Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic

Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Akinwumi Ogundiran
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253013917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.

Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic

Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Akinwumi Ogundiran
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253013917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.

Materialities of Religion

Materialities of Religion PDF Author: Niall Finneran
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351025449
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This book offers an overview of the material expressions of Caribbean religious expressions, including those that have been imported through the vehicle of colonialism, and which subsequently changed and adapted within the Caribbean Islands and those religious expressions which developed through the contact of African, indigenous and imported world views. This book takes a multi-disciplinary perspective, drawing from subjects as diverse as archaeology, religious studies, history, human geography and anthropology. It introduces current topical debates around the role of colonialism and religion in the Caribbean, and also considers theoretical approaches to the study of Caribbean religions set within a wider global context. This approach introduces the reader to a number of important and topical concepts around the wider study of Caribbean religions, and illuminates the complex cultural history and interplay of these religions in the Caribbean Islands. Richly illustrated and drawing upon a range of different cultural approaches, it offers new and challenging perspectives on the development and cultural history of Caribbean spiritual and religious expression through the lens of the material world. The book is for anyone interested in the Caribbean as a region and the role of religious behaviour in human society. Students of religions, archaeology and anthropology will find a number of thought-provoking and important case studies which relate complex theories to real-world case studies. Any profits from this book will be donated to UNICEF Eastern Caribbean projects supporting vulnerable children in the region (https://www.unicef.org/easterncaribbean/).

Cuba's Racial Crucible

Cuba's Racial Crucible PDF Author: Karen Y. Morrison
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253016606
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
This prize-winning study examines the historical interplay of racial identity, nationality, and family formation in Cuba from the 18th century to today. Since the 19th century, there have been two opposing perspectives on Cuban racial identity: one that frames Cubans as white, and one that sees them as racially mixed based on acceptance of African descent. For the past two centuries, these competing views of have remained in continuous tension, while Cuban women and men make their own racially oriented decisions about choosing partners and family formation. Cuba’s Racial Crucible explores the historical dynamics of Cuban race relations by highlighting the role race has played in reproductive practices and genealogical memories associated with family formation. Karen Y. Morrison reads archival, oral-history, and literary sources to demonstrate the ideological centrality and inseparability of "race," "nation," and "family," in definitions of Cuban identity. Morrison also analyzes the conditions that supported the social advance and decline of notions of white racial superiority, nationalist projections of racial hybridity, and pride in African descent. Winner, NECLAS Marissa Navarro Best Book Prize

Freedom from Liberation

Freedom from Liberation PDF Author: Gerard Aching
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025301705X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
“Delves into the life and work of Juan Francisco Manzano, the enslaved Cuban poet and author of Spanish America’s only known slave narrative . . . Valuable.” —Choice By exploring the complexities of enslavement in the autobiography of Cuban slave-poet Juan Francisco Manzano (1797–1854), Gerard Aching complicates the universally recognized assumption that a slave’s foremost desire is to be freed from bondage. As the only slave narrative in Spanish that has surfaced to date, Manzano’s autobiography details the daily grind of the vast majority of slaves who sought relief from the burden of living under slavery. Aching combines historical narrative and literary criticism to take the reader beyond Manzano’s text to examine the motivations behind anticolonial and antislavery activism in pre-revolution Cuba, when Cuba’s Creole bourgeoisie sought their own form of freedom from the colonial arm of Spain.

Material Explorations in African Archaeology

Material Explorations in African Archaeology PDF Author: Timothy Insoll
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199550069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
How people engaged with materials such as clay or stone, why people dug features such as pits, why they decorated their bodies, or treated their dead in certain ways, were all meaningful in the African past. However, these are subjects that have been generally neglected by archaeologists working in Africa until recently. Material Explorations in African Archaeology examines materiality in African archaeology by exploring concepts of material agency and material engagement and entanglement in relation to their manifest presence in persons, animals, objects, substances, and contexts. It investigates the magnificent and complex world of past African materiality by considering a range of case studies. These include, for example, why standing stones were erected, the potential meanings of bodily alteration practices such as scarification and dental modification, and why, recurrently, Africans in the past gave ritual importance to objects, materials, and locations thought of as exotic or different. Adopting a multidisciplinary focus, the volume draws not only on archaeology but also, among other areas, ethnography and history, discussing themes such as bodies, landscape, healing and medicine, and divination, as well as concepts such as memory and biography, transformation, and metaphor and metonym.

