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Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions
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The anthropology and history of African American religious formations has long been dominated by approaches aiming to recover and authenticate the historical transatlantic continuities linking such traditions to identifiable African source cultures. While not denying such continuities, the contributors to this volume seek to transcend this research agenda by bracketing “Africa” and “African pasts” as objective givens, and asking instead what role notions of “Africanity” and “pastfulness” play in the social and ritual lives of historical and contemporary practitioners of Afro-Atlantic religious formations. The volume’s goal is to open up contextually salient claims to “African origins” to empirical scrutiny, and so contribute to a broadening of the terms of debate in Afro-Atlantic studies.
Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions
Author:
The anthropology and history of African American religious formations has long been dominated by approaches aiming to recover and authenticate the historical transatlantic continuities linking such traditions to identifiable African source cultures. While not denying such continuities, the contributors to this volume seek to transcend this research agenda by bracketing “Africa” and “African pasts” as objective givens, and asking instead what role notions of “Africanity” and “pastfulness” play in the social and ritual lives of historical and contemporary practitioners of Afro-Atlantic religious formations. The volume’s goal is to open up contextually salient claims to “African origins” to empirical scrutiny, and so contribute to a broadening of the terms of debate in Afro-Atlantic studies.
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[First paragraph]Schwarze Freiheit lm Dialog: Saint-Domingue 1791 - Haiti 1991. C. Herrmann Middelanis (ed.). Bielefeld: Hans Koek, 1992. 62 pp. (Paper n.p.)Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Karen McCarthy Brown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. x + 405 pp. (Cloth US$ 24.00, Paper US$ 13.00)Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Philip Kasinitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. xv + 280 pp. (Cloth US$ 39.95, Paper US$ 13.95)Ever since the first truly free nation of the Americas emerged from the agony of the Haitian Revolution, the western part of Hispaniola has been subject to torturous exertions of the European and American imagination. If, by reappropriating their own persons, the Haitians withheld a prime object of capitalist desire, their defiance was answered, in part, by the symbolic objectification of Haiti - this time not by merchants and empire-builders, but by philosophes, literati, and artists "organic" to various European and American regimes, anciens as well as nouveaux. Part of this was pragmatically motivated. The mere existence of Haiti spelled an immediate threat to the stability of New World polities predicated on the exploitation of unfree black labor. If slave revolts were endemic to the region, the events after 1791 seemed to exemplify the pandemic potential of black insurrection in its most virulent forms. Moreover, though direct connections to the events in St. Domingue could rarely be substantiated, the outbreaks of violence in Grenada, Demerara, Louisiana, St. Vincent, and Jamaica in the mid-1790s, and the subsequent proliferation (of real as well as imagined) plots in Cuba, Virginia, and Trinidad lent additional weight to fears aboutthe contagious nature of libertarian ideas (cf. Genovese 1979 and Geggus 1989 for rather different assessments of the reality behind such perceptions). Hence the frantic attempts to establish a cordon sanitaire between the source of revolutionary disease and those slave populations still uncontaminated - a course of action which may well represent one of the first instances of genuinely international information control. Yet slaveholders' recensions of the Haitian Revolution as symptomatic of a morbid process in need of containment did not exhaust its semantic potential.
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[First paragraph]Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. GEORGE BRANDON. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. x + 206 pp. (Cloth US$31.50) Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora. JOSEPH M. MURPHY. Boston: Beacon, 1994. xiii + 263 pp. (Cloth US$ 25.00)Walking with the Night: The Afro-Cuban World of Santeria. RAUL CANIZARES. Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 1993. xii + 148 pp. (Paper US$ 12.95)Since 1959, the steady exodus from revolutionary Cuba has led to the gradual emergence of an Afro-Cuban religious diaspora in the United States. While this phenomenon has attracted scholarly attention for some time, the literature has grown particularly rapidly in recent years. It is, perhaps, not entirely fortuitous that a spate of current academic publications on the subject coincided with a scramble by the popular media to exploit its exotic potential in the context of the 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case on animal sacrifice. Clearly, what has come to be called an Afro-Cuban "cultic renaissance" in exile holds promise both for sensationalist journalism and certain kinds of theoretical projects. Partly articulating with older, but politically reinvigorated debates about the relations between African and African-American cultures, partly addressing fundamental questions about conventional models of cultural boundedness and coherence, and, finally, calling into question both popular and academic notions of "modernity" (and its inevitable counterpart "tradition"), the 292 New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 70 no. 3 &4 (1996)problems posed by the emergence of an Afro-Cuban religious diaspora in the United States present a timely challenge.
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Focuses on the introduction of capitalist elements, such as the use of the dollar as currency, in Cuba in the 1990s, and discusses survival strategies among the Cuban people, during the "special period" since 1989. Based on fieldwork and experiences in Havana, the author pays particular attention to the important role of (obtaining) dollars instead of the less valuable peso currency for Cubans in response to deprivations, and how this occurs through different forms of hustling people with money, including offering sexual favours to tourists, as well as to an increased focus on own interests instead of on courteous sharing among Cubans, and increased racial cleavages. He finds that the introduction of the dollar in Cuba, as well as tourism's growth, garnered income, but also stimulated inequalities in access to dollars and to dollar-prized commodities, and had morally problematic effects, because working formally for the state with wages in pesos generally paid less than informal work to obtain dollars. He describes how this increased instrumental thinking and made hustling widespread, and also stimulated shams and secular intentionality within the practice of Afro-Cuban religions, e.g. fake possessions to obtain dollar offerings to deities from foreigners at ceremonies. In addition, he refers to the ending of the circulation of the US dollar as currency in Cuba as decreed by the Cuban government in November 2004, making the dollar's role in practice historical.
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Abstract
This essay attempts to chart the career of the concept of ‘Africanisms’ in the anthropology and history of the African Diaspora in the Americas. After surveying the origins of the concept, I focus on the role of Melville J. Herskovits’ highly influential mobilisation of the concept, its major mid-20th century critiques, and a highly influential late 20th century reaction to the terms of these debates. I will conclude by indicating how Africanist historians have come to repurpose this concept around the turn of the millennium, and how more recent scholarship might indicate the end of its usefulness as an analytical category.
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African Diaspora
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