Synopses & Reviews
"I'm extremely impressed by Johnson's book.
Diaspora Conversions offers an outstanding combination of theoretical acuity, erudition, and ethnographic prowess. It is bound to become highly influential in the study of religion in motion."and#151;Manuel A. Vasquez, co-author of
Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas"Johnson's work bursts through the present conversations on African diaspora and brings us onto entirely new ground, shattering simplistic ideas and replacing them with critical distinctions. This smart and talented ethnographer succeeds in combining detailed and rich ethnographic fieldwork with an unrelentingly critical and sophisticated analysis. Johnson's work brings to life one of the most central, perhaps the most central, classic question of African American anthropology: "How is Black culture constituted, even through dislocation and displacement?"and#151;Elizabeth McAlister, author of Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora
"Diasporic Conversions convincingly breaks new ground by showing how the meaning of 'homeland' is fundamentally a product of historically situated and contested forms of collective imagination. What will make Johnson's book a benchmark in the study of the African diaspora, and diasporic situations more generally, is that it is not just a richly documented and rigorously argued ethnography, but a genuine anthropology of historical consciousness."and#151;Stephan Palmiand#233;, author of Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition
Review
“Wonderful and eloquently written.” European Review Of Latin American and Caribbean Stds
Review
and#8220;Performing Afro-Cuba is remarkable achievement. To put Wirtzand#8217;s argument in a nutshell would be to do a gross injustice to her sophisticatedand#8212;and often quite elegantand#8212;exposition. She is simply the smartest and theoretically most sophisticated anthropologist doing research in Cuba these days. But aside from her contribution to the regionalist literature, the real value of her work is that it speaks to enduring anthropological questions, while raising a number of new ones that are relevant far beyond her specific field site. I enthusiastically recommend it.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Performing Afro-Cubaand#160;is a careful and precise anthropology of history making, a study of the effortful cultural work and highly structured theater of relations out of which the Cuban racial order was and is still, perhaps more forcefully than ever, being made and remade. Compact, well-argued, it is utterly engrossing. It attacks a familiar issue in an original way, and it does so with a strong theoretical frame rendered in an approachable writing style.and#8221; and#160; and#160;
Review
and#8220;Performing Afro-Cuba is a masterful exploration of figurations of race and dialogues of racialization in Cuba. I learned a great deal from this challenging work, especially from Wirtzand#8217;s productive expansions of the notions of register and chronotope. The book is analytically powerful and richly engaged; Wirtzand#8217;s own voice is a sensitively reflexive part of the polyphonic dialogues she traces through Cuban history, social life, and cultural performance.and#8221; and#160;and#160;
Review
and#8220;Spirited Thingsand#160;is an ambitious and provocative work that casts a brilliant light over one of the more complex and critical issues in anthropology. It brings spirit possession into the heart of anthropological theory, revealing its central place in the and#8216;genealogy of modernity.and#8217;and#8221;
Review
and#8220;A model study, provocative and compelling, a constellation of essays with both gravity and energy, Spirited Things rearranges spirit possessionand#8217;s theoretical and contextual furnishings with striking consequences. Parsing the subject in relation to current scholarly frontiers where matter is reacquainted with spirit and things aspire to agency, Johnsonand#8217;s volume invites an expansive audience of readers interested in materiality, religion, sensation, transatlantic slavery, and Afro-Atlantic modernities.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Trading geographical sweep for ethnographic and theoretical depth, this volume engages the relationship between spirit possession and materiality, helping to locate the place of possession in the genealogy of modernityand#8212;an innovative, stimulating take on Black Atlantic religions.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Wonderful and eloquently written.and#8221;
Synopsis
By joining a diaspora, a society may begin to change its religious, ethnic, and even racial identifications by rethinking its "pasts." This pioneering multisite ethnography explores how this phenomenon is affecting the remarkable religion of the Garifuna, historically known as the Black Caribs, from the Central American coast of the Caribbean. It is estimated that one-third of the Garifuna have migrated to New York City over the past fifty years. Paul Christopher Johnson compares Garifuna spirit possession rituals performed in Honduran villages with those conducted in New York, and what emerges is a compelling picture of how the Garifuna engage ancestral spirits across multiple diasporic horizons. His study sheds new light on the ways diasporic religions around the world creatively plot itineraries of spatial memory that at once recover and remold their histories.
Synopsis
By joining a diaspora, a society may begin to change its religious, ethnic, and even racial identifications by rethinking its "pasts." This pioneering multisite ethnography explores how this phenomenon is affecting the remarkable religion of the Garifuna, historically known as the Black Caribs, from the Central American coast of the Caribbean. It is estimated that one-third of the Garifuna have migrated to New York City over the past fifty years. Paul Christopher Johnson compares Garifuna spirit possession rituals performed in Honduran villages with those conducted in New York, and what emerges is a compelling picture of how the Garifuna engage ancestral spirits across multiple diasporic horizons. His study sheds new light on the ways diasporic religions around the world creatively plot itineraries of spatial memory that at once recover and remold their histories.
