outdated beliefs that survived into new contexts but had lost their original meaning. Following Tylor (1871), Rodrigues avoided the term “superstition” with its pejorative overtones. He preferred Tylor’s definition of “survivals.” In Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor explained:

The very word “superstition,” in what is perhaps its original sense of a “standing over” from old times, itself expresses the notion of survival. But the term superstition now implies a reproach, and though this reproach may be often cast deservedly on fragments of a dead lower culture embedded in a living higher one, yet in many cases, it would be harsh and even untrue. For the ethnographer’s purpose, at any rate, it is desirable to introduce such a term as “survival” simply to denote the historical fact which the word “superstition” is now spoiled for expressing. (Tylor 1871: 64-65)²⁸

This debate (Leal 1902) thus testifies to the incorporation of Tylor’s concept of “survivals” into Nina Rodrigues’ work, a concept he would elaborate on later in Os Africanos no Brasil - and one that would exert a long-lasting influence on Afro-American and Afro-Brazilian studies (Yelvington 2011; Simões 2023). Yet, in 1902, Rodrigues still related “survivals” to forms of hereditary transmission such as “psychic atavism,” as noted in Leal’s book:

As Tylor teaches, [superstition] is a phenomenon of survival, psychic reversion, or atavism, and it consists of the manifestation, in highly cultured people, of the religious sentiments of inferior peoples. Cases of fetishism and idolatry observed in cultured peoples are certainly cases of superstition; these same phenomena observed in savage or barbaric peoples strictly represent no longer superstition but religiosity itself in the lower stages of their development. (Rodrigues apudLeal 1902: 228-229)

As we have seen, after Animismo Fetichista, his studies on “psychic atavism” among Black populations led him to favour the concept of “survivals” for these religious phenomena, a distinction he would later make explicit in Os Africanos no Brasil:

Atavism is a more organic phenomenon in the realm of hereditary accumulation, which presupposes a discontinuity in the transmission by inheritance of certain qualities from the ancestors, skipping one or a few generations. Survival is a phenomenon from the social sphere and differs from the former by the continuity that it presupposes: it represents the remnants of temperaments or moral qualities that are, or should be, on the way to gradual extinction but that continue to live alongside or associated with new habits, new moral or intellectual acquisitions. (Rodrigues 1932: 405)

This evolutionary analysis of the Bahian religion would be rejected by Leal. While in 1898, he had argued that superstition reflected the inferior racial and evolutionary condition of the sertanejos, in his later essay, he made the opposite case:

Our disagreement lies in the reference that the learned observer makes to “savage or barbaric peoples,” as if he could apply this part of his considerations to any of the Bahian populations, except for the Indigenous people who live in the heart of our forests and who are outside the debate. Which of our cities is populated by barbarians or savages in the sociological sense of the term? None. (Leal 1902: 229-230)

Leal did not reject the evolutionist theory itself, but he firmly opposed labelling the Bahian population as uncivilised. His shift in position was both explicit and reflective:

And I do not shy away from the penance of thus modifying the concept that I expressed in A Religião entre os Condemnados da Bahia concerning the peoples of the interior, in whose less cultivated, but equally civilised, layer I saw neighbours of the savage state, guided more by instinct than by intelligence. (Leal 1902: 237)

Leal explicitly challenged the sociological utility of the Comtean category “savage.” He argued that even Indigenous populations of Brazil possessed moral and social codes too complex to be labelled as such. To defend the civilisational status of Bahians, he adopted Réville’s distinction between “civilised” and “non-civilised” peoples, considering the former to be those with a legal system, judiciary, and institutions of governance.

In this, we can extend Ozanam’s (2022) argument that personal and subjective factors also shaped these observers’ assumptions. Leal, born in the Bahian interior - and perhaps having witnessed the brutal repression of sertanejos during the Canudos Campaign under accusations of “savagery” - seems determined to affirm their dignity. He probably saw in Rodrigues’ differentiation - that mandinga was a survival in the upper classes and a sign of fetishism among the lower - an implicit affirmation of the anthropological superiority of the urban population over the interior. Regional belonging is then strategically mobilised: “It is worth noting that the esteemed professor knows very little, or nothing at all, about our hinterland” (Leal 1902: 214).

