28.11.2025 After all, what does it mean to be alive? A lecture exploring ontological perspectives from Candomblé and Jurema Sagrada on 3rd December 2025

After all, what does it mean to be alive?

This talk interrogates the cultural contingency of “life” by examining ontological practices in Candomblé and Jurema Sagrada terreiros in Pernambuco. Contrasting Euro-American assumptions that equate life with biological vitality or metaphysical essence, the speaker demonstrates that, within these Afro-Indigenous religious worlds, being alive is neither self-evident nor guaranteed. Rather, life emerges as an outcome of feitura—a laborious, relational, and 
multispecies process that transforms mere existence into vital presence. Drawing on Amerindian perspectivism, ontology debates, and classic analyses of Afro-Brazilian religions, the speaker elucidates how stones, plants, animals, and humans become living subjects through ritual procedures that actualize dormant potentials and generate axé. 

Through the hypothetical feitura of Exu, he shows how ritual assemblage produces bodies that dismember and recombine vegetal, mineral, animal, and human elements, thereby subverting Western notions of bounded individuality and biological life. Ultimately, it is argued that life in the terreiro is not a substantive property but a relational effect: an ongoing achievement sustained through networks of obligation, reciprocity, and becoming. Life appears here as a dynamic ontopolitical practice through which subjects are continually made, unmade, and remade in the presence of others, human and more-than-human alike.

Speaker: Hugo Weslley Oliveira Silva (Universidade de Pernambuco, Brazil)
Date: 3.12.2025
Place: CNMS, Deutschhausstrasse 12, Room 1A25
Time: 2-4 p.m.

The lecture is open to all interested persons