ABSTRACT
Between November 1930 and January 1931, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret (Rezé, 1899 – Paris, 1959) published a series of 13 articles entitled Candomblé e Makumba in the Brazilian newspaper Diário da Noite. This chapter seeks to critically assess the series, considering both its valuable contributions to the understanding of Afro-Brazilian religions and the primitivist and ethnocentric biases that Péret expresses in it. Moreover, it tries to verify to what extent excerpts from Péret’s articles could be considered early examples of what some authors more recently conceptualised as a “surrealist ethnography”.
