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Professor Brown explores the history and development of the syncretistic Brazilian religion of Umbanda, from its beginnings in Rio de Janeiro during the 1920s to the late 1970s, examining its changing spectrum of practices, followers, and beliefs.

“On New Year’s Eve 1993, from the window of a Rio de Janeiro apartment overlooking Copacabana beach, I waited expectantly for the worshippers of Yemanjá to arrive, dressed for her ceremonies, the women resplendent in their long, white lace-trimmed outfits or in brightly colored full satin skirts. I wanted to see them loaded down with flowers, candles, food and drink; to watch them set up these offerings in the sand and begin their ceremonies; to go down and join them. In 1970, the last New Year’s Eve I had spent in Rio doing research for this book, the evening had begun with a religious procession much like those for Catholic saint days except that it was the Afro-Brazilian sea deity Yemanjá whose image was carried aloft to the edge of the beach, accompanied by thousands of Umbanda worshippers carrying lighted candles and singing Umbanda hymns and, at the head of the procession, the Umbandista politicians who were the secular patrons of the public event. Then this famous beach, a long crescent of white sand framed by the lights of the buildings along the shore, had become so densely crowded with Umbanda rituals that I could hardly move among them” 

Page xv in Brown, Diana DeG. 1986. Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil. New York: Columbia. (Quotation from 1994 edition.)

 “As an anthropologist and a teacher, my most difficult problem has been to explain to myself and to my students how one could extend the concept of culture from the small-scale societies traditionally studied by anthropologists to our own society [...] Seeing myself reflected in the mirror of my immigrant parents, in the experience of travel and field work, has made it difficult to give up a sense of cultural identity, and has led me to pursue my intuition that there is an American culture in some definable sense. My quest has led me to the subject of this paper, baseball. I will argue that baseball, not as a ritual, not as a social structure, not as a set of multivocalic symbols, but as a system of shared knowledge and experience, may provide a key to the thorny problem of cultural identity and continuity in a complex nation state.

What I am suggesting is not a definition of, or delineation of American culture or culture as a concept. Though I may occasionally lapse into the murkiness of national character, I do so inadvertently. [....] I see the ability of members of a society to communicate through a common idiom and shared system of experience and related knowledge as central to the issue of identity”

Page 37 in Bick, Mario (1978). "Double Play: Notes on American Baseball." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 318(1): 37-49.