This comparative study of African and Hindu popular religions in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago charts the development of religion in the Caribbean by analyzing the ways ecstatic forms of worship, enacted through trance performance and spirit mediumship, have adapted to capitalism and reconfigured themselves within the context of modernity. Showing how diasporic traditions of West African Orisha Worship and South Asian Shakti Puja converged in their ritual adaptations to colonialism in the West Indies, as well as diverged politically within the context of postcolonial multiculturalism, Keith McNeal reveals the unexpected ways these traditions of trance performance have become both globalized and modernized. The first book-length work to compare and contrast Afro- and Indo-Caribbean materials in a systematic and multidimensional manner, this volume makes fresh and innovative contributions to anthropology, religious studies, and the historiography of modernity. By giving both religious subcultures and their intersections equal attention, McNeal offers a richly textured account of southern Caribbean cultural history and pursues important questions about the history and future of religion.

This book examines alleged "superhuman" powers predominantly associated with smith/artisans in five African societies. It discusses their ritual and social roles, mythico-histories, symbols surrounding their art, and changing relationships between these specialists and their patrons. Needed but also feared, these smith/artisans work in traditionally hereditary occupations and in stratified but negotiable relationships with their rural patron families. Many of them now also work for new customers in an expanding market economy, which is still characterized by personal, face-to-face interactions. Rasmussen maintains that a framework integrating anthropological theories of witchcraft, alterity, symbolism, and power is fundamental to understanding local accusations and tensions in these relationships. She also argues that it is critical to deconstruct and disentangle guilt, blame, and envy-concepts that are often conflated in anthropology at the expense of falsely accused "witch" figures. The first portion of this book is an ethnographic analysis of smith/artisans in Tuareg society, and draws on primary source data from this author's long-term social/cultural anthropological field research in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) communities of northern Niger and Mali. The latter portion of the book is a cross-cultural comparison, and it re-analyzes the Tuareg case, drawing on secondary data on ritual powers and smith/artisans in four other African societies: the Amhara of Ethiopia, the Bidan (Moors) of Mauritania, the Kapsiki of Cameroon, and the Mande of southern Mali. In the concluding analysis, there is discussion of similarities and differences between these cases, the social consequences of ritual knowledge and power in each community, and their wider implications for anthropology of religion, human rights, and African studies.

Margaret Mitchell Armand presents a cutting edge interdisciplinary terrain inside an indigenous exploration of her homeland. Her contribution to the historiography of Haitian Vodou demonstrates the struggle for its recognition in Haiti's post-independence phase as well as its continued misunderstanding. Through a methodological, original study of the colonial culture of slavery and its dehumanization, Healing in the Homeland: Haitian Vodou Traditions examines the sociocultural and economic oppression stemming from the local and international derived politics and religious economic oppression. While concentrating the narratives on stories of indigenous elites educated in the western traditions, Armand moves pass the variables of race to locate the historical conjuncture at the root of the persistent Haitian national division. Supported by scholarships of indigenous studies and current analysis, she elucidates how a false consciousness can be overcome to reclaim cultural identity and pride, and include a sociocultural, national educational program, and political platform that embraces traditional needs in a global context of mutual respect. While shredding the western adages, and within an indigenous model of understanding, this book purposefully brings forth the struggle of the African people in Haiti.

The Liberatory Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a philosophical anthology which explores Dr. King's legacy as a philosopher and his contemporary relevance as a thinker-activist. It consists of sixteen chapters organized into four sections: Part I, King within Philosophical Traditions, Part II, King as Engaged Social and Political Philosopher, Part III, King's Ethics of Nonviolence, and Part IV, Hope Resurgent or Dream Deferred: Perplexities of King's Philosophical Optimism. Most chapters are written by philosophers, but two are by philosophically informed social scientists. The contributors examine King's relationships to canonical Western philosophical traditions, and to African-American thought. King's contribution to traditional branches of philosophy such as ethics, social philosophy and philosophy of religion is explored, as well as his relevance to contemporary movements for social justice. As is evident from the title, the book considers the importance of King's thought as liberatory discourse. Some chapters focus on "topical" issues like the relevance of King's moral critique of the Vietnam War to our present involvement in Middle Eastern wars. Others focus on more densely theoretical issues such as Personalism, existential philosophy or Hegelian dialectics in King's thought. The significance of King's reflections on racism, economic justice, democracy and the quest for community are abiding themes. But the volume closes, quite fittingly, on the importance of the theme of hope. The text is a kind of philosophical dialogue on the enduring value of the legacy of the philosopher, King.

La religion yoruba tiene sus origenes en la tribu del mismo nombre, que duro aproximadamente doce siglos. El trafico de esclavos permitio que sus habitantes fueran transportados a America, a donde llevaron su religion, que se fundio con el catolicismo para dar lugar a otro de sus nombres: santeria.. Actualmente es un credo con un gran numero de devotos, por lo cual surge este libro, que presenta un glosario de terminos yoruba, con cientos de palabras y frases religiosas y folcloricas.

Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon tells the life story of Mandu da Silva, the last living jaguar shaman among the Baniwa people in the Northwest Amazon. In this original and engaging work, Robin M. Wright, who has known and worked with Silva for more than thirty years, weaves the story of Silva's life together with the Baniwas' broader society, history, mythology, cosmology, and jaguar shaman traditions. The jaguar shamans are key players in what Wright calls "a nexus of religious power and knowledge" in which healers, sorcerers, priestly chanters, and dance leaders exercise complementary functions that link living specialists with the deities and great spirits of the cosmos. Exploring in depth the apprenticeship of the shaman, Wright shows how jaguar shamans seek the knowledge and power of the deities through several stages of instruction and practice. This volume, the first study to map the sacred geography ("mythscape") of the northern Arawak-speaking people of the Northwest Amazon, demonstrates the direct connections between petroglyphs and other inscriptions and Baniwa sacred narratives as a whole. In eloquent and inviting analytic prose, Wright links biographic and ethnographic elements in elevating anthropological writing to a new standard of theoretically aware storytelling and analytic power.

African religion is ancestor worship; it revolves around the dead, now thought to be alive and well in heaven (the Samanadzie) and propitiated by the living on earth. For the Akan, the ancestors' stool is the emblem of the ancestors (Nananom Nsamanfo). Led by their kings and queen mothers as living ancestors, the Akan periodically propitiate the ancestors' stools housing their ancestors. In return, the ancestors and deities influence the affairs of living descendants, making ancestor worship as tenably viable as any other religion. This second edition updates the scholarship on ancestor worship by demonstrating the centrality of the ancestors' stool as the ultimate religious symbol. In addition, all chapters have been expanded. A new chapter has been added to show how ancestor worship is pragmatically integrative, theologically sound, teleological as well as soteriological, with a highly trained clerical body and elders as mediators.

In a study that challenges familiar Western modes of thought, Jacob K. Olupona focuses on one of the most important religious centers in Africa and in the world: the Yoruba city of Ile-Ife in southwest Nigeria. The spread of Yoruba traditions in the African diaspora has come to define the cultural identity of millions of black and white people in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the United States. Seen through the eyes of a native, this first comprehensive study of the spiritual and cultural center of the Yoruba religion tells how the city went from great prominence to near obliteration and then rose again as a contemporary city of gods. Throughout, Olupona corroborates the indispensable linkages between religion, cosmology, migration, and kinship as espoused in the power of royal lineages, hegemonic state structure, gender, and the Yoruba sense of place, offering the fullest portrait to date of this sacred African city.

En esta obra Lydia Cabrera, transcribe y colecciona por puro deleite el conjunto de leyendas negras de La Habana. Se trata de Cuentos afrocubanos, que aunque estan cundidos'de fantasia y ofrecen entre sus protagonistas algunos personajes del panteon yoruba, como Obaogo, Oshun, Ochosi, etc., no son unicamente religiosos. La mayoria entran en la categoria de fabulas de animales. Otros son de personajes humanos en los cuales la mitologia entra secundariamente. En varios de ellos se descubren supervivencias totemicas, como cuando se cita el Hombre-tigre, el Hombre-Toro. Papa-Jicotea, etc. Otro nos ofrece unas fabulas muy curiosas, de como se originaron el primer hombre, el primer negro y el primer blanco, muestra de como abundan en el folklore negro los mitos de la etnogenia. Si bien la mayor parte de los cuentos negros coleccionados por Lydia Cabrera son de origen yoruba, en varios aparece evidente la huella de la civilizacion de los blancos.

"Searching for Africa in Brazil" is a learned exploration of tradition and change in Afro-Brazilian religions. Focusing on the convergence of anthropologists' and religious leaders' exegeses, Stefania Capone argues that twentieth-century anthropological research contributed to the construction of an ideal Afro-Brazilian religious orthodoxy identified with the Nago (Yoruba) cult in the northeastern state of Bahia. In contrast to other researchers, Capone foregrounds the agency of Candomble leaders. She demonstrates that they successfully imposed their vision of Candomble on anthropologists, reshaping in their own interest narratives of Afro-Brazilian religious practice. The anthropological narratives were then taken as official accounts of religious orthodoxy by many practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil. Capone draws on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in Salvador de Bahia and Rio de Janeiro as she demonstrates that there is no pure or orthodox Afro-Brazilian religion.