Conversely, this bias is also evident in Rodrigues’ assertions, which arguably allude to Leal’s background: “It is a well-known fact that in rural populations, segregated from social interaction, inferior religious sentiments, idolatry and fetishism still persist in the most cultured peoples” (Rodrigues apudLeal 1902: 229). Rodrigues’ evolutionary framework subtly mobilised regional hierarchy, which may help explain the personal tone behind Leal’s forceful rebuttal. For Leal, mandinga was not a religion for the sertanejos nor a “survival” of African fetishism among the elite. It was, quite simply, a common superstition - one found across religious and regional boundaries alike.

To counter the idea that mandinga was part of a religious system, Leal distanced himself from his previous explanations based on “race” and heredity and turned to sociological concepts. His description drew on principles from the social psychology of his time:

Mandinga is a psycho-sociological factor in crime in the countryside, in a vast area. The large groups that are always ready to take orders from political bosses are always in an imminent state of fighting and confrontation. They need to kill, but they want to live, and they do so by dwelling on the superstitious principles that their environment has suggested to them, that imitation has awakened in them. (Leal 1898: 31-32, italics added)

The “suggestion-imitation” mechanism was introduced by social psychologists such as Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde to describe how a certain behaviour or idea spreads collectively through social learning. As Tarde (1890) put it, “Imitation plays in societies a role analogous to that of heredity in biological organisms and to that of undulation in gross bodies.” In this model, “suggestion” referred to the psychological bond formed between two individuals, while “imitation” described the process by which such bonds, once internalised, were reproduced throughout a social group.

Through “suggestion-imitation”, mandinga contributed to criminality among the Bahian population. Like alcohol, mandinga functioned as a “psychic stimulant” for individuals of “indecisive character or temperament”, those who were neither fully committed criminals nor entirely incapable of committing crimes. By alleviating their fear of being injured, killed, or arrested, mandinga could embolden such individuals to act in ways they otherwise would not. He also noted that Armand Corre had identified mandinga as a contributing factor to crime, albeit to a lesser extent, even among the more “civilised” population of his own country. Drawing on this framework, Leal believed that virtues could be disseminated in the same manner as “bad habits.” In his view, the penitentiary served as fertile ground for the imitation of socially acquired superstitions - but by the same principle, the presence of priests offering sound religious instruction could, in some cases, reverse this trend.

Nina Rodrigues challenged this thesis, arguing that mandinga was so widespread among the Bahian population that, were it truly an incentive to crime, a large portion of the Bahian “masses” would have already committed criminal acts. On the contrary, ever since Animismo Fetichista, Rodrigues had been concerned with defending the legitimacy of what he understood as survivals of African fetishist beliefs against accusations of utilitarianism, charlatanism, and immorality. In his view, such accusations had long served as pretexts for the unjust persecution of Candomblés by Bahian society and the police. In several passages, Rodrigues (1935) emphasised that participants in these religions were deeply committed to their beliefs and fully immersed in rituals such as initiation and possession.

His defence of the legitimacy of fetishist beliefs also enabled Rodrigues to criticise what he saw as the Catholic undertone of Leal’s argument and compared his view of mandinga to that of conservative Catholic priests who believed they could be “corrected” through catechesis: “He calls these cases ‘bad religion’ and believes that it is simply a case of ‘Catholic sheep going astray’” (Rodrigues apudLeal 1902: 220). In contrast, he argued that the very persistence of practices such as mandinga proved that the forced conversion of the Black population to Catholicism had failed to extinguish their fetishist beliefs. Rather than internalising Catholic liturgy, he contended, Black Brazilians had transferred their fetishist devotion to African gods onto Catholic saints - and this practice had been spread throughout Bahian society. Rodrigues compared this process of religious transformation to the replacement of polytheistic paganism in Europe with the veneration of saints in early Christianity. Thus, if mandinga was not mere opportunism or a corruption of Catholicism but a legacy of African beliefs, it could not be “corrected” through religious instruction.

CONCLUSIONS

Some of the backward views held by these authors regarding the Black and mestiço populations are evident. Nevertheless, it is still worthwhile to examine the intellectual innovations they introduced - both in questioning one another’s assumptions and, at times, their own use of racial hierarchies and prejudices. To begin with, we must acknowledge their engagement with popular religious beliefs as a crucial vehicle for the introduction of sociological and anthropological thought in Brazil.

