The future is ancestral. Other temporalities in Afro-religious learning.

Abstract (English)

I analyze how the changes in temporality affects the religious learning of candomblé, a type of Afro-Brazilian religion Afro-Brazilian religions are a variety of religious expressions of African origin, which were codified in Brazil during the Afro-Atlantic slave trade, between the 16th and 19th centuries. Of the West African traditions, Candomblé is a religion that was constituted in the nineteenth century in the Brazilian state of Bahia, drawing upon the Yoruba tradition.
The time it takes to learn and build a person involves 21 years, starting from initiation and lasting until the last orishas´s ritual. However, the constructions of the adepts' mediumship and their histories and the time in which their bodies encounter the orisha are not necessarily represented by this temporality. The presence of the African gods in people's bodies often begins before initiation, manifesting itself in situations, dreams, illnesses, mediumship and memories that their adepts experience. Furthermore, learning is not only experienced in the space of the temple (house of saint), nor through the spiritual exchanges between the subjects and their entities, but also through the growing presence of digital influences and other technologies.
The production of time and knowledge that forms the person in candomblé is ancestral. Contact with ancestry, in other words, with the spirit world produces knowledge, perceptions and different ways of seeing. The spirit world brings knowledge about herbs, minerals, vegetables, in short, about various other human and non-human beings. All this knowledge is produced by humans and non-humans in interaction with the spiritual world, also the complex relationship with ancestry crosses past, present and future time.