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The Cooking of History
Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World. Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santería and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely...
Wizards and Scientists
In Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmié offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them. Highlighting the ways that Afro-Cuban discourses serve as a means of moral analys...
The Caribbean
An “illuminating” survey of Caribbean history from pre-Columbian times to the twenty-first century (Los Angeles Times). Combining fertile soils, vital trade routes, and a coveted strategic location, the islands and surrounding continental lowlands of the Caribbean were one of Europe’s earliest and most desirable colonial frontiers. The region was colonized over the course of five centuries by a revolving cast of Spanish, Dutch, French, and English forces, who imported first African slaves and later Asian indentured laborers to help realize the economic promise of sugar, coffee, and tobacco. The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples offers an authoritative one-volume survey...
The Mythology in Our Language
In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact—continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology’s theoretical terms, like mana, taboo, and potlatch, in order to help them explore the limits of human belief and imagination. Now the book receives its first translation by an anthropologist, in the hope that it can kick-start a new era of interdisciplinary fertilization. Wittgenstein’s remarks on ritual, magic, religion, belief, ceremony, and Frazer’s own logical presuppositions are as lucid and thought-provoking now as they were in Wittgenstein’s day. Anthropologists find themselves asking many of the same questions as Wittgenstein—and in a reflection of that, this volume is fleshed out with a series of engagements with Wittgenstein’s ideas by some of the world’s leading anthropologists, including Veena Das, David Graeber, Wendy James, Heonik Kwon, Michael Lambek, Michael Puett, and Carlo Severi.
Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery
Historians and anthropologists focus on the cultural dimensions of slavery in various geographical and historical settings. They deal with conceptual and theoretical problems in current slavery studies, as well as issues including Native American slaveholding; the integration of former slaves into West African societies; slave life on Caribbean sugar plantations; slave cultures in Suriname; female slave-owners on the Gold Coast; and Maroon communities. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Varieties of Historical Experience
This book considers how history is not just objectively lived but subjectively experienced by people in the process of orienting their present toward the past. It analyses affectivity in historical experience, examines the digital mediation of history, and assesses the current politics of competing historical genres. The contributors explore the diverse ways in which the past may be activated and felt in the here and now, juxtaposing the practices of professional historiography with popular modes of engaging the past, from reenactments, filmmaking/viewing and historical fiction to museum collections and visits to historical sites. By examining the divergent forms of historical experience that flourish in the shadow of historicism in the West, this volume demonstrates how, and how widely (socially), the understanding of the past exceeds the expectations and frameworks of professional historicism. It makes the case that historians and the discipline of History could benefit from an ethnographic approach in order to assess the social reception of their practice now, and into a near future increasingly conditioned by digital media and demands for experiential immediacy.
Thinking with Ngangas
"Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, a Jesuit priest and proto-ethnographer of the "New World" who compared the lives of the Iroquois to the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmié embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations. What do organ transplants have to do with ngangas, a complex assemblage of mineral, animal, and vegetal materials, including human remains, that serve as the embodiment of spirits of the dead? Where do genomics and "ancestry projects" converge with divination and oracular systems? What does it mean that Black Cubans in the US took advantage of Edisonian technology to project the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named ecué onto the streets of Philad...
Africas of the Americas
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.
Empirical Futures
Since the 1950s, anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate the disciplines of anthropology and history. Author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and other groundbreaking works, he was one of the first scholars to anticipate and critique globalization studies. However, a strong...
Obeah and Other Powers
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.