Nina Rodrigues was a pioneer in recognising what he called the “religious mestiçagem” of the Bahian population, marked by African and, to a lesser extent, Indigenous influences. Although rooted in an almost obsessive concern with physical mestiçagem, his reflections eventually moved beyond it, particularly in his analysis of how Afro-Brazilian religiosity became generalised in Bahia, a morally sensitive claim in the eyes of Bahian elites. Increasingly, his studies drew on the intersection of psychology and sociology, especially the work of Gabriel Tarde (Monteiro 2020) and ethnological theories of religious evolution developed by Charles Letourneau and Edward Tylor (A. Lima 2013; Serafim 2017; J. Leal 2020). These frameworks enabled him to distinguish various evolutionary stages among the African cultures present in Brazil. In parallel with his pessimism regarding mestiçagem, he viewed the relatively “purer” African religions in Brazil, such as those of the Yorubas, as more developed, while the more mixed beliefs of Bantu and Indigenous origin were considered inferior (Capone 2010). Both tendencies - the study of religious mestiçagem (later reframed as “syncretism” by Arthur Ramos) and the search for the purest African survivals - became enduring themes in Afro-Brazilian ethnological studies.

Rodrigues fostered an emerging ethnographic sensibility with an evolutionary and Africanist orientation in Bahia. This tendency can be observed, for example, in Oscar Freire’s doctoral dissertation, entitled “Etiologia das formas concretas da religiosidade no Norte do Brasil” (1902) [Aetiology of the concrete forms of religiosity in Northern Brazil], which deserves closer reading. While Rodrigues reinforced cultural hierarchies by internalising the category of the “primitive” within the Brazilian population, he also took early steps toward a more relativistic approach that began to acknowledge the legitimacy of African cultural expressions. For him, mandinga was not a mere accessory or utilitarian belief but rather an example of the “true religion of our population” (Rodrigues apud Leal 1902: 204). The debate may have pushed him to reconsider how religious beliefs were transmitted. From this point on, the concept of “survival” began to replace the more biologically grounded idea of “atavism” in explaining the persistence of African cultural practices, as it will become clear in Os Africanos no Brasil (1932).

Aurelino Leal rejected the Africanist evolutionary framework embraced by Rodrigues, denying that African cultures had deeply shaped Bahia’s religious landscape. This reflected Bahian elite views (Ickes 2013), especially in the interior, where Catholicism was more dominant. Yet Leal’s ethnography had notable features. He favoured a more synchronic approach and focused on how mandinga operated socially, distancing himself from the cultural hierarchies proposed by Rodrigues. Based on informant testimonies and prison observations, he interpreted mandinga as a utilitarian belief linked to criminal behaviour, shaped through mechanisms of social learning. Drawing on the sociological ideas of Tarde and Sighele, his 1902 essay marked a shift in his own thinking, treating superstition less as a racial trait and more as a learned practice.

From a broader perspective, it is important to revisit this debate to show that Nina Rodrigues was not alone in engaging with lower-class, mestiço, and Black culture in late nineteenth-century Brazil. Over the past 30 years, Rodrigues has been often revisited, largely because of concerns about racism and racial theories (Ozanam 2022). More sensible studies have been able to nuance his racialism as his interests have shifted towards psychology, evolutionism, and African culture (Monteiro 2020). But why have colleagues of his generation discussing related topics received less attention? It is a question that certainly demands further investigation.²⁹ This seems to be the case with Aurelino Leal, who deserves to be revisited. Despite its evident moral shortcomings, his ethnographic work reveals how empirical approaches helped to unsettle dominant scientific theories.

Édison Carneiro (1938) was an important exception. More than three decades after the debate, he published an article titled “Orações Milagrosas” [Miraculous Prayers], one of the few analyses of Leal’s ethnography that we could find. A meticulous researcher of Afro-Brazilian religious ethnographies, Carneiro stated that “it was Aurelino Leal who first became interested in the religion of the poor classes in Bahia” (Carneiro 1938: 29). Nonetheless, he devoted the remainder of the article to criticising the ethnological inaccuracies in Leal’s observations, rejecting the generalisation that all the practices observed in the penitentiary were mandingas or that they were the product of mestiçagem. He took a position opposite to that of Nina Rodrigues: while acknowledging an association between mandinga and the amulets of Malês, he denied that such influences shaped the beliefs of the convicts.³⁰

More recently, Cunha (2020) drew an important connection between Rodrigues, Leal and the Cuban lawyer and ethnographer Fernando Ortiz. She argues that Leal’s ethnography served as a relevant source for Ortiz’s Los Negros Brujos (1906), likely accessed through the journals of Lacassagne and Tarde. Although Ortiz described magical objects among Afro-Cubans as “fetishes,” following Nina Rodrigues’ interpretation, Cunha points out that Ortiz’s ethnographic approach and criminological insights were ultimately closer to his lawyer colleague Leal. She situates these three pioneering authors - Rodrigues, Leal, and Ortiz - between the intellectual traditions of Cesare Lombroso and Gabriel Tarde:³¹

