Review of African ethnobotany in the Americas (2012), edited by Robert Voeks and John Rashford. (original) (raw)
Related papers
African Diaspora Heritage in the Americas
Chapter 12 in the peer-reviewed Routledge Handbook of Critical African Heritage Studies, edited by Ashton Sinamai, John Giblin, Shadreck Chirikure, and Ishanlosen Odiaua. London: Routledge , 2024
This chapter addresses a remarkable diversity of legacies and heritage for African diaspora populations in the Americas. Overcoming the horrors of the transAtlantic slave trade, captive Africans further developed myriad forms of cultural knowledge and practices drawn from their homeland cultures and conveyed those aspects of heritage to their descendants and social affiliates. Special knowledge of agricultural industries led to transformed landscapes. Resilience and fights for freedom were represented in self-emancipation, rebellion communities, reverence of burial grounds, and commemorations of lost settlements and ancestors across terrains and seascapes. Elements of cosmologies from multiple African cultures were integrated to form new religions and forms of cultural heritage. Over the past six centuries African diaspora peoples have pursued vitality in their cultural heritage and continue to fight for reparative justice to address European colonial wrongs.
C. Daniel Dawson; Treasure in the Terror: The African Cultural Legacy in the Americas
2002
The contemporary Americas have benefited from the intellectual heritage of three major cultural groups, i.e., the Native American, the European and the African. This paper is concerned with the African contribution. Much of the scholarship concerning Africans in the Americas has functioned under the myopia of the “Deficit Model”, a term frequently used by Robert Farris Thompson to explain the tendency of scholars to view African cultural contributions as nonexistent, or at best, deficient. The Deficit Model presumes that because of their lack of material goods and deprived social conditions under the yoke of chattel slavery, Africans were unable to contribute in any significant way, other than their labor, to the formation of the cultures in the Americas. Because of the forced or involuntary nature of the African Diaspora, it is often forgotten that these migrating groups, in this case enslaved humans, carried with them more than their bodies. They brought their cultures, religious traditions, artistic forms, philosophies, social mores, and ideas about governance and political organizations.
BETWEEN EXTINCTION AND DISTINCTION: BLACK CULTURAL SURVIVALS IN THE NEW WORLD
Pre-colonial Africa had a flourishing tradition of cultural activities which marked her off as the cradle of human civilization. European contact through religious, economic and political interests signaled the gradual erosion of traditional African values lost to modernity. It is no longer news that what sustained the African humanity is dying on the altar of imported values. However, while continental Africans treat their past with disdain, Diaspora Blacks are busy celebrating festivals of its re-birth with a passion that can best be described as consuming. From Cuba to Brazil, African festivals are celebrated with very deep religious commitment. Unfortunately, imported religions have continued to denigrate African religious practices and festivals, describing them as fetish and barbaric, whereas, in them lies the ultimate salvation of the lost soul of the African humanity. Therefore, this paper seeks to reclaim the stolen pride of the African ancestry.
The American Historical Review, 2007
BROADLY SPEAKING, TWO CONTRASTING MODELS dominate interpretations of Atlantic history. One draws on Old World influences to explain the nature of societies and cultures in the Americas, while the other assigns primacy to the New World environment. One stresses continuities, the other change. The polar extremes are persistence and transience, inheritance and experience. An emphasis on inheritance prioritizes the cultural baggage that migrants brought with them, whereas a focus on experience highlights the physical and social environments, such as climate, natural resources, and settlement processes, that they encountered. In modern parlance, one approach focuses on folkways, the other on factor endowments. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these two viewpoints clashed, and the debate still reverberates in modified form. An emphasis on cultural continuities was the preserve of germ theory historians, such as Herbert Baxter Adams and Edward Eggleston, who stressed what immigrants from Europe brought with them when they crossed the Atlantic. Frederick Jackson Turner most famously challenged this emphasis, arguing that an egalitarian civil society and political democracy were rooted in the expanding frontier and availability of land in temperate North America. In the course of the twentieth century, the frontier thesis gathered considerable strength. Although historians of migration no longer mention the Turner school, the new environment continues to be seen as the dominant influence, whether in terms of physical resources or the evolution of new social identities. In the Black Atlantic, the frontier thesis might seem irrelevant, but there, too, the literature on creolization, stemming most notably from the work of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, saw the historiographical pendulum swing toward an emphasis on the discontinuity of the transatlantic experience and the critical importance of the New World environment. 1
Archaeology of the African Diaspora in Latin America
Historical Archaeology, 2004
and Peru has made significant contributions to our understanding of African Diaspora history. Historical archaeology of the African Diaspora in Latin America has explored technological innovations in pottery making, resistance to slavery, and everyday life. The unifying theme in these studies, like that of the Anglo colonies, has been ethnic or cultural markers of identity. Maroon studies have predominated, while plantation archaeology in Latin America is developing slowly. By placing Latin American sites within the context of theories such as ethnogenesis, focusing on intercultural interactions in Maroon and slave societies, and rediscovering the forgotten connections between Amerindians and Africans, it is possible to advance our understanding of African Diaspora social formation and culture creation.
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.
2022
The anthropological study of the African Diaspora is steeped in questions of identity. Slaves, people ripped from their homes and placed in a new socio-political and natural environment, had to create new identities; ones that were an amalgam of (predominantly) West African, Western European, and indigenous American cultures. This paper expands on these concepts by examining how the resistance of maroons, or escaped slaves, allowed for a unique series of cultures to be created during this ethnically concerning period of history. With anarchist theory and archaeological data from sites in the Caribbean and South America, I present a new image of these maroon communities: once where simply creating new lifeways was an everyday act of resistance. I conclude with an affirmation that these people were not only victims, but active, socially complex, and ingenuitive individuals who, through immense adversity, created lasting and successful communities.
Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas, 2014
When I came to the University of Florida in 1981, I was informed that Charles Wagley was not accepting new graduate students. After my first class with Wagley, he agreed to be my advisor and mentor and I became the last student he accepted. Though better known for his sensitive and pioneering ethnography of indigenous and peasant populations and his influential anthropological/historical overviews of Brazil and Latin America, Wagley and his students' contributions to the study of Afro-American cultures and race relations in the Americas are considerable. Among the important concepts that Wagley articulated were 'social race', 'Plantation America', and the 'amorphous and weakly organized local community without clear boundaries in space or membership'. Wagley guided my dissertation research in Haiti. In it I developed his concept by proposing…