Challenging the usual interpretations of Afro-Brazilian religions as fixed entities, completely independent of one another, Capone reveals these practices as parts of a unique religious continuum. She does so through an analysis of ritual variations as well as discursive practices. To illuminate the continuum of Afro-Brazilian religious practice and the tensions between exegetic discourses and ritual practices, Capone focuses on the figure of Exu, the sacred African trickster who allows communication between gods and men. Following Exu and his avatars, she discloses the centrality of notions of prestige and power--mystical and religious--in Afro-Brazilian religions. To explain how religious identity is constantly negotiated among social actors, Capone emphasizes the agency of practitioners and their political agendas in the "return to roots," or re-Africanization, movement, an attempt to recover the original purity of a mythical and legitimizing Africa.

Sango in Africa and the African Diaspora is a multidisciplinary, transregional exploration of Sango religious traditions in West Africa and beyond. Sango the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning is a powerful, fearful deity who controls the forces of nature, but has not received the same attention as other Yoruba orishas. This volume considers the spread of polytheistic religious traditions from West Africa, the mythic Sango, the historical Sango, and syncretic traditions of Sango worship. Readers with an interest in the Yoruba and their religious cultures will find a diverse, complex, and comprehensive portrait of Sango worship in Africa and the African world."

Called the Mvskoke in their language, the Creek Indians of Oklahoma continue to practice traditional medicine. In "Creek Indian Medicine Ways," David Lewis, a full-blood Mvskoke and practicing medicine man, tells about the medicine tradition that has shaped his life. Born into a family of medicine people, he was chosen at birth to carry on the tradition. He shares his memories here about his childhood training and initiation as a medicine man as well as his remembrances about his father and grandmother, who trained him. Lewis reveals part of the sacred story of the origin of plants and he identifies some of the plants he uses in his cures. He also describes several of the ceremonies his teachers taught him, stressing throughout the sacredness and importance of Mvskoke medicine.

Ann T. Jordan, a Euroamerican anthropologist, documents the place of Lewis's medicine family in the written record. Lewis is the great grandson of Jackson Lewis, who was interviewed in 1910 by anthropologist John Swanton. Jackson Lewis is mentioned numerous times in Swanton's classic works on Mvskoke medicine and culture, published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in the 1920s. David Lewis is the direct inheritor of his great grandfather's medicine knowledge.

David Obey has in his nearly forty years in the U.S. House of Representatives worked to bring economic and social justice to America s working families. In 2007 he assumed the chair of the Appropriations Committee and is positioned to pursue his priority concerns for affordable health care, education, environmental protection, and a foreign policy consistent with American democratic ideals. Here, in his autobiography, Obey looks back on his journey in politics beginning with his early years in the Wisconsin Legislature, when Wisconsin moved through eras of shifting balance between Republicans and Democrats. On a national level Obey traces, as few others have done, the dramatic changes in the workings of the U.S. Congress since his first election to the House in 1969. He discusses his own central role in the evolution of Congress and ethics reforms and his view of the recent Bush presidency crucial chapters in our democracy, of interest to all who observe politics and modern U.S. history.Best Books for Regional General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association"

This work addresses the growing challenge of contextuality within Christianity in the setting of the vibrant and dynamic Caribbean. The challenge results from the recognition that all religious practices are conditioned by the geographical, ethnic, socio-economic, and cultural frameworks in which they emerge. This contextuality should inform the way theological diversity within Christianity is addressed, as well as the way Christian formulations are considered in relation to other religions. The text offers conceptual support for the position that Christian theologizing in the Caribbean requires that the context's religious diversity be engaged and that insights from other religions be explored. Processing this position through an examination of religious dynamics within the English-speaking sub-region, the prominent attempt at contextually sensitive Christianity (Caribbean Revisionist Christianity) with the associated theological orientation (Caribbean Theology) is analyzed in relation to formulations and practices from other dominant religions in the area-Afro-Caribbean Religion, Hinduism, and Islam. Epistemological analysis exposes the complexity of the religious life and a framework is proposed for inter-religious engagement. This framework engenders contextually sensitive pluralism and demands that theology be pursued in dialectical mode. The dialectical approach is then dramatized in an inter-religious dialogue on God.

Drawing on anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo's fifteen years of field research, Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche is the first study to follow shamans' gender identities and performance in a variety of ritual, social, sexual, and political contexts.

To Mapuche shamans, or machi, the foye tree is of special importance, not only for its medicinal qualities but also because of its hermaphroditic flowers, which reflect the gender-shifting components of machi healing practices. Framed by the cultural constructions of gender and identity, Bacigalupo's fascinating findings span the ways in which the Chilean state stigmatizes the machi as witches and sexual deviants; how shamans use paradoxical discourses about gender to legitimatize themselves as healers and, at the same time, as modern men and women; the tree's political use as a symbol of resistance to national ideologies; and other components of these rich traditions.

The first comprehensive study on Mapuche shamans' gendered practices, Shamans of the Foye Tree offers new perspectives on this crucial intersection of spiritual, social, and political power.

