I´m off to do my first interview just now and I´m pretty excited. Lady luck seems to be smiling at me this time around doing fieldwork. I made friends with a guy who is initiated into Candomble and works at the umbrella organization for all the temples in the area at the Candomble ceremony I went to two weeks ago. Since then he has been of great help to me introducing me to people and even taking me to a Caboclo ceremony (the one´s I´m writing my MA on) last Sunday in the periphery of Salvador. And now he has agreed to let me try out my interview questions on him.
Last Saturday was the Independence day of Bahia that is celebrated to commemorate the expulsion of Portuguese troups from here in 1833. The streets filled with people wearing the colors of the Brazilian flag - blue, green and yellow - and a huge procession led by the Caboclo and Cabocla, an Indian couple, understood as representing Brazilianness in its most authentic form.
The celebration of the Caboclos continued in the Candomble temples in the evening as well as the next day. The ceremony I went to on Saturday night, led by an articulate Caboclo spirit dressed in an enormous feather headdress, who manifested in the temple´s main priest, was probably the most luxurious Candomble ceremony I have been to yet, and quite a contrast to the humble ceremony I went to in a small temple the next day, but the songs the spirits sang and messages they were transmittin to their followers were still pretty much the same, and to my delight confirmed many of the ideas I had been unsure of in my thesis (Now I just have to get my final draft in for the thesis, and soon).