Empire of Brutality

Empire of Brutality PDF Author: Christopher Michael Blakley
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807181013
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In the early modern British Atlantic world, the comparison of enslaved people to animals, particularly dogs, cattle, or horses, was a common device used by enslavers to dehumanize and otherwise reduce the existence of the enslaved. Letters, memoirs, and philosophical treatises of the enslaved and formerly enslaved bear testament to the methods used to dehumanize them. In Empire of Brutality, Christopher Michael Blakley explores how material relationships between enslaved people and animals bolstered the intellectual dehumanization of the enslaved. By reconsidering dehumanization in the light of human–animal relations, Blakley offers new insights into the horrific institution later challenged by Black intellectuals in multiple ways. Using the correspondence of the Royal African Company, specimen catalogs and scientific papers of the Royal Society, plantation inventories and manuals, and diaries kept by slaveholders, Blakley describes human–animal networks spanning from Britain’s slave castles and outposts throughout western Africa to plantations in the Caribbean and American Southeast. They combine approaches from environmental history, history of science, and philosophy to examine slavery from the ground up and from the perspectives of the enslaved. Blakley’s work reveals how African captives who became commodified through exchanges of cowry sea snails between slavers in the Bight of Benin later went on to collect zoological specimens in Barbados and Virginia for institutions such as the Royal Society. On plantations, where enslaved people labored alongside cattle, donkeys, horses, and other animals to make the agricultural fortunes of slaveholders, Blakley shows how the enslaved resisted these human–animal pairings by stealing animals for their own purposes—such as fugitives who escaped their slaveholder’s grasp by riding stolen horses. Because of experiences like these, writers and thinkers of African descent who survived slavery later attacked the institution in public as fundamentally dehumanizing, one that corrupted the humanity of both slaveholders and the enslaved.

Vodou en Vogue

Vodou en Vogue PDF Author: Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469674025
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
In Haitian Vodou, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals in this richly textured book, that connection is manifest in the dynamic relationship between public religious ceremonies, material aesthetics, bodily adornment, and spirit possession. Nwokocha spent more than a decade observing Vodou ceremonies from Montreal and New York to Miami and Port-au-Prince. She engaged particularly with a Haitian practitioner and former fashion designer, Manbo Maude, who presided over Vodou temples in Mattapan, Massachusetts, and Jacmel, Haiti. With vivid description and nuanced analysis, Nwokocha shows how Manbo Maude's use of dress and her production of ritual garments are key to serving Black gods and illuminate a larger transnational economy of fashion and spiritual exchange. This innovative book centers on fashion and other forms of self-presentation, yet it draws together many strands of thought and practice, showing how religion is a multisensorial experience of engagement with what the gods want and demand from worshippers. Nwokocha's ethnographic work will challenge and enrich readers' understandings not only of Vodou and its place in Black religious experience but also of religion's entanglements with gender and sexuality, race, and the material and spiritual realms.

The Smell of Slavery

The Smell of Slavery PDF Author: Andrew Kettler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108490735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Slavery, capitalism, and colonialism were understood as racially justified through false olfactory perceptions of African bodies throughout the Atlantic World.

Music, Health and the Body

Music, Health and the Body PDF Author: Poonam Bala
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666932493
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Music, Health and the Body: Cross-Cultural Perspectives focuses on the role of music in understanding new dimensions of health and healing through a unique relationship between identity, social interactions and the human body under the overarching paradigm of culture. The recent Covid-19 pandemic also has highlighted the significance of social and individual factors in people’s perception of and their ability to cope with the pandemic situation globally through music. Based on inter-disciplinary themes, and contributions from highly qualified international cohort of scholars, the volume will command attention amongst historians, ethnologists, musicologists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychotherapists and other scholars in arts and humanities.

Coral Lives

Coral Lives PDF Author: Michele Currie Navakas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691240108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
A literary and cultural history of coral—as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor Today, coral and the human-caused threats to coral reef ecosystems symbolize our ongoing planetary crisis. In the nineteenth century, coral represented something else; as a recurring motif in American literature and culture, it shaped popular ideas about human society and politics. In Coral Lives, Michele Currie Navakas tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a cherished personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including works by such writers as Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and George Washington Cable, Navakas shows how coral once helped Americans to recognize both the potential and the limits of interdependence—to imagine that their society could grow, like a coral reef, by sustaining rather than displacing others. Navakas shows how coral became deeply entwined with the histories of slavery, wage labor, and women’s reproductive and domestic work. If coral seemed to some nineteenth-century American writers to be a metaphor for a truly just collective society, it also showed them, by analogy, that society can seem most robust precisely when it is in fact most unfree for the laborers sustaining it. Navakas’s trailblazing cultural history reveals that coral has long been conceptually indispensable to humans, and its loss is more than biological. Without it, we lose some of our most complex political imaginings, recognitions, reckonings, and longings.