2026 Theses Doctoral

Spirit-bodies: Governing Black Religious Life and Climate Change in Urban Brazil

Rhoden, Chazelle E.

This study examines how Afro-religious practitioners voice and embody ways of life with spiritual beings and forests that are paradoxical to state-led climate planning in Salvador, Brazil. It is based on 24 months of ethnographic and archival research conducted within the São Bartolomeu Conservation Unit (SBCU). The SBCU is a forest reserve that has become part of Brazil’s climate adaptation, mitigation, and conservation strategies. I foreground how practitioners of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion mediate Salvador’s forest-based climate transitions. Practitioners’ temples are located in the SBCU, and they claim ancestral ties to these forests dating back to Brazil’s slavery-era, when the religion emerged. It is where they hold land-based ritual praxes cultivating sacred leaves and honoring African and Indigenous spirits that dwell in rivers, waterfalls, lagoons, rocks, and other biophysical elements. Conducted in Brazilian Portuguese, my multi-modal research combined participant observation; semistructured and oral history interviews; archival research; social media content analysis; documental analysis of urban planning and environmental reports, maps, and laws; and AfroBrazilian dance lessons.

This dissertation proposes Afro-religious praxes as a lens for examining the technocratic and participatory parameters of Salvador’s climate action. It sheds light on practitioners’ distinct ecological relations with spiritual entities and the biophysical world, while showing how Candomblé religious praxes become mired in the city’s climate transitions. It also reveals how climate adaptation and mitigation in Salvador proceeds through development and forestation projects, discourses, and new legal frameworks that interlock with and reproduce historically emplaced anti-Black racializing assemblages. I propose that anti-Blackness, a governing modality, informs conservation processes undertaken in the Brazilian context.

Theoretically, this project reconciles social scientific approaches that have struggled to generate theories on the relations between humans and more-than-humans that equally attend to histories of racial and colonial violence against Afro-diasporic communities. Through a focus on Candomblé’s ritual engagements with entities, such as forest ecosystems and their relations with spirits, I argue for the centrality of Black spiritual relations in discussions of urban conservation processes and climate transformations. I thus advance scholarship in the anthropology of conservation by foregrounding Blackness not only as an identity or political position but as a mode of governance that both structures and contests conservation regimes. In turn, this larger body of research also contributes to studies of urban space and racialization by reorienting attention from dominant themes, such as policing, food insecurity, and gentrification, toward the role of Afro-descendant religious knowledge and practices in producing urban environmental futures.