Materialities Of Ritual In The Black Atlantic

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Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic

Author : Akinwumi Ogundiran
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253013917
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic by : Akinwumi Ogundiran

Download or read book Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic written by Akinwumi Ogundiran and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.

Materialities of Religion

Author : Niall Finneran
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1351025449
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Materialities of Religion by : Niall Finneran

Download or read book Materialities of Religion written by Niall Finneran and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-22 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an overview of the material expressions of Caribbean religious expressions, including those that have been imported through the vehicle of colonialism, and which subsequently changed and adapted within the Caribbean Islands and those religious expressions which developed through the contact of African, indigenous and imported world views. This book takes a multi-disciplinary perspective, drawing from subjects as diverse as archaeology, religious studies, history, human geography and anthropology. It introduces current topical debates around the role of colonialism and religion in the Caribbean, and also considers theoretical approaches to the study of Caribbean religions set within a wider global context. This approach introduces the reader to a number of important and topical concepts around the wider study of Caribbean religions, and illuminates the complex cultural history and interplay of these religions in the Caribbean Islands. Richly illustrated and drawing upon a range of different cultural approaches, it offers new and challenging perspectives on the development and cultural history of Caribbean spiritual and religious expression through the lens of the material world. The book is for anyone interested in the Caribbean as a region and the role of religious behaviour in human society. Students of religions, archaeology and anthropology will find a number of thought-provoking and important case studies which relate complex theories to real-world case studies. Any profits from this book will be donated to UNICEF Eastern Caribbean projects supporting vulnerable children in the region (https://www.unicef.org/easterncaribbean/).

Material Explorations in African Archaeology

Author : Timothy Insoll
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191062227
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Material Explorations in African Archaeology by : Timothy Insoll

Download or read book Material Explorations in African Archaeology written by Timothy Insoll and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How people engaged with materials such as clay or stone, why people dug features such as pits, why they decorated their bodies, or treated their dead in certain ways, were all meaningful in the African past. However, these are subjects that have been generally neglected by archaeologists working in Africa until recently. Material Explorations in African Archaeology examines materiality in African archaeology by exploring concepts of material agency and material engagement and entanglement in relation to their manifest presence in persons, animals, objects, substances, and contexts. It investigates the magnificent and complex world of past African materiality by considering a range of case studies. These include, for example, why standing stones were erected, the potential meanings of bodily alteration practices such as scarification and dental modification, and why, recurrently, Africans in the past gave ritual importance to objects, materials, and locations thought of as exotic or different. Adopting a multidisciplinary focus, the volume draws not only on archaeology but also, among other areas, ethnography and history, discussing themes such as bodies, landscape, healing and medicine, and divination, as well as concepts such as memory and biography, transformation, and metaphor and metonym.

Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space

Author : Grace Turner
Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 1683400364
Total Pages : 197 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (834 download)

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Book Synopsis Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space by : Grace Turner

Download or read book Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space written by Grace Turner and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Provides new insights into how enslaved and freed Africans in the New World navigated racialized landscapes while honoring the memories of their dead."--Laurie A. Wilkie, coauthor of Sampling Many Pots: An Archaeology of Memory and Tradition at a Bahamian Plantation "Turner's unique hybrid approach makes this book a valuable resource in the study of the African diaspora."--Rosalyn Howard, author of Black Seminoles in the Bahamas The Anglican Church established St. Matthew's Parish on the eastern side of Nassau to accommodate a population increase after British Loyalists migrated to the Bahamas in the 1780s. The parish had three separate cemeteries: the churchyard cemetery and Centre Burial Ground were for whites, but the Northern Burial Ground was officially consecrated for nonwhites in 1826 by the Bishop of Jamaica. In Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space, Grace Turner posits that the African-Bahamian community intentionally established this separate cemetery in order to observe non-European burial customs. Analyzing the landscape and artifacts found at the site, Turner shows how the community used this space to maintain a sense of social and cultural belonging despite the power of white planters and the colonial government. Although the Northern Burial Ground was covered by storm surges in the 1920s, and later a sidewalk was built through the site, Turner's fieldwork reveals a wealth of material culture. She points to the cemetery's location near water, trees planted at the heads of graves, personal items left with the dead, and remnants of food offerings as evidence of mortuary practices originating in West and Central Africa. According to Turner, these African-influenced ways of memorializing the dead illustrate W. E. B. Du Bois's idea of "double consciousness"--the experience of existing in two irreconcilable cultures at the same time. Comparing the burial ground with others in Great Britain and the American colonies, Turner demonstrates how Africans in the Atlantic diaspora did not always adopt European customs but often created a separate, parallel world for themselves. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology

