Candomblé is a religion. More specifically, it has been described as an "African American religion", an Afro-Brazilian religion, and "one of the major religious expressions of the African Diaspora". The anthropologist Paul Christopher Johnson stated that, "at its most basic level", Candomblé can be defined as "the practice of exchange with orixás"; the scholar Joana Bahia called it "the religion of the orishas." Johnson also defined it as "a Brazilian redaction of West African religions recreated in the radically new context of a nineteenth-century Catholic slave colony." The term "Candomblé " probably derived from a "kandombele", a Bantu-derived term for dances, which also developed into the term "Candombe", used to describe a dance style among African-descended communities in Argentina and Uruguay.