Of interest is the extensive spirit-world concepts she draws out form the Brazilian worldview.  She concludes that, rather than being "Afro-Brazilian," Umbanda is actually Brazilian.  This means though African symbols, practices and gods or spirits are characters in the Umbanda world, they are "employed" in an already indigenous animistic world.

A great insight of this book was that the animism and "syncretism" reported in Brazilian Roman Catholicism (and I see direct parallels to other South American expressions of Catholicism) is actually European animism which had already been incorporated unconsciously in European Catholic Christianity or consciously adopted with the unsuccessful high aim of using these practices or beliefs as bridges to the gospel.

Another source of the animism which evolved into Umbanda, through the heavy input of African persons in the slavery period of Portuguese colonialism, is the Indian traditional religious worldview.  Thus three cultures of animism (European, Indian and African) come together in largely African guise, in the superficial formal structures of the Catholic Church, and on into a separate religious milieu of Umbanda.  The author's estimates at the time of writing (research published 1986) indicate 85% of the Brazilian population were practitioners of Umbanda.  This number, of course, indicates that there is a great overlap in reported membership of Catholic and Umbanda.

The author provides many events and actual cases to illustrate various aspects of the situation and approaches to addressing that.  She points out weaknesses in the rational North American worldview which limit missionaries from understanding or addressing this spirit worldview, then provides specific means to meeting these deficiencies.  Itioka closes with an insightful practical proposal on counseling practitioners of Umbanda oppressed by spirits or converts leaving the faith, and provides guidelines for "curing the memories."

(Read in Portuguese, but the English short version of the text is also included.  I first photoread the English version, then photoread the Portuguese version, before reading the Portuguese text for detail.)

See this book on the Interent.
See all my reviews on Amazon.com
See menu of all formal book reviews on this site
See my reading list for this year
Many other books have review notes with the entry