Author : Charles E. Orser, Jr.
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351786245
Total Pages : 1039 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (517 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology by : Charles E. Orser, Jr.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology written by Charles E. Orser, Jr. and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-26 with total page 1039 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology is a multi-authored compendium of articles on specific topics of interest to today’s historical archaeologists, offering perspectives on the current state of research and collectively outlining future directions for the field. The broad range of topics covered in this volume allows for specificity within individual chapters, while building to a cumulative overview of the field of historical archaeology as it stands, and where it could go next. Archaeological research is discussed in the context of current sociological concerns, different approaches and techniques are assessed, and potential advances are posited. This is a comprehensive treatment of the sub-discipline, engaging key contemporary debates, and providing a series of specially-commissioned geographical overviews to complement the more theoretical explorations. This book is designed to offer a starting point for students who may wish to pursue particular topics in more depth, as well as for non-archaeologists who have an interest in historical archaeology. Archaeologists, historians, preservationists, and all scholars interested in the role historical archaeology plays in illuminating daily life during the past five centuries will find this volume engaging and enlightening.

Knowledge in Motion

Author : Andrew P. Roddick
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
ISBN 13 : 0816532605
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Knowledge in Motion by : Andrew P. Roddick

Download or read book Knowledge in Motion written by Andrew P. Roddick and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge in Motion brings together archaeologists, historians, and cultural anthropologists to examine communities from around the globe as they engage in a range of practices constituting situated learned and knowledge transmission. The contributors lay the groundwork to forge productive theories and methodologies for exploring situated learning and its broad-ranging outcomes.

Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas

Author : Cécile Fromont
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271084340
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas by : Cécile Fromont

Download or read book Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas written by Cécile Fromont and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume demonstrates how, from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholicism and Christian-derived celebrations as spaces for autonomous cultural expression, social organization, and political empowerment. Their appropriation of Catholic-based celebrations calls into question the long-held idea that Africans and their descendants in the diaspora either resignedly accepted Christianity or else transformed its religious rituals into syncretic objects of stealthy resistance. In cities and on plantations throughout the Americas, men and women of African birth or descent staged mock battles against heathens, elected Christian queens and kings with great pageantry, and gathered in festive rituals to express their devotion to saints. Many of these traditions endure in the twenty-first century. The contributors to this volume draw connections between these Afro-Catholic festivals—observed from North America to South America and the Caribbean—and their precedents in the early modern kingdom of Kongo, one of the main regions of origin of men and women enslaved in the New World. This transatlantic perspective offers a useful counterpoint to the Yoruba focus prevailing in studies of African diasporic religions and reveals how Kongo-infused Catholicism constituted a site for the formation of black Atlantic tradition. Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas complicates the notion of Christianity as a European tool of domination and enhances our comprehension of the formation and trajectory of black religious culture on the American continent. It will be of great interest to scholars of African diaspora, religion, Christianity, and performance. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Kevin Dawson, Jeroen Dewulf, Junia Ferreira Furtado, Michael Iyanaga, Dianne M. Stewart, Miguel A. Valerio, and Lisa Voigt.

Material Worlds

Author : Barbara J. Heath
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317327292
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Material Worlds by : Barbara J. Heath

Download or read book Material Worlds written by Barbara J. Heath and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Material Worlds examines consumption from an archaeological perspective, broadly exploring the intersection of social relations and objects through the processes of production, distribution, use, reuse, and discard. Interrogating individual objects as well as considering the contexts in which acts of consumption take place, a range of case studies present the intertwined issues of power, inequality, identity, and community as mediated through choice, access, and use of the diversity of mass-produced goods. Key themes of this innovative volume include the relationship between colonial, political and economic structures and the practices of consumption, the use of consumer goods in the construction and negotiation of identity, and the dialectic between strategies of consumption and individual or community choices. Situating studies of consumerism within the field of historical archaeology, this exciting collection reflects on the interrelationship between the material and ideological aspects of culture. With a focus on North America from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries, Material Worlds is an important examination of consumption which will appeal to scholars with interests in colonialism, gender and race, as well as those engaged with the material culture of the emergent modern world.

