Author: Benjamin Hebblethwaite
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496236475
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas explores spirit-based religious traditions across vast geographical and cultural expanses, including Canada, the United States, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. Using interdisciplinary research methods, this collection of original perspectives breaks new ground by examining these traditions as typologically and historically related. This curated selection of the traditions allows readers to compare and highlight convergences, while the description and comparison of the traditions challenges colonial erasures and expands knowledge about endangered cultures. The inclusion of spirit-based traditions from a broad geographical area emphasizes the typology of religion over ethnic compartmentalization. The individuals and communities studied in this collection serve spirits through rituals, song, instruments, initiation, embodiment via possession or trance, veneration of nature, and, among some Indigenous people, the consumption of ritual psychoactive entheogens. Indigenous and African diaspora practices focused on service to ancestors and spirits reflect ancient substrates of religiosity. The rationale to separate them on disciplinary, ethnic, linguistic, geographical, or historical grounds evaporates in our interconnected world. Shared cultural, historical, and structural features of American indigenous and African diaspora spirit-based traditions mutually deserve our attention since the analyses and dialogues give way to discoveries about deep commonalities and divergences among religions and philosophies. Still struggling against the effects of colonialism, enslavement, and extinction, the practitioners of these spirit-based religious traditions hold on to important but vulnerable parts of humanity’s cultural heritage. These readings make possible journeys of recognition as well as discovery.
Author: Carolyn M. Jones Medine
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137498056
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
Contemporary Perspectives on Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora explores African derived religions in a globalized world. The volume focuses on the continent, on African identity in globalization, and on African religion in cultural change.
Author: Jacob K. Olupona
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199790582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
This book connects traditional religions to the thriving religious activity in Africa today.
Author: T. Trost
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230609937
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
This book focuses on the location of the religious heritage of Africa within the academic study of religion - including indigenous African religions, African Christianities, African/American forms of Islam, the religions of African Americans, Afro-Caribbean religions, and Afro-Brazilian religions.
Author: Åke Hultkrantz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520026537
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
This study of the religions of American Indians covers tribal religions and religions of the American high culture.
Author: Sylvester A. Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316368149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 437
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Book Description
This book provides a narrative historical, postcolonial account of African American religions. It examines the intersection of Black religion and colonialism over several centuries to explain the relationship between empire and democratic freedom. Rather than treating freedom and its others (colonialism, slavery and racism) as opposites, Sylvester A. Johnson interprets multiple periods of Black religious history to discern how Atlantic empires (particularly that of the United States) simultaneously enabled the emergence of particular forms of religious experience and freedom movements as well as disturbing patterns of violent domination. Johnson explains theories of matter and spirit that shaped early indigenous religious movements in Africa, Black political religion responding to the American racial state, the creation of Liberia, and FBI repression of Black religious movements in the twentieth century. By combining historical methods with theoretical analysis, Johnson explains the seeming contradictions that have shaped Black religions in the modern era.
Author: Jacob K. Olupona
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199790787
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
What are African religions? African Religions: A Very Short Introduction answers this question by examining primarily indigenous religious traditions on the African continent, as well as exploring Christianity and Islam. It focuses on the diversity of ethnic groups, languages, cultures, and worldviews, emphasizing the continent's regional diversity. Olupona examines a wide range of African religious traditions on their own terms and in their social, cultural, and political contexts. For example, the book moves beyond ethnographic descriptions and interpretations of core beliefs and practices to look at how African religion has engaged issues of socioeconomic development and power relations. Olupona examines the myths and sacred stories about the origins of the universe that define ethnic groups and national identities throughout Africa. He also discusses spiritual agents in the African cosmos such as God, spirits, and ancestors. In addition to myths and deities, Olupona focuses on the people central to African religions, including medicine men and women, rainmakers, witches, magicians, and divine kings, and how they serve as authority figures and intermediaries between the social world and the cosmic realm. African Religions: A Very Short Introduction discusses a wide variety of religious practices, including music and dance, calendrical rituals and festivals, celebrations for the gods' birthdays, and rituals accompanying stages of life such as birth, puberty, marriage, elderhood, and death. In addition to exploring indigenous religions, Olupona examines the ways Islam and Christianity as outside traditions encountered indigenous African religion. He shows how these incoming faith traditions altered the face and the future of indigenous African religions as well as how indigenous religions shaped two world religions in Africa and the diaspora. Olupona draws on archaeological and historical sources, as well as ethnographic materials based on fieldwork. He shows that African religions are not static traditions, but have responded to changes within their local communities and to fluxes caused by outside influences, and spread with diaspora and migration.
Author: Stephen D. Glazier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781614728658
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 452
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Book Description
Author: Kevin Dawson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812224930
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.
Author: Manuel Vazquez
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814767311
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Before Columbus, the Americas were populated by many indigenous cultures, with a great diversity of religions. After 1492, European governments and churches dominated religious life. While Roman Catholicism was the official religion, great religious hybridization occurred, mixing European, indigenous, and often African traditions into distinctly New World forms. Latin American Religions provides an introduction through documents to the historical development and contemporary expressions of religious life in South and Central America, Mexico, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. A central feature of this text is its inclusion of both primary and secondary materials, including letters, sermons, journal entries, ritual manuals, and ancient sacred texts. These documents provide readers with direct access to the voices of adherents, enabling them to act as academic investigators, experiencing and interpreting the same texts on which historians draw. The documents are framed by substantive introductions which provide both historical context and theoretical insights for the study of these religions traditions and the ways in which they have developed over time. From the religious traditions of the Mayas and Aztecs and of the African diaspora, to official and popular Catholicism, to liberation theology, the rise of Pentecostalism, and emerging trends and new religious movements in Latin America, this new work offers a concise overview of this fascinating field.