Nina Rodrigues, Aurelino Leal, and Fernando Ortiz all encountered in the ideas of the sociologist Gabriel Tarde strong arguments with which they could soften the radicalism of the Lombrosian propositions of their writings and establish connections between the scientific objects that they were creating and other themes of interest (…) Added to the hereditary determinations that weighed on individuals afflicted by disease was another element, the “environment,” a variable that had the effect of intensifying or dampening hereditary characteristics. (Cunha 2020: 161)

Although we are tempted to agree that Lombrosian and Tardean theories were useful to these authors - as confirmed by Sansone’s (2025) analysis of the development of the social sciences in 1900s Bahia - we would argue that Aurelino Leal, Nina Rodrigues, and Fernando Ortiz took the criminal anthropology of their time to a much more empirical level. They pioneered an ethnographic approach to popular religious practices and often abandoned one theoretical bend for another as their empirical observations led them in new directions. This is one of the reasons they are seen as “eclectic” and “theoretically fragile” (Maggie & Fry 2006: 21), something that speaks to a broader tendency to see Latin American intellectuals as mere followers of European theories. Part of this article’s effort is to show that Nina Rodrigues’ contributions to Afro-Brazilian studies, as listed by Maggie and Fry (2006), were not merely the quality of his ethnography, but also the extent to which he let it reshape his own theoretical apparatus. We cannot overlook important conceptual innovations like Rodrigues’ “religious mestiçagem” and Ortiz’s “transculturación”, which foregrounded the influence of African cultures in shaping national communities across the Americas, while exchanges were mainly seen through the prism of assimilation to European colonisers.³²

As for their methods, we cannot claim that ethnography was unknown to these authors. Corrêa (2001) shows that the unpublished subtitle of O Animismo Fetichista dos Negros Bahianos (1896-7) was “studies in criminal psychology and religious ethnography” (Rodrigues 2008). In Leal’s case, the subtitle of A Religião entre os Condemnados da Bahia (1898) was also “studies in criminal psychology”, though his main methodological reference was Armand Corre’s Le Crime en pays créoles: esquisse d’ethnographie criminelle (1889) and Ethnographie criminelle: d’après les observations et les statistiques judiciaires recueillies dans les colonies françaises (1894).

This is yet another example of the fact that the history of ethnography is not exclusive to anthropology. In the era of polygraphy, before Brazilian universities were formally established in the late 1930s, ethnography emerged as a cross-disciplinary method for engaging firsthand with people. It often led them to identify contradictions within dominant racial paradigms when racial theory was at its height. A more comprehensive study of ethnographic efforts by this generation remains to be undertaken.³³ While most of them held racialist views, their work demonstrates that ethnographic interest in African-descendant populations in Brazil did not arise solely from cultural relativism and its new relative racial tolerance. Ethnography - and the new sensibilities that came with it - could and did develop prior to “modern anthropology” among those who still believed in a hierarchy of “races.”

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¹

These reassessments include collaborations between figures such as Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) and Rüdiger Bilden (1893-1980) (Pallares-Burke 2005; 2012); Melville Herskovits (1895-1963) and Arthur Ramos (1903-1949) (Yelvington 2006; 2007; Guimarães 2008); Ruth Landes (1908-1991) and Edison Carneiro (1912-1972) (Corrêa 2002; Fry 2002; Rossi 2015); as well as the role of Donald Pierson (1900-1995) and Roger Bastide (1898-1974) in establishing the social sciences in Brazil (Pereira da Silva 2013; Maio and Lopes 2017; Merkel 2022; Peixoto 2022).

²

To accurately situate the debates and terminology of that period, the authors chose to retain the original Portuguese terms mestiçagem and mestiço to describe the historical process and the racialised individuals resulting from mixing among populations of European, African, and Indigenous origin in Brazil. These terms reflect the specific historical contexts following the debates on mestiçagem and carry racial connotations that are considered problematic today.

³

Although this “optimism” was shared by the Brazilian intellectuals of the 1930s, it was not unprecedented. It represented the continuation of debates about mestiçagem that had been developing since at least the 1870s in Brazil. Some experts have noted this before: “The entire first part of Nina Rodrigues’ article is also an excellent reminder that the possibility of mestiçagem being seen in a positive light had been in the air since the debates of the nineteenth century” (Corrêa 2008: 1102).