The Archaeology of Harriet Tubman's Life in Freedom

Author : Douglas V. Armstrong
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 0815655231
Total Pages : 508 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (156 download)

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Book Synopsis The Archaeology of Harriet Tubman's Life in Freedom by : Douglas V. Armstrong

Download or read book The Archaeology of Harriet Tubman's Life in Freedom written by Douglas V. Armstrong and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-09 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harriet Tubman’s social activism as well as her efforts as a soldier, nurse, and spy have been retold in countless books and films and have justly elevated her to iconic status in American history. Given her fame and contributions, it is surprising how little is known of her later years and her continued efforts for social justice, women’s rights, and care for the elderly. Tubman housed and cared for her extended family, parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews, as well as many other African Americans seeking refuge. Ultimately her house just outside of Auburn, New York, would become a focal point of Tubman’s expanded efforts to provide care to those who came to her seeking shelter and support, in the form of the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. In this book, Armstrong reconstructs and interprets Tubman’s public and private life in freedom through integrating his archaeological findings with historical research. The material record Tubman left behind sheds vital light on her life and the ways in which she interacted with local and national communities, giving readers a fuller understanding of her impact on the lives of African Americans. Armstrong’s research is part of a wider effort to enhance public interpretation and engagement with the Harriet Tubman Home.

Istwa across the Water

Author : Toni Pressley-Sanon
Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 0813072204
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Istwa across the Water by : Toni Pressley-Sanon

Download or read book Istwa across the Water written by Toni Pressley-Sanon and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-01-03 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Isis Duarte Book Prize Gathering oral stories and visual art from Haiti and two of its "motherlands" in Africa, Istwa across the Water recovers the submerged histories of the island through methods drawn from its deep spiritual and cultural traditions. Toni Pressley-Sanon employs three theoretical anchors to bring together parts of the African diaspora that are profoundly fractured because of the slave trade. The first is the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, which she uses to identify parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region as Haiti's twinned sites of cultural production. Second, she draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite's idea of tidalectics—the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves—as a way to look at the cultural exchange set in motion by the transatlantic movement of captives. Finally, Pressley-Sanon searches out the places where history and memory intersect in story, expressed by the Kreyòl term istwa. Challenging the tendency to read history linearly, this volume offers a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.

Field Manual for the Archaeology of Ritual, Religion, and Magic

Author : C. Riley Augé
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1800735049
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Field Manual for the Archaeology of Ritual, Religion, and Magic by : C. Riley Augé

Download or read book Field Manual for the Archaeology of Ritual, Religion, and Magic written by C. Riley Augé and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-07-08 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By bringing together in one place specific objects, materials, and features indicating ritual, religious, or magical belief used by people around the world and through time, this tool will assist archaeologists in identifying evidence of belief-related behaviors and broadening their understanding of how those behaviors may also be seen through less obvious evidential lines. Instruction and templates for recording, typologizing, classifying, and analyzing ritual or magico-religious material culture are also provided to guide researchers in the survey, collection, and cataloging processes. The bulleted formatting and topical range make this a highly accessible work, while providing an incredible wealth of information in a single volume.

