From Syncretism to Hybridity: Transformations in African-derived American Religions: An Introduction (original) (raw)
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Black Atlantic Religions in America
Bloomsbury Religion in North America, 2021
This article charts the history of Black Atlantic religions in North America with attention to themes, historiographical trends, and possible new directions in the field. From the transatlantic slave trade to the present day, people of African descent in North America, and specifically the United States, have cultivated religions in the face of gratuitous violence. By examining these religious innovations and their historical contexts, this article demonstrates how we come to know the history of people of African descent in North America more deeply and how we come to understand North American history more fully through the eyes of Black religious practitioners.
American religion: diaspora and syncretism from Old World to New
New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 2003
As paradigms and perspectives change within and across academie disciplines, certain motifs remain at the crux of our inquiries. Evident in these four new works on African and New World African and South Asian religions are two motifs that have long defined the Caribbean: the relationship between cultural transformation and cultural continuity, and that between cultural diversity and cultural commonality. In approaching religion from such revisionist sites as poststructuralism, diaspora, hybridity, and creolization, however, the works reviewed here attempt to move toward new and more productive ways of thinking about cultures and histories in the Americas. In the process, other questions arise. Particularly, can what are
2021
This paper analyses the role that European Spiritism plays in the religious history of Brazil, Cuba and Puerto Rico and compares it to the influence of American Spiritualism on the religious landscape of New Orleans. The picture is very similar in Brazil and Cuba, with Spiritist groups and churches on the one hand and Spiritist elements in African-derived religions on the other, the former covering a range from “white” organisations—who, as a rule, see themselves as “philosophies” rather than “religions”—to “white-washed” African-derived religions (like Brazilian Umbanda). As to Puerto Rico, purely African derived religions are rather imported than autochthonous. In all those places, the religions in question focus strongly on healing. Black Spiritual Churches in New Orleans are—as a rule—a later development, and their origins as well as the degree of “African” elements they include are still discussed among scholars.
Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-atlantic Religions
2008
Stephan Palmié is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He has conducted ethnographic and historical research on Afro-Caribbean cultures, with an emphasis on Afro-Cuban religious formations and their relations to the history and cultures of a wider Atlantic world. His other interests include practices of historical representation and knowledge production, systems of slavery and other forms of unfree labor, constructions of race and ethnicity, conceptions of embodiment and moral personhood, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of food and cuisine. In Africas for the Americas, Palmié and other contributors interrogate the scafffolds of current scholarly assumptions about the historical transatlantic continuities between African religions in the Americas with Africa. By problematizing the objective nature of terms such as "Africa and African pasts," Africas for the Americas sets up a new research agenda in Afro-Atlantic religions. These essays are more interested in showing what role notions of Africanity and the past play in the lives of Afro-Atlantic practitioners in their construction of their religious identities than connecting Afro-Atlantic religions with Africa as a legitimizing factor for their authenticity. In the fijirst essay, Paul Christopher Johnson problematizes notions of connectivity with Africa by presenting the case of the Garifuna. The "Black Caribs" or Garifuna originated from Amerindian, African, and European antecedents in the island of Saint Vincent, where, according to their religious beliefs, their ancestors now return to join with the living. Yet because of diasporic circumstances of their history, the Garifuna have learned to negotiate their "African" identity in new lands. James Sidbury's essay takes a similar position regarding diasporic horizons by exploring the life of Gustavus Vassa, also known as Olaudah Equiano. Sidbury's treatment of Equiano reveals that the 18th-century abolitionist fijigure went through several transformations regarding his ethnic and racial identity, which was constructed in dialogue with the Bible. This led him to construct Africa as the ancestral homeland for black Christians. Reinaldo Román's contribution situates the trials and tribulations of two "man-gods" in republican Cuba at the beginnings of the twentieth century. Hilario Mustelier Garzón, an Afro-Cuban, and Juan Manso Estévez, a Spanish veteran of the Philippines' war, embarked on a journey of rejection (Mustelier) and adaptation (Manso). Their contrasting strategies reveal that the preference of one "man-god" over the other has little to do with race and much to do with how Manso adapted to the new political rationality of government of the day. In "Divining the Past: The Linguistic Reconstruction of 'African' Roots in Diasporic Ritual Registers and Songs," Kristina Wirtz examines the "interpretive work through which scholars and religious practitioners recognize religious songs and ritual speech from the African diaspora as 'African' " (142). She discovers in her quest that both scholars and practitioners are "engaged in meaning-making through a divinatory process." Brian Brazeal reconstructs the encounter of two priestesses of Afro-Brazilian religions who come from diffferent spectrums of the same tradition, portraying how they negotiate geographical tensions that signify the legitimacy and efffijicacy of a priestess with her client.
Reversed racism: fundamentalist genealogies in African-American religions
Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society – J-RaT: Vol 2, 2016
As one of the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade, distinct religions evolved among the descendants of the Africans brought to the Americas. As a rule, Afro-Americans in Latin America developed their own religions (like Santería in Cuba or Candomblé in Brazil), based on West or Central African cultural matrices using elements taken from other traditions the slaves were exposed to, like Christianity and Spiritism. In contrast to Latin America, in North America under colonial rule and in ante-bellum USA there emerged, for the main part, evangelical forms of Christianity among the African Americans. In the class of those new religious groups outside mainstream Christianity that came into being amidst African-Americans at the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century, we find so called “messianic-nationalist sects” (Baer / Singer) that have in common a criticism of American society, a central myth about a glorious past of the “black race”, and the strive to re-establish black supremacy in a golden future of the “black race”. The mythical background concerning genealogies of races these religions share can be described as an inversion of white dualistic racist theories within the framework of Abrahamic religions: Dark skinned Africans are either regarded as the true Hebrews or as the true Muslims, “whites” as members of an inferior race. Some of these groups are openly separatist, whilst others have a more integrationist stance. This paper reads the development of some of these groups on the background of a sketch of African-American religious history and interprets it as a more or less fundamentalist reaction to a situation of incongruence.
Transatlantic Dialogue: Roger Bastide and the African American Religions
Th is article considers the role played by Roger Bastide in the development of studies of religions and cultures of African origin in Brazil. Bastide's interpretation of syncretism in religious phenomena has left its imprint on Afro-Brazilian studies. I will analyze two paradigms used by this author in his treatment of the logic of syncretism: the 'principle of compartmentalization' and the opposition between material acculturation and formal acculturation. I will show how, within the Afro-American religious universe, one finds two types of differentially defined syncretism: an Afro-African syncretism, prior to slavery, that lays the foundation for the idea of a basic unity of African culture, and an Afro-western syncretism that one must fight today. Th e notion of 'ritual panafricanism', which accounts for this 'positive' syncretism between religions with a similar ancestry, revives the Afro-Brazilian vision of 'unity in diversity' that is largely inspired by Bastidian theories.