The Social Context of the Mau Mau Movement in Kenya (1952-1960) explores the social aspects of the Mau Mau Movement, which have been relatively unexamined in scholarly studies of the movement. This work situates the Mau Mau in the context of "Social Movement" literature; and more importantly, blends theory and practice through the use of first-hand narrative from Muigai Kanyua, a fighter in the Mau Mau forest for at least three years. Muigai Kanyua describes the need for strong social networks, trust, faith, and determination in the community and how the Mau Mau provided this courage and perseverance. Through detailed research and Kanyua's narrative, author Kinuthia Macharia explores the social climate that united different clans and ethnic groups and sustained the Mau Mau Movement. The work also examines the role of women in the movement and combat, and the enduring relevance of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya's politics and economic development.

"Will be of interest not only to specialists in Afro-Cuban and African Diaspora religions, but also to medical anthropologists and students of anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. This work provides a particularly revealing entry way into the realities of contemporary Cuba."-- George Brandon, Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, City University of New York Johan Wedel offers a visit inside the world of Santeria healing. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in contemporary Cuba, including interviews with Santeria devotees, firsthand observations of divination sessions, and interviews with healed patients supplemented by comments from Santeria healers, Wedel demonstrates how Santeria healing is carried out and experienced by the participants. Santeria--with roots in Africa and the slave trade and rituals including divination, animal sacrifice, and possession trance--would seem an anachronism in the modern world. Still, Wedel argues, it offers treatment and ideas about illness that are flourishing and even spreading in the face of Western medicine. He shows that Santeria healing is best understood as a transformation of the self, allowing the patient to experience the world in a new way. He grounds his analysis of Santeria in lively and sometimes frightening narratives in which people reveal in their own words the experience of illness, sorcery, and healing. Wedel's account will appeal to scholars and others interested in Santeria, Cuba, and religious healing. He shows that Santeria is not only a challenge to Western medical theory, but also an important contribution to our understanding of illness, suffering, and well-being. Johan Wedel is instructor in social anthropology at Goeteborg University, Sweden.

Here, for the first time in paperback, is a fascinating daily record of Ferdinand Hayden's historic 1871 scientific expedition through Utah, Idaho, and Montana Territories to the Yellowstone Basin. The expedition's findings quickly led Congress to establish Yellowstone as the world's first national park. In addition to its scientific discoveries, the expedition is famous for producing the earliest on-site images of Yellowstone, by its photographer, William Henry Jackson, and its guest artist, Thomas Moran. Marlene Deahl Merrill has woven together a compelling daily narrative from the field writings of three expedition members: unpublished journals kept by mineralogist Albert Peale and geologist George Allen, periodic reports by Peale to his hometown newspaper, and letters from Hayden to his friend and mentor Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. Enriching this narrative are Jackson's photographs of camp scenes and landscapes; rare panoramic drawings by the party's topographical artist, Henry Elliott; maps; an introduction; and extensive annotations.

Osun is a brilliant deity whose imagery and worldwide devotion demand broad and deep scholarly reflection. Contributors to the ground-breaking Africa s Ogun, edited by Sandra Barnes (Indiana University Press, 1997), explored the complex nature of Ogun, the orisa who transforms life through iron and technology. Osun across the Waters continues this exploration of Yoruba religion by documenting Osun religion. Osun presents a dynamic example of the resilience and renewed importance of traditional Yoruba images in negotiating spiritual experience, social identity, and political power in contemporary Africa and the African diaspora.

The 17 contributors to Osun across the Waters delineate the special dimensions of Osun religion as it appears through multiple disciplines in multiple cultural contexts. Tracing the extent of Osun traditions takes us across the waters and back again. Osun traditions continue to grow and change as they flow and return from their sources in Africa and the Americas.
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"Hassig's position is daring and potentially controversial and will be mandatory reading for those who deal with calendrical systems." -- Dr. Barbara J. Price, Columbia University

Based on their enormously complex calendars that recorded cycles of many kinds, the Aztecs and other ancient Mesoamerican civilizations are generally believed to have had a cyclical, rather than linear, conception of time and history. This boldly revisionist book challenges that understanding. Ross Hassig offers convincing evidence that for the Aztecs time was predominantly linear, that it was manipulated by the state as a means of controlling a dispersed tribute empire, and that the Conquest cut off state control and severed the unity of the calendar, leaving only the lesser cycles. From these, he asserts, we have inadequately reconstructed the pre-Columbian calendar and so misunderstood the Aztec conception of time and history.

Hassig first presents the traditional explanation of the Aztec calendrical system and its ideological functions and then marshals contrary evidence to argue that the Aztec elite deliberately used calendars and timekeeping to achieve practical political ends. He further traces how the Conquest played out in the temporal realm as Spanish conceptions of time partially displaced the Aztec ones. His findings promise to revolutionize our understanding of how the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican societies conceived of time and history.