⁴

By the mid-1930s, it became imperative for culturalist intellectuals to distance themselves from the “spectre” of racism. In reaction to the global rise of Nazi-fascist ideologies, Arthur Ramos and Gilberto Freyre — alongside other leading Brazilian social thinkers — signed the Manifesto of Brazilian Intellectuals Against Racial Prejudice in 1935 (Ramos 1943). However, it is important to recognize that their anti-racist stances were not always reflected in their theoretical choices, what Martínez-Echazábal (1996) insightfully described as a “rhetorical shift.”

⁵

Recent efforts to highlight Black intellectuals have renewed attention to the works of Manuel Querino (1851-1923) and Juliano Moreira (1872-1933) (Oda and Dalgalarrondo 2000; Gledhill 2023). In addition to them, Oscar Freire’s (1882-1923) works also discussed Afro-Brazilian customs and deserve to be further analysed.

⁶

When does a modernist sensibility arrive in Brazilian ethnography? Investigating this question also depends on how Modernism is periodized. Art history studies concerned with historicising the social production of modernist ideas in Brazil and observing the repercussions of the time have begun to challenge the canonical emergence of Modernism in the 1920s. Cardoso (2021) shows the rise of different regional Modernisms at the turn of the 1900s in reports, chronicles, and illustrations in the newspapers of the time. Works such as those by Lima Barreto, João do Rio, and Xavier Marques, long labelled “pre-modernist,” introduced a new sensibility about the lives of the Black and mestiço populations through the expansion of new print media techniques and new writing formats. However, Cardoso argues that they did not appeal to the European modernist vanguards in the same way as the artists of Semana de Arte Moderna.

⁷

Its leading venues were the journals Archivos de Psiquiatría y Criminología, edited by José Ingenieros in Buenos Aires; Archivio di Psichiatria, Scienze Penali ed Antropologia Criminale, edited by Cesare Lombroso in Turin; and Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, de Médecine Légale et de Psychologie Normale, edited by Alexandre Lacassagne and Gabriel Tarde in Lyon (Sansone 2025).

⁸

Our analysis draws on Yelvington’s (2011) effort to historicise racial and ethnological paradigms, showing that ideas are inseparable from scientific practices and are embodied in intellectual alliances, rivalries, and broader political and social struggles. Following his approach, we challenge the notion of a clear rupture between racialist and culturalist paradigms, demonstrating how early ethnographic efforts to understand customs and practices of African descendants often relied on overlapping and seemingly contradictory theories.

⁹

The title references Ronnie Almeida’s (2011) doctoral dissertation, which offers a detailed analysis of the theses produced at the Bahia Faculty of Medicine in the nineteenth century.

¹⁰

Mariza Corrêa’s (2001) work stands out for redefining the role of late nineteenth-century authors in the early rise of ethnographic interest in the Brazilian lower classes. She demonstrated how these new sensibilities developed well before the institutionalization of anthropology as a discipline — which, in Brazil, only occurred in the mid-1930s. She sought to reconnect the history of Brazilian anthropology to the work of polygraphers like Silvio Romero, Euclides da Cunha, and Nina Rodrigues. At that time, “anthropology” meant an interdisciplinary study of humankind primarily through their racial biological and psychological features, with “a strong emphasis on what we would now describe as physical anthropology” (Corrêa 2001: 37). “Ethnology”, in turn — with “ethnography” as its descriptive method, following the French usage of the terms — referred to the study of the material and immaterial aspects of a human group, frequently associated with studies of the so-called “primitive” peoples and, in Brazil, initially applied to the study of Indigenous populations, later extending to mestiço and Black communities.

¹¹

Sertão is a designation that emerged during the early phases of Portuguese colonial activity in Africa and Brazil. As colonization advanced from the coast toward the interior, the term came to denote vast inland territories where “the human element is subjected to the forces of the natural world” (Moraes 2003: 1). The sertão was not a place defined by distinctive geographical features but a discursive construction from the colonizer’s perspective — one that devalued both the territory and its population, while projecting its future occupation. Indigenous peoples were the first targets of colonial policies of territorial domination of the sertões, pursued through extermination and miscegenation. The later interiorization of economic activity in colonial Brazil also drew enslaved Africans into inland regions and contributed to the formation of quilombos in these regions. With the advent of the Republic, the sertão and its inhabitants became central to a “process of hegemonization of state territorial policies and practices.” (Moraes 2003: 3). Scientific missions, military expeditions, and incursions into the interior sought to delimit the sertão and define its population, inserting the sertanejos into a series of anthropological debates. The repression of social revolts in the sertões of Pernambuco and Bahia fueled discussions of the alleged degeneration of sertanejos as a product of mestiçagem (Sousa Leite 1898; Rodrigues 2000). In the early twentieth century, the commission led by Marshal Rondon employed anthropologists such as Edgar Roquette-Pinto as sertanistas in expeditions aimed at researching, pacifying, and incorporating Indigenous territories and demarcating Brazil’s western borders (Souza Lima 2008).

