Guilt and care in the candomblé of Bahia

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to discuss how inadequate some of “our” concepts are to describe other realities, based on different assumptions. The constant worries that my friends in candomblé had about the risk of becoming victims of sorcery initially sounded to me as a paranoid behavior. Thus, I try to show that the notion of paranoia has to do with “single universe societies”, in the distinction proposed by ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan. At the end of my paper, based on situations I experienced throughout my field research, I suggest that the term “prevention” would be a fitter description for the phenomenon I, at first, had classified as “paranoia”.