Synopsis
The present work articulates a very specific problematicandmdash;the ever-presence in Cuba of the figure of the authentic African, making appearances in restaurants, art galleries, folklore shows, everyday discourses, state propaganda, during Carnaval and, most interestingly, also in andldquo;actualandrdquo; spirit-possession performances. Wirtz argues that the figure of the traditional Afro-Cuban, typically characterized by a combination of rusticity, sincerity, and spirit-power, has a long pedigree, beginning in the time of Cervantes. She picks up the trope where it is launched in a particularly Spanish and then Cuban style, which emphasizes the force of the colonial process in the creation of even anti-colonial national narratives. After introducing key concepts of temporality, emplacement, memory, voicing, and imagery, Wirtz gives an account of the nature of race as a sign that is always in processandndash;a sign whose meaning shifts with context, even as racial categories are made to seem immutable. She then investigates how Blackness has become an essential marker of andldquo;folkandrdquo; performances in Cuba and how communities as well as the government mobilize folklore for local and national political purposes, paying careful attention to the tension between them. The result is something called andldquo;inclusionary exclusionandrdquo;andmdash;the strange situation of Cubaandrsquo;s national identity being tightly tethered to the very Africanness it tries so hard to distance itself from, as andldquo;the past.andrdquo; Wirtz also offers concluding thoughts on the future of Cuban racial politics as issues of racism finally seem to be receiving consideration in officially-sanctioned public discourse.and#160;
Synopsis
Visitors to Cuba will notice that Afro-Cuban figures and references are everywhere: in popular music and folklore shows, paintings and dolls of Santerand#237;a saints in airport shops, and even restaurants with plantation themes. In
Performing Afro-Cuba, Kristina Wirtz examines how the animation of Cubaand#8217;s colonial past and African heritage through such figures and performances not only reflects but also shapes the Cuban experience of Blackness. She also investigates how this process operates at different spatial and temporal scalesand#151;from the immediate present to the imagined past, from the barrio to the socialist state.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;
Wirtz analyzes a variety of performances and the ways they construct Cuban racial and historical imaginations. She offers a sophisticated view of performance as enacting diverse revolutionary ideals, religious notions, and racial identity politics, and she outlines how these concepts play out in the ongoing institutionalization of folklore as an official, even state-sponsored, category. Employing Bakhtinand#8217;s concept of and#147;chronotopesand#8221;and#151;the semiotic construction of space-timeand#151;she examines the roles of voice, temporality, embodiment, imagery, and memory in the racializing process. The result is a deftly balanced study that marries racial studies, performance studies, anthropology, and semiotics to explore the nature of race as a cultural sign, one that is always in process, always shifting. and#160;
Synopsis
This groundbreaking collection of essays by a group of cutting-edge scholars of religions of the Black Atlantic explores both the genealogy of spirit possession and the theories of political economy and governance from which it emerged, and the empirical production of spirit possession practices. Johnsonand#8217;s introductory chapter, which traces the rise of the idea of possession in the commercial and political encounters between Europeans and Africans, is followed by eight ethnographic chapters on Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and North America. These chapters explore the ritual production of mediated spirits in a context framed not only by specific thingsand#151; for example, the plantation, the Catholic church, the sea, 19th century theater, gemstone mining, land called heritaj, the telegraph, the phonograph, the languages of European masters, the Pentecostal church, the senses of the human body, and so onand#151;but also by the context of slavery, which transformed persons into things.
Synopsis
The word and#147;possessionand#8221; is anything but transparent, especially as it developed in the context of the African Americas. There it referred variously to spirits, material goods, and people. It served as a watershed term marking both transactions in which people were made into thingsand#151;via slaveryand#151;and ritual events by which the thingification of people was revised. In
Spirited Things, Paul Christopher Johnson gathers together essays by leading anthropologists in the Americas that reopen the concept of possession on these two fronts in order to examine the relationship between African religions in the Atlantic and the economies that have historically shapedand#151;and continue to shapeand#151;the cultures that practice them. Exploring the way spirit possessions were framed both by material thingsand#151;including plantations, the Catholic church, the sea, and the phonographand#151;as well as by the legacy of slavery, they offer a powerful new way of understanding the Atlantic world.and#160;
About the Author
Paul Christopher Johnson is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, and author of Secrets, Gossip and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candombland#233;.
Table of Contents
PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON
INTRODUCTION / Spirits and Things in the Making of the Afro-Atlantic World
PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON
ONE / Toward an Atlantic Genealogy of and#147;Spirit Possessionand#8221;
STEPHAN PALMIand#201;
TWO / The Ejamba of North Fairmount Avenue, the Wizard of Menlo Park, and the Dialectics of Ensoniment: An Episode in the History of an Acoustic Mask
PATRICK A. POLK
THREE / and#147;Whoand#8217;s Dat Knocking at the Door?and#8221; A Tragicomic Ethiopian Spirit Delineation in Three Parts
KRISTINA WIRTZ
FOUR / Spiritual Agency, Materiality, and Knowledge in Cuba
BRIAN BRAZEAL
FIVE / The Fetish and the Stone: A Moral Economy of Charlatans and Thieves
STEPHEN SELKA
SIX / Demons and Money: Possessions in Brazilian Pentecostalism
ELIZABETH McALISTER
SEVEN / Possessing the Land for Jesus
KAREN RICHMAN
EIGHT / Possession and Attachment: Notes on Moral Ritual Communication among Haitian Descent Groups
RAQUEL ROMBERG
NINE / Mimetic Corporeality, Discourse, and Indeterminacy in Spirit Possession
MICHAEL LAMBEK
TEN / Afterword: Recognizing and Misrecognizing Spirit Possession
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
and#160;