Roger Bastide (Nîmes, 1898–Paris, 1974) accepted the labels of sociologist, anthropologist and ethnologist. All are appropriate, but only in part. First because Bastide was trained as a philosopher and never lost sight of the large questions philosophers try to handle. A second point is that his sensitivity to human beings nearly always shone through any label that he wore or received. Thus Bastide was also a writer—and one who reflected on the work that writers and other artists do. But scholars are necessarily localized—we do our jobs in a modern specialized world—so a sociologist he shall be, adding however that sociology, for him, included anthropology and ethnology.

His Ph.D. equivalent was an aggrégation en philosophie obtained in Bordeaux in 1920, where he followed the teaching of Gaston Richard, who was a pupil of Émile Durkheim (and his successor in the philosophy chair of Bordeaux). His early intellectual context places him in the second generation of Durkheimian sociology. He reached his intellectual maturity in Brazil, during his professorship in sociology at the University of São Paulo, from 1938 to 1954. He showed there the scope of his interests and pursued his now classical work on Afro-Brazilian religions. From 1954 to the year of his death, his outreach was international, centered in Paris. His scholarship flowered in the era of the cold war and the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States.

Founded in 1934, the University of São Paulo was energized in the social sciences by the arrival of a group of gifted young French scholars, nearly all of whom were to achieve world-wide reputation. Among them was historian Fernand Braudel, geographer Pierre Monbeig and “sociologist” Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss taught for only one year and does not seem to have left positive memories in academic circles. Bastide was selected to succeed him and in June 1938 arrived with his family in São Paulo. They were to stay until 1954 (Bastide returned afterward for shorter stays.)

World War II probably influenced Bastide's decision to remain in Brazil. Like De Gaulle, Bastide was aware of the visibility of Nazis in Argentina and of the authority of Vichy in the French Embassies in the Americas, so he wrote to defend the cause of the Free French. But sheer intellectual excitement in the discovery of the new country must have also loomed large in the mind of the expatriate. He taught and wrote in French, but he quickly understood Portuguese. His attempts to speak it were said to reflect rather a variety of Languedocien.

Bastide promptly read everything that was written on the sociology of Brazil. By 1939 articles and book reviews begin to pour forth from his pen. But his social immersion was mainly among artists, and his first lectures were on the aesthetics and the philosophy and sociology of art.

Between 1970 and 1973 Bastide published three collections of previously published articles along with some new materials. The three titles Le prochain et le lointain (1970), Le Rêve, la transe et la folie (1972), Estudos afro-brasileiros (1973) give us the farthest points reached in his thinking and writing. All examine, in some way or other, what happens when individuals and groups leave the ground of their familiar truths to get on alien grounds, far from group security and the presence of only well-known evils. Here we shall focus mainly on the texts that enable us to focus on the theory of religion that emerged from his specialized work. The general focus in his theorizing of religion runs along the lines of common concerns that took shape in his day. I can borrow a definition from Charles Long, the US historian of religion who has done most to further studies on the religion of Black Americans. Religion, he writes, is “how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one's place in the world.” I see a convergence between this definition and two points essential to Bastide's work: people need to have “a place in the world” and they must actively “come to terms” with it.

“Calvinisme et racisme” take us to grounds much ploughed since Weber's Protestant Ethic, namely that of the cultural by-products of the doctrine and ethics at the heart of Calvinist churches. The doctrine of predestination, as found in the works of Augustine, Luther and Calvin, seemed in these churches to transform the dark secrets of the divine will into some luminous behaviour. God, like Jeremiah's potter, works on mankind as on clay, and rejects some of the pots he shaped for reasons known only to himself.

The uncontested leader of the sociological school in France in 1900 was Émile Durkheim. Three aspects of his work are of concern to us here.

Durkheim was first of all determined to make sociology a science. His models of science were, like those of his generation, drawn from the natural sciences; hence his slogan about treating social facts as things, the search for “elementary forms” of religious life, and the recourse to stable morphologies. Durkheim also maintained a sharp differentiation between his sociology and psychology, a discipline recently admitted to the holy shrine of approved methodical sciences. This led naturally to his opposition to any of the nascent forms of psychology of religion, which all seemed to him to eschew the only possible rational explanation of religion, namely the sociological. The translation in 1906 of William James The Varieties of Religious Experience did not receive much attention in the group of the Année sociologique.