African Archaeology Without Frontiers

Author : Chapurukha M Kusimba
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1776140354
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (761 download)

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Book Synopsis African Archaeology Without Frontiers by : Chapurukha M Kusimba

Download or read book African Archaeology Without Frontiers written by Chapurukha M Kusimba and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, contributors to African Archaeology Without Frontiers argue against artificial limits and divisions created through the study of ?ages? that in reality overlap and cannot and should not be understood in isolation. Papers are drawn from the proceedings of the landmark 14th PanAfrican Archaeological Association Congress, held in Johannesburg in 2014, nearly seven decades after the conference planned for 1951 was re-located to Algiers for ideological reasons following the National Party?s rise to power in South Africa. Contributions by keynote speakers Chapurukha Kusimba and Akin Ogundiran encourage African archaeologists to practise an archaeology that collaborates across many related fields of study to enrich our understanding of the past. The nine papers cover a broad geographical sweep by incorporating material on ongoing projects throughout the continent including South Africa, Botswana, Cameroon, Togo, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria. Thematically, the papers included in the volume address issues of identity and interaction, and the need to balance cultural heritage management and sustainable development derived from a continent racked by social inequalities and crippling poverty. Edited by three leading archaeologists, the collection covers many aspects of African archaeology, and a range of periods from the earliest hominins to the historical period. It will appeal to specialists and interested amateurs.

The Yoruba

Author : Akinwumi Ogundiran
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253051525
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis The Yoruba by : Akinwumi Ogundiran

Download or read book The Yoruba written by Akinwumi Ogundiran and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Yoruba: A New History is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent. Weaving together archaeology with linguistics, environmental science with oral traditions, and material culture with mythology, Ogundiran examines the local, regional, and even global dimensions of Yoruba history. The Yoruba: A New History offers an intriguing cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history from ca. 300 BC to 1840. It accounts for the events, peoples, and practices, as well as the theories of knowledge, ways of being, and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience at different junctures of time. The result is a new framework for understanding the Yoruba past and present.

The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions

Author : Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190916966
Total Pages : 569 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions by : Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions written by Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Caribbean is a microcosm of the world. In this very small geographic space one encounters global religions as well as religious practices that are indigenous to the region. This volume provides an overview of Caribbean religions, one that respects the diversity of the religious traditions and the national particularity of the region. It addresses the prominent religious traditions in the Caribbean, with a focus on multiple geographic settings, and examines a cross-section of themes that impact the region broadly and the academic study of Caribbean religion.

Poisoned Relations

Author : Chelsea Berry
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 1512826502
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (128 download)

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Book Synopsis Poisoned Relations by : Chelsea Berry

Download or read book Poisoned Relations written by Chelsea Berry and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events. In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one’s relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved—they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities. Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts—British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas—bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.

Secret Cures of Slaves

Author : Londa Schiebinger
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503602982
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Secret Cures of Slaves by : Londa Schiebinger

Download or read book Secret Cures of Slaves written by Londa Schiebinger and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Engaging unique sources . . . Londa Schiebinger untangles the complex relationships between European and local physicians, healers, plants, and slavery.” —François Regourd, Université Paris Nanterre In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die. The history of medicine bristles with attempts to find new and miraculous remedies, to work with and against nature to restore humans to health and well-being. In this book, Londa Schiebinger examines medicine and human experimentation in the Atlantic World, exploring the circulation of people, disease, plants, and knowledge between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. She traces the development of a colonial medical complex from the 1760s, when a robust experimental culture emerged in the British and French West Indies, to the early 1800s, when debates raged about banning the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. Massive mortality among enslaved Africans and European planters, soldiers, and sailors fueled the search for new healing techniques. Amerindian, African, and European knowledges competed to cure diseases emerging from the collision of peoples on newly established, often poorly supplied, plantations. But not all knowledge was equal. Highlighting the violence and fear endemic to colonial struggles, Schiebinger explores aspects of African medicine that were not put to the test, such as Obeah and vodou. This book analyzes how and why specific knowledges were blocked, discredited, or held secret. “In this urgent, probing and visually striking volume, Londa Schiebinger, one of the pioneers of feminist and colonial science studies, shifts our understanding of Enlightenment racial attitudes to the domain of the medical, making a vital contribution to the dynamic new wave of research on science and slavery in the Atlantic world.” —James Delbourgo, Rutgers University

The Experiential Caribbean

Author : Pablo F. Gómez
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469630885
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis The Experiential Caribbean by : Pablo F. Gómez

Download or read book The Experiential Caribbean written by Pablo F. Gómez and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gomez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gomez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine. Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gomez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world.