¹²

According to Estácio de Lima (1979), the physician João Pondé exhumed the body of Antônio Conselheiro and delivered the skull to Raymundo Nina Rodrigues for analysis. After publishing an article about Conselheiro (Rodrigues 1900), Rodrigues kept the skull at his Museum of Criminal Anthropology at the Bahia Faculty of Medicine until the dreadful 1905 fire that destroyed the entire collection. Besides Canudos, other historical uprisings linked to religion and violently repressed by Northeastern elites — such as the Pedra Bonita massacre in the sertão of Pernambuco and the Malês rebellion in the Bahian Recôncavo — were revisited by scholars (Sousa Leite 1898; Rodrigues 1900).

¹³

Os Sertões (1902), Euclides da Cunha’s coverage of the Canudos conflict, is a powerful example of how positivist beliefs were unsettled by direct contact with the people. Initially holding a strong Republican and positivist view, Cunha believed the Canudos community represented a backward, fanatical resistance to progress. However, his experience witnessing the devastation and tenacity of the sertanejos led him to a more complex and critical understanding of the Brazilian state’s violence and the socio-political dynamics of the Bahian sertão. This ethnographic sensibility toward the sertanejo endowed it with an aura of authenticity that would later be explored by Brazilian modernist vanguards and by the cultural policies of the Estado Novo.

¹⁴

The idea of a “social Darwinist” school of thought, as proposed by Skidmore (1974) and Schwarcz (1993), is imprecise. Skidmore claims that Silvio Romero and Euclides da Cunha considered themselves as such, yet none of them ever used the term. He defines social Darwinism as a racial ideology but lists only loosely connected thinkers — Spencer, Le Bon, Lapouge, and Ingenieros. Schwarcz expands this list to include Haeckel, Agassiz, Galton, and even pre-Darwinian historians like Taine and Gobineau, while excluding evolutionists such as Tylor and Morgan, despite their application of Darwinian principles to society. As Hodgson (2024: 408) notes, “there was no school of self-proclaimed ‘social Darwinists’”. The label was retroactively constructed by postwar sociologists like Richard Hofstadter and Talcott Parsons in an effort to “reconstruct the discipline and establish boundaries between good and bad sociology.” Skidmore (1974) and Schwarcz (1993) seem to adopt the same strategy to give coherence to their genealogy of scientific racism in Brazil. While various forms of racial determinism shaped nineteenth-century thought, it is analytically unhelpful to homogenize these perspectives under the label of “social Darwinism” since their connections to Darwin’s theory are often imprecise and do not reflect the varied positions of these authors.

¹⁵

Nina Rodrigues was probably the first scholar to hold this position in a Candomblé house, followed by many others such as Arthur Ramos, Roger Bastide and Pierre Verger. This somewhat honorary position of ogã, also called suspenso, was part of the terreiros’ initiative to get support from influential people in society to defend their interests. It is different from the ogã confirmado, in which initiated Candomblé members are responsible for the protection and maintenance of the house and have many more obligations and responsabilities for the ritual dynamics.

¹⁶

This shift was not abrupt. It is important to note that Nina Rodrigues’ increased attention to the influence of environmental and social factors on revolts and religious phenomena among the mestiço and Black populations did not supplant, but coexisted with, his hypotheses regarding the hereditary degeneration resulting from mestiçagem. His studies on collective psychology (Rodrigues 1939) bear witness to these contradictions.

¹⁷

Even if uncomfortable by Rodrigues’ sexist tone, Corrêa (2008: 1102) stated that: “He also showed, with his research, how Black and mulatto women could be just as “hysterical” as their White European counterparts — ambiguous equality, but equality nonetheless.” Andrade (2022) carried out a detailed analysis of the discourse on women by Brazilian criminologists at the end of the nineteenth century, including Nina Rodrigues and Aurelino Leal, who are the subject of this article.

