Ilê Aiyê and the African world in Bahia

Abstract

This review addresses the latest book in Portuguese by anthropologist Michel Agier, Ilê Aiyê: a fábrica do mundo afro, published in 2024, a condensed, revised and updated version of Anthropologie du carnaval: la ville, la fête et l’Afrique à Bahia, published in 2000, with an afterword by Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães and photographs by Milton Guran. The book combines ethnographic approaches to the practices of Ilê Aiyê members with historical reconstructions aimed at understanding its structural changes over its fifty years of existence. The topics discussed include the founding event of the group during the 1975 carnival in Salvador, with the participation of only black people; the urban and sociological history of Salvador, marked by the strong initial presence of enslaved black people, who later sought to enter the difficult local employment structure, in a society divided between a white elite and a large class of black and mixed-race people immersed in poverty; the origins of Ilê Aiyê in the popular and black neighborhood of Liberdade, the role of its founders in the articulations between family, neighborhood and religious and cultural practices; the importance of rituals linked to carnival and the diverse African dimensions of such an event; the cultural system in which groups such as Ilê Aiyê carry out a plural and comprehensive set of practices. This publication provides new debates on anti-racist struggles that are expanding significantly in Brazil.