Ontological confusion: Eshu and the Devil dance to The Samba of the Black Madman

What does it take to recognise “confusion” as a particular form in itself? This text explores how different types of knowledge inflect the way that some Brazilian favela (shantytown) dwellers experience and deal with confusion in their daily lives. I contend that religious grammars of confusion may enable the recognition and understanding of a wide variety of other (ontological) forms of confusion in the daily life of different groups living in Favela da Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro. The method used for my investigation is an ethnographic and recursive one. Part of the confusion manifested in the capacity of recognising “a confusion” derives exactly from the condition that there is no fixed or neutral epistemological position to serve as a basis from which to arbitrate with precision the existence of confusion as a form. In an attempt to better understand the way under which confusion exists in people’s everyday lives, I describe and analyse particular events that I experienced during an Afro-Brazilian (Umbanda) religious celebration and other more quotidian episodes with a different group, my Evangelical friends. What are the struggles and conflicts of power that warrant the existence of certain confusions? What confusions would normative sexual, religious and class-based orders rather avoid? The historical presence of Eshu in the Afro-Brazilian pantheon as the god of all agreements and disagreements, lord of all paths and crossroads and the master of all order and confusion has been deeply valued in Afro-Brazilian religious cosmologies – among other reasons, for the power of disruption that it offers against an oppressive social order. I suggest that part of the political dimension that informs acts of recognition of confusion as a form is revealed when we interrogate and confuse the context of order against which “a confusion” may emerge.