¹⁸

Rodrigues’ “psycho-pathological” diagnoses did not shield him from the destabilizing effects of ethnographic encounters. After witnessing the possession of a young, uninitiated woman named Fausta, he invited her to undergo a hypnosis session under his and another physician’s supervision. During the session, he recreated the ritual atmosphere by playing the same sequence of songs he had previously recorded and asking her to describe what she experienced. Her responses matched the scene Rodrigues had originally observed in the terreiro. When the song for Obatalá was played, Fausta began to writhe as though re-entering possession. From that moment on, her posture shifted: she identified herself as Obatalá, her tone of voice changed, she rejected Rodrigues’ hypnotic suggestions, and voluntarily described ritual details of the Orixás and Candomblé practices. Losing control of the session, Rodrigues asked “Obatalá” how to bring her back. The entity instructed him to offer her a glass of water. He complied — and, to his astonishment, Fausta immediately returned to normal consciousness (Rodrigues 1935).

¹⁹

An opening passage in Leal’s ethnography shows that a disagreement with other theorists led him to undertake empirical work: “The conclusions I arrived at led me far, in hypothesis, from thinkers whom I had become accustomed to respecting, and this fact prompted me to seek to legitimize all my assertions by practical means.” (Leal 1898: 3). It is reasonable to suppose that, even before 1898, Leal had already engaged in this debate with Nina Rodrigues.

²⁰

Leal was identified as one of the main Bahian intellectuals of the period in José Veríssimo’s article “A Litteratura Provinciana” for the Jornal do Commércio (RJ) on January 30, 1899.

²¹

Although Leal (1898) did not explicitly cite any ethnological literature, he offers a clue that suggests otherwise: “Superstition is the anthropomorphism of God in its quintessence. Readers will have seen that altar objects are highly valued. God is invoked for evil with the same fervour and conviction with which the true believer invokes Him for good” (Leal 1898: 21). “Anthropomorphism” was a concept used by late nineteenth-century theorists of “primitive” religion. As becomes evident in his 1902 essay, Leal’s most likely source was the French theologian Albert Réville’s Les Religions des Peuples Non-civilisés (1883).

²²

We have two hypotheses regarding the whereabouts of Nina Rodrigues’ review of A Religião entre os Condemnados da Bahia (1898). The first is that it was never published, and Leal accessed Rodrigues’ comments through personal exchange, as suggested by some remarks: “At a Candomblé ceremony that Dr. Rodrigues and I attended together...” (Leal 1902: 205). The devastating fire in Rodrigues’ office at the Bahia Faculty of Medicine during the 1905 Carnival may have also contributed to the loss of this material. The second, less likely, is that the review was published but Leal failed to include the reference in his 1902 book. Leal (1902) also cites an excerpt from Rodrigues’ manuscript said to have appeared in the Jornal do Commercio (RJ) (May 1 and 3, under the heading “Sobrevivências Africanas no Brasil”), but our search found no such article between 1896 and 1902.

²³

Brazilian historian Laura de Mello e Souza’s (1986) account of mandinga confirms both their European and African origins, while also affirming the process of mixing highlighted by Rodrigues: “bolsas de mandinga were the most characteristically form of witchcraft in colonial Brazil. From North to South, individuals from a wide range of social backgrounds — though most often men — carried them. They were not exclusive to a single segment of society, even if frequently used by enslaved people. They may be the most syncretic of all known magical practices in Brazil: combining the European tradition of amulets with Amerindian fetishism and the customs of African populations. […] The Mandinga, or Malinké designation, eventually evolved into Malê. The so-called Malês (Muslim) Blacks were regarded — both in Rio and in Bahia — as masters of dark magic. They were known to wear around their neck amulets inscribed with the Seal of Solomon and papers containing verses from the Qur’an. It is difficult to determine whether they were truly the ones who introduced the bolsas de mandinga to the colony” (Souza 1986: 211-213). Dias (2009) also highlights how the practice was linked to capoeira in early twentieth-century Bahia.

²⁴

In this section, Leal demonstrates considerable familiarity with terms associated with Candomblé, including the names of Orixás, ritual practices such as dancing, drumming (atabaques), offerings, possession, and animal sacrifices. Some excerpts indicate that he personally attended terreiros: “At a Candomblé ceremony that Dr. Rodrigues and I attended together…” (1902: 205). In 1904, Leal became Chief of Police in Bahia, at a time when terreiros were heavily persecuted. A study of the Bahian newspapers and police records related to Candomblé during Leal’s tenure (1904-1907) could shed further light on whether his actions had any impact in the persecution of terreiros. At that time, Nina Rodrigues was already an advocate against the persecution of Afro-Bahian religious practices (Romo 2010).

