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Author: Diana Paton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-08-10
Total Pages: 377
ISBN-13: 1107025656
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A study of the importance of debates about obeah, and state suppression of it, for Caribbean struggles about freedom and citizenship.
Author: Diana Paton
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2012-04-13
Total Pages: 373
ISBN-13: 0822351331
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This collection looks at Caribbean religious history from the late 18th century to the present including obeah, vodou, santeria, candomble, and brujeria. The contributors examine how these religions have been affected by many forces including colonialism, law, race, gender, class, state power, media represenation, and the academy.
Author: Keith Sandiford
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-11-23
Total Pages: 205
ISBN-13: 1136853995
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book develops a theory of a Caribbean-Atlantic imaginary by exploring the ways two colonial texts represent the consciousnesses of Amerindians, Africans, and Europeans at two crucial points marking respectively the origins and demise of slavocratic systems in the West Indies. Focusing on Richard Ligon’s History of Barbados (1657) and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis’ Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), the study identifies specific myths and belief systems surrounding sugar and obeah as each of these came to stand for concepts of order and counterorder, and to figure the material and symbolic power of masters and slaves respectively. Rooting the imaginary in indigenous Caribbean myths, the study adopts the pre-Columbian origins of the imaginary ascribed by Wilson Harris to a cross cultural bridge or arc, and derives the mythic origins for the centrality of sugar in the imaginary’s constitution from Kamau Brathwaite. The book’s central organizing principle is an oppositional one, grounded on the order/counterorder binary model of the imaginary formulated by the philosopher-social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis. The study breaks new ground by reading Ligon’s History and Lewis’ Journal through the lens of the slaves’ imaginaries of hidden knowledge. By redefining Lewis’ subjectivity through his poem’s most potent counterordering symbol, the demon-king, this book advances recent scholarly interest in Jamaica’s legendary Three Fingered Jack.
Author: J. Brent Crosson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-07-10
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 022670548X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In 2011, Trinidad declared a state of emergency. This massive state intervention lasted for 108 days and led to the rounding up of over 7,000 people in areas the state deemed “crime hot spots.” The government justified this action and subsequent police violence on the grounds that these measures were restoring “the rule of law.” In this milieu of expanded policing powers, protests occasioned by police violence against lower-class black people have often garnered little sympathy. But in an improbable turn of events, six officers involved in the shooting of three young people were charged with murder at the height of the state of emergency. To explain this, the host of Crime Watch, the nation’s most popular television show, alleged that there must be a special power at work: obeah. From eighteenth-century slave rebellions to contemporary responses to police brutality, Caribbean methods of problem-solving “spiritual work” have been criminalized under the label of “obeah.” Connected to a justice-making force, obeah remains a crime in many parts of the anglophone Caribbean. In Experiments with Power, J. Brent Crosson addresses the complex question of what obeah is. Redescribing obeah as “science” and “experiments,” Caribbean spiritual workers unsettle the moral and racial foundations of Western categories of religion. Based on more than a decade of conversations with spiritual workers during and after the state of emergency, this book shows how the reframing of religious practice as an experiment with power transforms conceptions of religion and law in modern nation-states.
Author: Dianne M. Stewart
Publisher: Religious Cultures of African
Published: 2022-10-07
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9781478013921
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Dianne M. Stewart analyzes the sacred poetics, religious imagination, and African heritage of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
Author: Patrick Taylor
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9780253338358
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Dealing with the ongoing interaction of rich and diverse cultural traditions from Cuba and Jamaica to Guyana and Surinam, Nation Dance addresses some of the major contemporary issues in the study of Caribbean religion and identity. The book’s three sections move from a focus on spirituality and healing, to theology in social and political context, and on to questions of identity and diaspora. The book begins with the voices of female practitioners and then offers a broad, interdisciplinary examination of Caribbean religion and culture. Afro-Caribbean religions, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are all addressed, with specific reflections on Santería, Palo Monte, Vodou, Winti, Obeah, Kali Mai, Orisha work, Spiritual Baptist faith, Spiritualism, Rastafari, Confucianism, Congregationalism, Pentecostalism, Catholicism, and liberation theology. Some essays are based on fieldwork, archival research, and textual or linguistic analysis, while others are concerned with methodological or theoretical issues. Contributors include practitioners and scholars, some very established in the field, others with fresh, new approaches; all of them come from the region or have done extensive fieldwork or research there. In these essays the poetic vitality of the practitioner’s voice meets the attentive commitment of the postcolonial scholar in a dance of "nations" across the waters.
