On the evening of Tuesday, November 28th, I attended a lecture by Paul C. Johnson, scholar and professor in the departments of History, Afro-american and African studies at the University of Michigan. Johnson has published a number of books and articles within several fields of study: theories of religion, ethnography, history of the study of religion, religion and race, and the modern history of Brazil. The title of the exhibit at the Fleming Museum, Spirited Things, is borrowed from Johnson’s book by the same name. Johnson’s lecture focused mainly on his studies involving Brazilian Candomble and the concept of spirit possession. He discussed the materiality of spirit possession, and how it related to gender.

In Brazilian Candomble (and many diasporic religions), spirit possession is a common way for gods and spirits (orisha) to take form in the world of the mortals by occupying a human body as a vessel. Johnson stated in his talk that typically, women are most likely to be possessed. This is due to their “cool” nature. Gender in Candomble is quite complex, as traditional gender roles are replaced with the ideas of “hot” and “cool.” Johnson described the “cool” as even-tempered, tranquil, and empathetic. In class, one of our readings was an except from Johnson’s book, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomble. In it, he discusses the relationship between traditional gender and “hot” and “cool”: “Women are cool, reproductive, and contained” (Johnson). I understand that this description of women is contextualized within the content of his lecture, but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable with the way Johnson described women both in his lecture and in his book. He kept using words such as calm, tranquil, and empathetic, citing these traits as reasons why women were more likely to be possessed by spirits. These were all arguably good traits, but something about the way he grouped all women into this group made me a little angry.

The generalization of women’s characteristics bothered me, but I was conflicted–did I have a right to feel this way? Was it disrespectful of me to feel uncomfortable with the way Johnson was describing someone else’s culture–one that I knew so little about? In class, we have spent a fair amount of time discussing the methods of translation from diasporic religions to Western culture. We came to a consensus with the idea that a lot of important concepts get lost and/or misinterpreted when being translated from such complex religions–primarily because 1) they are so fundamentally different from Western religions and 2) it’s extremely difficult to convey the meaning of certain concepts when they simply don’t exist in the world we are familiar with. As I was listening to Johnson’s lecture (and later on, reading an excerpt from his book), I felt skeptical and uncomfortable with what Johnson was saying. Mid-thought, I remembered this discussion and tried to think about what Johnson was implying with a more contextualized perspective. It’s possible that I did have a reason to be uncomfortable, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that maybe there was something more–something untranslatable from culture to culture that validated Johnson’s statements and rectified the discomfort I was feeling.

It’s clear that at some level, there is a disconnect between these two cultures. It’s an interesting barrier that I hope to see broken down one day–possibly with the normalization of and further education on diasporic religions in the West.