²⁵

Unlike Rodrigues, Leal seems to agree with the “Whitening solution” — championed in Brazil by influential intellectuals such as Sylvio Romero, Joaquim Nabuco, and João Baptista de Lacerda — that mestiçagem meant the predominance of the White “race” and its better adaptation to the tropical climate and local diseases.

²⁶

The term crioulo (creole) was used for Black people born in Brazil, as opposed to Africans who had recently arrived and still constituted a significant number at the turn of the century.

²⁷

This proposal marked a novel contribution to the anthropological theory of the time. Rodrigues not only adopted Tylor’s (1871) notion of “survivals” as cultural evidence of earlier evolutionary stages but also proposed their adoption by other populations — incorporating an element more aligned with diffusionist theory. This is further supported by his growing interest in tracing the origins of African “survivals” (Rodrigues 1932). At the same time, however, his concept of religious mestiçagem challenges the core assumptions of contemporary diffusionist theories, which posited that cultural elements spread from more to less “advanced” centres. For a more detailed discussion of these conceptual innovations by Rodrigues, see J. Leal (2020); Simões (2023).

²⁸

Tylor’s formulation reveals a tension between two understandings of “survivals” that remained unresolved in his work. On one hand, evolutionary survivals were remnants of “inferior” cultures that persisted within more advanced stages of development. On the other, historical survivals were cultural fragments from earlier periods that continued to exist alongside more recent cultural forms. For a detailed discussion of Tylor’s concept of “survivals,” see Leopold (1980) and Simões (2023).

²⁹

Manuel Querino was another exemplary case. He was long regarded by the culturalist generation as unscientific (Ramos 1938). Fortunately, he had been revisited in recent years with the close attention his work deserves (Gledhill 2023)

³⁰

Carneiro’s primary objective in analysing Leal’s ethnography was to dissociate the beliefs and practices of Leal’s convicts from those of Afro-Brazilians, in order to combat the stigma and persecution faced by Candomblé terreiros in 1930s Bahian society (Carvalho 2024). The authors would like to thank Luiz Gustavo Rossi for kindly providing a photocopy of this article.

³¹

Lombroso supported the collaboration between Cuban jurist Fernando Ortiz and Nina Rodrigues from 1902 to 1906 (Sansone 2025).

³²

Rodrigues’ and Ortiz’ research projects on African “survivals” were revisited in the 1930s and 1940s, when anthropology was eventually established in the incipient Brazilian university system and set the agenda for Afro-American and Afro-Brazilian studies (Yelvington 2006). Interestingly, Ortiz — initially regarded as a Lombrosian positivist — was later courted by culturalist Melville Herskovits and functionalist Bronislaw Malinowski to align with their schools. Ortiz’ Cuban Counterpoint (1940), strategically conceded to functionalism, while Malinowski’s preface to that book argued that transculturación addressed key limitations in the culturalist concept of acculturation (Arnedo-Gómez 2022). Herskovits maintained that acculturation had always implied mutual cultural exchange, yet — when power hierarchies were observed in cultural contacts — no Boasian scholar had applied the concept beyond an assimilationist framework. As Yelvington (2006) shows, the emphasis on African cultural influence in the Americas by Latin American ethnologists such as Rodrigues, Ortiz, and Price-Mars was crucial in shifting Herskovits’ own perspective.

³³

As Ozanam (2022: 59) notes, it is not sufficient to look only at academic texts. Late nineteenth-century ethnography in Brazil points toward a variety of disciplines, writing methods, and stylistic innovations: “It is not that empirical research did not exist, but rather that the genres in which it was presented were as numerous and as variable in disciplinary terms […] As Mariza Corrêa [2001] convincingly demonstrated, professional necessity meant that many of those seeking to promote such integration worked across a wide range of public administration sectors, leaving records in formats and styles very different from the scientific article or academic manual. Added to this is the fact that many were active in the press and […] had literary aspirations.”

Data Availability Statement:

The author confirms that all data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

Correspondence

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Correspondence

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Editors

Laura Moutinho (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6479-2711)

Gisele Fonseca Chagas (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3798-8721)

Vinicius Kauê Ferreira (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9925-3304)

Vinícius Venancio (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3245-1204)

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  10 Apr 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  28 Oct 2024
• Accepted
  29 Jan 2026