Orixas Costumes: Art, Myth, Fashion and African-Brazilian Rite

Abstract

The research work is aimed at analyzing the orixas costumes, which refers to the Ketu tradition of nago-yorubas, people from present-day Nigeria, brought to Brazil in the colonial period, with the rise of this group in the 19th century, with the foundation. and the strengthening of the Ketu nation's terreiros, in the urban space, begin to perform the initiation rituals, the exaltation of the myths and public festivals - worship of the venerable deities - the orishas. And with that, the realization of a possible tradition invented and reinvented in dialogue with the new world, due to the influence of European costumes in the Brazilian urban space. Thus, we start from the hypothesis that clothing, as a prolongation of the culture, corporeality and expression of black and Afro-Brazilian religiosity, is constitutive of the social experience and religious experience developed by candomble Ketu followers in the urban space. The costumes presuppose to analyze and reflect on the relationship between the body and the sacred, relating Africanities, black and Afro-Brazilian aesthetics in the diaspora. Prioritizing the aesthetic dimension of the liturgical costumes of the Nagago-Yoruba oris, we have as presuppositions that they, as well as adornments and jewels, exceed the function of embellishing, covering, protecting the body, extrapolating the aesthetic sense of beauty, exercising functions of their importance that contribute to the understanding of the social, liturgical, ritual and mythological dimension of the orishas in Ketu's candomble yards expanding beyond him.