{"title":"A Very Brief Analysis on Religious Intolerance against Religious Groups of African Origin in Brazil","authors":"Dos Santos","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.9.2.0292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.9.2.0292","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70842709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Art of Sweeping Sickness and Catching Death: Babalú Aye, Materiality, and Mortality in Lukumí Religious Practice","authors":"Martin a. Tsang","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0292","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the ritual act of sweeping away sickness from the body as associated with Babalú Aye, the deity of healing and miracles. Babalú Aye is worshipped by adherents of Yorùbá and Dahomean groups and their descendants worldwide, and this article focuses on the curative arts and articulations of this orisha/fodun in Cuba's Afro-Atlantic religious complex. Babalú Aye's materiality and rites encompass unique vernaculars of space, performativity, and materiality within Lukumí religion; I show how the deity crosses borders and boundaries unlike any other in the pantheon. Through an examination and focus on Babalú Aye's broom, and associated ritual and medicinal technologies his priests and devotees employ in his healing rites, I posit that Babalú Aye's aesthetics and ceremonies reorder and equilibrate the body, removing death and sickness. Sweeping and carefully choreographed actions that are designed to detach, catch, and remove Ikú/death and Arun/sickness are the means by which his priests restore health, acts that comprise a Lukumí response to the need for a spiritually aligned system of healthcare. By extension, the modalities of divination, initiation, offerings, sacrifice, herbalism, music, dance, and prayer are composite strategies that form part of Babalú Aye's healing repertoire––they are the foundational elements of practice that are ultimately employed to restore health and to promote and prolong life in Lukumí worship.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"8 1","pages":"292 - 316"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42781604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vodún, Spirited Forests, and the African Atlantic Forest Complex","authors":"T. Landry","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0173","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Vodún has been described as indefinable, endlessly flexible, and borderless. In this paper, I develop an analytical framework for understanding global Vodún, thereby challenging claims that Vodún is, at its core, inexplicable. To accomplish this, I combine over a decade of ethnographic research in Bénin and Haiti with my status as an initiate of Haitian Vodou and my time as a diviner's apprentice in Bénin. Joining these three modalities, I explore the centrality of the forest as a key symbol in Vodún cosmology, how the forest's symbolic and ontological potency is maintained in Bénin and beyond, and how a forest-focused analysis of Vodún offers anthropologists new insights into how and why African Atlantic forest religions have been so successful globally. I lay out a new strategy for understanding Vodún that reframes the religion as an ontological product of forest cosmologies, and, in so doing, I argue that Vodún is best understood as a smaller part of a greater African Atlantic religious system that I call the \"African Atlantic Forest Complex.\"","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"8 1","pages":"173 - 201"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49257148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Manifest Heritages of Family and Nation: Embodying \"All the Ancestors\" in Guyanese Komfa","authors":"Jeremy Jacob Peretz","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0232","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article offers comparative ethnographic exploration of Komfa ritual engaged to \"entertain the ancestors\" that is central to the way of life of Spiritualists in Guyana. Practiced primarily by Guyanese of African descent and considered an Africa-derived tradition, Komfa worldview nonetheless draws on cultural inheritances of various Guyanese backgrounds. Embracing Komfa worlds serves as historical and genealogical inquiry into often indistinct, polysemous pasts wherein spirit guides lead devotees through emancipatory journeys of familial and personal (re)discovery. Komfa can best be understood through comparative analyses foregrounding \"adjacent\" Black Atlantic religious idioms. Frameworks developed in interrogating practices at the \"margins\" of Candomblé, Lukumí, and Vodou situate Komfa and the spectrum that African-inspired religions encompass. In particular, existing ethnographic literature on Espiritismo as practiced in Cuba and elsewhere furnishes critical perspectives through which to understand Komfa that are more adequate than the bodies of scholarship consulted by researchers studying Komfa thus far.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"8 1","pages":"232 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43681618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kongo Symbols, Catholic Celebrations: Adornment and Spiritual Power in Nineteenth-Century Religious Festivals in São Paulo, Brazil","authors":"Alicia L. Monroe","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0202","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract :This paper investigates the use of religious paraphernalia based on West Central African charms in the bodily adornment of participants commemorating the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary in late nineteenth-century São Paulo, Brazil. Our Lady of the Rosary constituted a popular patron saint for Black confraternities across imperial Brazil (1822–1889). During festivals for this patron saint, West Central African forced laborers and their descendants clad themselves and their children in fine clothes and conventional symbols of orthodox Catholicism, such as crosses and rosary beads, but also with locally sourced materials and objects including pacová, olho de cabra seeds, and jaguar teeth, which referenced or constituted symbols of authority and fertility in West Central Africa. Afro-Brazilians in the city of São Paulo crafted and wore material expressions of religiosity that demonstrated engagement with Catholicism and concurrent reliance on and public celebration of spiritual knowledge from West Central Africa.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"8 1","pages":"202 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45502142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Matter of Time: Spirit Possession and the Temporalities of School in Niger","authors":"A. Masquelier","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.8.1.0122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.8.1.0122","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of incidents of mass possession among schoolgirls in Niger. Possession by revengeful spirits dramatizes the controversies surrounding women's education. During exorcism, possessing spirits speak of the homes they lost when trees were cut to build schools. Spirits were part of a sacred topography disrupted by the transformation of bushland into farmland, the shift toward individual property, and urban expansion. This essay centers on narratives of loss, displacement, subjection, and appropriation and the claims to knowledge about the past that these narratives authorize. By focusing on schools as staging grounds for historical reckoning, I consider how the possession of schoolgirls by vindictive spirits and the memory work sparked by these unsettling events constitute temporal tactics—subversive modes of unfolding time so as to retrieve forgotten histories while also reframing the present (and, by implication, the future) in relation to a past that continues to evolve.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"8 1","pages":"122 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47088848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}