Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-atlantic Religions (original) (raw)

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.