Secondly, the societies he knew and which nourished his reflection were what we might call societies that considered themselves complete. France and Germany believed they had evolved into a classical form and seemed both determined and able to go on as they were, colonial expansion being the only ambition left for the future. Thus he was not inclined to study evolution and social change but rather the mechanisms of stability in societies that had evolved toward their apparent end-goal.

From 1954 until his retirement in 1968 Bastide was professor at the Sorbonne in Paris. (He returned to Brazil for extended stays in 1962 and 1973). His chair, was named “Ethnologie sociale et religieuse,” the designation to which Lévy-Brühl had given currency. His activities were numerous and his production intense. In touch with French Africanists, he assimilated the results of their research, did field work in Africa, and wrote on a group of Afro-Brazilians who returned to Africa. This chapter will focus on his general institutional involvements. Specific developments in theory of religion will be examined in the next chapters.

In the first two years Bastide wrote his dissertation and his book on Candomblé. He then produced a variety of books that share a somewhat different profile. They reflect his teaching, and opened up new areas of sociology; they have a sort of textbook quality, reflecting the current state of specific questions (with abundant international bibliography) and seem intended for gifted undergraduates. In this vein are Sociologie des maladies mentales (1965; English translation in 1972), Les Amériques noires (1967, 1973, 1996), and Anthropologie appliquée (1971; English 1973). In this category I would also place Sociologie et psychanalyse, first published in Portuguese in 1948 (1950, 1972, 1995). Many of these books were translated into a range of languages.

The early career of Roger Bastide was the predictable one of a graduate of the aggrégation de philosophie: he taught in the senior years of a sequence of provincial colleges. One of his earliest available texts is an address to the award-winning 1926 graduates in Lorient (Britanny). His topic was regionalism and tradition and this leads him, as the genre requires, to direct exhortation.

His choice of topic, we can see now, and what he did say are indicative of life-long concerns. It was also rooted in crucial debates of the decade in France. It has been noted that from the end of the nineteenth century, memory became a central topic for a whole range of authors: psychologists, historians, philosophers—and novelists. Suffice to mention two monumental works: Matter and Memory (1896) in which Henri Bergson developed a contrast fundamental to his whole subsequent work, and Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (1913–1927). The issue of memory became socially and politically important because of the notion of tradition. Solidarity and tradition were at the core of the agenda of early sociology on France. That the individual is born into a pre-existing social whole and subsequently shaped by it was the basic premise that led to fertile inquiries. Traditionalism however, quickly became the rallying point of political anti-modernity movements (first led by persistent royalists and staunch Catholics).

What was to be Bastide's magnum opus are accounts of the process of cultural reproduction among a group exposed to forced acculturation, the Afro-Brazilians, first brought as slaves to the colonial Northeast dominated by the sugar economy, and later participating in forms of mutual cultural inter-penetration in a pluralist society. This work led to three books that made Candomblé known to the world and that still make Bastide an important source for any work on theories of religions. His studies focused first on the African cults present in Bahia where many people kept dark skin colour, next in other locations of Northeast Brazil, and finally in the South, where the pigmentation generally got lighter.

Here too it matters to know the genesis of the scholarly endeavour. In the summer of 1943–1944, more precisely in January–February of 1944, Bastide did a study tour (or fieldwork session) in the area of Bahia and Recife. He had read up all that the Brazilian authors had written on the cults that the Bahian population (slaves and their descendants) had developed. He also came with a series of excellent contacts. But, once on the site, he cut some moorings, from books and from his academic environment, because experience conveyed to him some fresh meanings that were self-evident. Now he meets people, he sees and hears much, including carnaval.

