A Practiced Religion, Not a Media Trope

Quimbanda emerged and developed alongside Umbanda in twentieth-century Brazil, and the two traditions share considerable historical and ritual overlap, with some practitioners and terreiros maintaining connections to both, even as Quimbanda developed its own more specific focus on the Exu and Pombagira spirits and their associated ritual work, distinguishing it as its own identifiable tradition within the broader landscape of Brazilian Afro-diasporic religion rather than simply a darker variant of Umbanda, a characterization scholars of the tradition specifically reject as inaccurate.

Popular international media, including film and television, has frequently drawn on sensationalized and inaccurate versions of Quimbanda imagery to depict sorcery or malevolent spiritual practice generally, a pattern of misrepresentation Brazilian scholars and practitioners have worked to correct through more accurate ethnographic and religious studies scholarship documenting how the tradition is actually practiced and understood by its own communities. Quimbanda remains an actively practiced religion in Brazil today, maintained by initiated practitioners and terreiros who, like practitioners of the other Afro-diasporic traditions catalogued in this atlas, hold their own authority over how their specific prayers, offerings and ritual practice are conducted and represented.