Embracing uncertainty to release magic. Ciganos' ancestry in Afro-Brazilian religious spaces.

Abstract (English)

Ciganos (Romanes) communities seem to embody two opposing imaginaries in the popular imagination and in world politics: a way of life to be feared, on the one hand, and a romantic expression of freedom, on the other. Neither ethnocentric projection, however, seems to tell us anything about the cultural forms of these heterogeneous groups. In this paper, we will attempt to explore how the cosmotechnics of Ciganos' ancestry resemantise uncertain paths through collective magical and ecological practices in Afro-Brazilian religious spaces. Indeed, Ciganos' life practices, from - forced - nomadism to forms of divination (fortune-telling, tarology), provide us with interesting examples to explore in terms of human forms of relating to the necessary and inescapable threshold of human uncertainty: what happens when the paths of two deterritorialised populations - Ciganos and Afro-Brazilians - are ecologically reterritorialised in the Afro-Brazilian religious spaces of the Umbanda?