Cultural contact and religious creation

Abstract

I would like to speak here of a very special form of cultural contact: the religious contact within a Christian and colonial context, Christianization has not always accompanied colonial aggression, and colonization has not always accompanied acts of conversion. But is interesting to study the cases in which they have been associated, for they actually show us in a nutshell what the reactions of a given culture confronted with more or less enforced external contributions has been. From this point of view, Central America and South America in the sixteenth and lle seventeenth centuries, and Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are en good examples: A third example which combines both continents concerns the religious models imported to America by the African slaves, models which have led be to the constitution of what has been called the "Afro-Brazilian" religions also influenced by Christianity. Of course it is impossible, within the scope of such a brief talk, to analyze every aspect of these encounters and influences. I will select only three of them: first the power of the image and the imaginary; then the structural aspects of religious transmission; and finally the individualizing elements associated with Christian influences. Every colonization is also a colonization of the imaginary. The colonizer brings with him patterns of representations and behaviours of which he may not always be completely aware but which the colonized on the contrary notices and which he may be tempted to read as the expression or the instrument of the power that oppresses him.