Author: Nicholaj De Mattos Frisvold
Publisher:
Published: 2014-04
Total Pages: 88
ISBN-13: 9781907881411
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Of all the Living Traditions, Obeah has remained the most elusive. Whilst Vodou and Santeria have had both academic and occult treatment in tomes widely available to the seeker, Obeah has stayed uncompromisingly rooted as a sorcerous tradition veiled in obscurity. In OBEAH: A SORCEROUS OSSUARY, Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold teases open this Caribbean mystery and reveals a crooked path into the hidden world of Papa Bones and Sasabonsam with a short monograph concerning the history of this incoherent cult and the ways in which power is bestowed upon and wielded by the Obeahman. The text includes the Kabalistic Banquette of Lemegeton, the Hypostasis of Abysina Clarissa and the Green Beasts, a Kabalistic Mass for Anima Sola Mayanet, a Call to Papa Bones, a Call to Spirit Guides, a Call to Anima Sola Abysina Clarissa, the Missale Ezekiel Sasabonson or the Conjuration of the Shadow-Self, and the Ritual Reptilica de Anansi, and offers insights into the Obeahman's special relationship with the spirits of wood, water, and bone.
Author: Maarit Forde
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2018-11-15
Total Pages: 201
ISBN-13: 1478002131
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen
Author: Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2011-07-11
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 0814762573
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions developed in the Caribbean region Creolization—the coming together of diverse beliefs and practices to form new beliefs and practices—is one of the most significant phenomena in Caribbean religious history. Brought together in the crucible of the sugar plantation, Caribbean peoples drew on the variants of Christianity brought by European colonizers, as well as on African religious and healing traditions and the remnants of Amerindian practices, to fashion new systems of belief. Creole Religions of the Caribbean offers a comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions that have developed in the region. From Vodou, Santería, Regla de Palo, the Abakuá Secret Society, and Obeah to Quimbois and Espiritismo, the volume traces the historical–cultural origins of the major Creole religions, as well as the newer traditions such as Pocomania and Rastafarianism. This second edition updates the scholarship on the religions themselves and also expands the regional considerations of the Diaspora to the U. S. Latino community who are influenced by Creole spiritual practices. Fernández Olmos and Paravisini–Gebert also take into account the increased significance of material culture—art, music, literature—and healing practices influenced by Creole religions.
Author: Nathaniel Samuel Murrell
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2010-01-25
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 1439901759
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Religion is one of the most important elements of Afro-Caribbean culture linking its people to their African past, from Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria—popular religions that have often been demonized in popular culture—to Rastafari in Jamaica and Orisha-Shango of Trinidad and Tobago. In Afro-Caribbean Religions, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell provides a comprehensive study that respectfully traces the social, historical, and political contexts of these religions. And, because Brazil has the largest African population in the world outside of Africa, and has historic ties to the Caribbean, Murrell includes a section on Candomble, Umbanda, Xango, and Batique. This accessibly written introduction to Afro-Caribbean religions examines the cultural traditions and transformations of all of the African-derived religions of the Caribbean along with their cosmology, beliefs, cultic structures, and ritual practices. Ideal for classroom use, Afro-Caribbean Religions also includes a glossary defining unfamiliar terms and identifying key figures.