Doughnut stands in Indonesia offer wildly coloured doughnuts: green, red, pink and yellow. The multinational companies in search of global markets adapt their product to local taste; with lots of food coloring, they emulate the brightness of tropical spices and vegetables that accompany the traditional dish of rice. This is called glocalization. The statistics compiled by the Canadian Government invite individuals to indicate, if they want, their ethnic origin (with guarantees of privacy). The public has just been informed that in a few years, the majority of the population will be ethnically hyphenated. Instead of English and French, there will be answers like Irish-Polish and French-Chileans. Muslim immigrants in Canada have started arguing for Fridays off. In Islam, Friday is not a sabbath; the religious obligation is to attend Friday prayer which takes an hour or so of the individual's life. But Muslims having noticed that Christians and Jews cannot be forced to work on Sundays or Saturdays, they want for themselves what the Unions obtained for the others. Their militancy is proof their assimilation to Canadian ways.

These three examples are instances of what is technically called acculturation. Studies in areas where cultures come in contact have multiplied exponentially in the second half of the twentieth century. The contact is sometimes peaceful, sometimes viciously conflictual, with many intermediate possibilities. The cultures exposed to each other often have unequal powers. The religious factor often looms large. In all cases, each side is affected by the other, and countless forms of hybridation appear.

Black and white are colours found in nature in relatively pure condition; think of ebony and ivory. These two contrasted colours have been found universally to be convenient, for cave paintings first, and for identifying the two sides in games that oppose two players, such as chess, checkers or backgammon. They were therefore put to frequent use in all cultures. The sharpness of the contrast also caused the two words to become overlaid with qualitative oppositions: dirty and clean, impure and pure, bad and good. In time the adjectives were used to sharpen the contrast between the colour of people's skins. The pink-beige tone of some became labelled “white” and the darker tones of others “black.” Once used to designate what came to be called races, the originally innocent and perceptually helpful contrast between the two colours served to justify oppression and crimes, by offering an apparently natural legitimation.

The process illustrates a common bent of language: to carve out distinct realities, to spread clear ideas, to essentialize and substantialize. These processes lay the ground for sharpening of differences, and can hence-forth serve as grounds of all-out oppositions and total wars. Adjectives and nouns are particularly liable to such distortions. No such extreme contrasts are found in nature, if perceived with an innocent eye. As the folk poet in Rio put it: black hens lay white eggs.

We said that the larger disciplinary framework within which Bastide theorises about religion is that of sociology. We can be more specific and define his contribution to a sociology of knowledge. While his interests were wide-ranging, including for instance ethno-psychiatry and processes of decolonization, we should situate the culminating point of his scholarly career in 1965 when he came to preside over the Sorbonne research group in sociology of knowledge. In this capacity, his path as a scholar was based on two premises.

1. The theorist cannot ever absolutely abstract his work from his own personal context. If he cuts his moorings from the society of his birth and youth, he gets acculturated into another. If he divorces himself from a religious tradition, he trails something of it behind himself. If he criticizes (or revolts against) a scholarly tradition, he embeds himself into another (which sometimes is only the opposite of the first). And when he writes with his best professional conscience, he has a language and hence a scholarly public. Furthermore, he has also a style. This is where his chance lies, as we shall see in the next section; because language can accommodate styles that do not make their own categories absolute but set the readers' minds in motion.

A masterful defence of this point is found in Pierre Bourdieu's Pascalian Meditations. We are implicated in a world, from which we distance ourselves in our scholarly work.

The distinction between the sacred and the profane is taught in most introductory courses in sociology of religion, with obligatory reference to the work of Durkheim. The distinction brings about a bipartite division of the entire universe. Sacred things are protected and isolated by interdictions; profane things are under rules emanating from these interdictions. A definition of religion follows: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.”

In Durkheim's works the sacred looks very much like a wafer ensconced in a precious container (hidden in a tabernacle, with its presence signalled by a little flame giving a small red light), or like a scroll wrapped in embroidered velvet and with a gold crown on top. In fact res sacrae (cultic utensils) is the oldest appearance of the term. The behaviour of believers in front of sacred objects tends to become objectified. (Durkheim made it a rule to treat social facts as things). To Bastide, these visions of cult objects direct the thinking about religion into the wrong directions. Durkheim's definition does not work well with Low Church Protestantism, which has no strict ritual rules on how to handle the Bible or how to use the space in a church building. Bastide would also doubt that religions are “systems” that are as unified as Durkheim says.