Relocating the Sacred

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Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438490739
Total Pages : 482 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Relocating the Sacred by : Niyi Afolabi

Download or read book Relocating the Sacred written by Niyi Afolabi and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Brazil is home to the largest African diaspora, the religions of its African descendants have often been syncretized and submerged, first under the force of colonialism and enslavement and later under the spurious banner of a harmonious national Brazilian character. Relocating the Sacred argues that these religions nevertheless have been preserved and manifested in a strategic corpus of shifting masks and masquerades of Afro-Brazilian identity. Following the re-Africanization process and black consciousness movement of the 1970s to 1990s, Afro-Brazilians have questioned racial democracy, seeing how its claim to harmony actually dispossesses them of political power. By embracing African deities as a source of creative inspiration and resistance, Afro-Brazilians have appropriated syncretism as a means of not only popularizing African culture but also decolonizing themselves from the past shame of slavery. This book maps the role of African heritage in—and relocation of the sacred to—three sites of Brazilian cultural production: ritual altars, literature, and carnival culture.

The African Religions of Brazil

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801886249
Total Pages : 536 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (862 download)

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Book Synopsis The African Religions of Brazil by : Roger Bastide

Download or read book The African Religions of Brazil written by Roger Bastide and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2007-06-18 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monteiro.--John A. Coleman "Theological Studies"

Secrets, Gossip, and Gods

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198034296
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis Secrets, Gossip, and Gods by : Paul Christopher Johnson

Download or read book Secrets, Gossip, and Gods written by Paul Christopher Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging book Paul Christopher Johnson explores the changing, hidden face of the Afro-Brazilian indigenous religion of Candomblé. Despite its importance in Brazilian society, Candomblé has received far less attention than its sister religions Vodou and Santeria. Johnson seeks to fill this void by offering a comprehensive look at the development, beliefs, and practices of Candomblé and exploring its transformation from a secret society of slaves--hidden, persecuted, and marginalized--to a public religion that is very much a part of Brazilian culture. Johnson traces this historical shift and locates the turning point in the creation of Brazilian national identity and a public sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. His major focus is on the ritual practice of secrecy in Candomblé. Like Vodou and Santeria and the African Yoruba religion from which they are descended, Candomblé features a hierarchic series of initiations, with increasing access to secret knowledge at each level. As Johnson shows, the nature and uses of secrecy evolved with the religion. First, secrecy was essential to a society that had to remain hidden from authorities. Later, when Candomblé became known and actively persecuted, its secrecy became a form of resistance as well as an exotic hidden power desired by elites. Finally, as Candomblé became a public religion and a vital part of Brazilian culture, the debate increasingly turned away from the secrets themselves and toward their possessors. It is speech about secrets, and not the content of those secrets, that is now most important in building status, legitimacy and power in Candomblé. Offering many first hand accounts of the rites and rituals of contemporary Candomblé, this book provides insight into this influential but little-studied group, while at the same time making a valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religion and society.

Black Atlantic Religion

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400833973
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Atlantic Religion by : J. Lorand Matory

Download or read book Black Atlantic Religion written by J. Lorand Matory and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a "survival," or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world. With counterparts in Nigeria, the Benin Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad, and the United States, Candomblé is a religion of spirit possession, dance, healing, and blood sacrifice. Most surprising to those who imagine Candomblé and other such religions as the products of anonymous folk memory is the fact that some of this religion's towering leaders and priests have been either well-traveled writers or merchants, whose stake in African-inspired religion was as much commercial as spiritual. Morever, they influenced Africa as much as Brazil. Thus, for centuries, Candomblé and its counterparts have stood at the crux of enormous transnational forces. Vividly combining history and ethnography, Matory spotlights a so-called "folk" religion defined not by its closure or internal homogeneity but by the diversity of its connections to classes and places often far away. Black Atlantic Religion sets a new standard for the study of transnationalism in its subaltern and often ancient manifestations.

Reinventing Religions

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780847688531
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (885 download)

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Book Synopsis Reinventing Religions by : Sidney M. Greenfield

Download or read book Reinventing Religions written by Sidney M. Greenfield and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once a central concept in anthropology, syncretism has recently re-emerged as a valuable tool for understanding the complex dynamics of ethnicity, postcolonialism, and transnationalism. Building on a century-long tradition of scholarship, this important book formulates a broader view of the mixing and interpenetration of religious beliefs and practices, primarily from Africa and Europe, highlighting the ways in which religions and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic have been assimilated and innovatively changed. Divided into four sections, the book focuses on religious syncretism in Brazil, Jamaica, and other parts of the Caribbean and West Africa. Greenfield and Droogers have brought together an array of outstanding international scholars whose rich and varied essays on specific geographical locales and customs comprise an innovative and comprehensive view of the transference of religious traditions and their continuity and reformulation on two continents.

Sacred Leaves of Candomblé

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Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292773854
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (927 download)

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Book Synopsis Sacred Leaves of Candomblé by : Robert A. Voeks

Download or read book Sacred Leaves of Candomblé written by Robert A. Voeks and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Hubert Herring Book Award, Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies Candomblé, an African religious and healing tradition that spread to Brazil during the slave trade, relies heavily on the use of plants in its spiritual and medicinal practices. When its African adherents were forcibly transplanted to the New World, they faced the challenge not only of maintaining their culture and beliefs in the face of European domination but also of finding plants with similar properties to the ones they had used in Africa. This book traces the origin, diffusion, medicinal use, and meaning of Candomblé's healing pharmacopoeia—the sacred leaves. Robert Voeks examines such topics as the biogeography of Africa and Brazil, the transference—and transformation—of Candomblé as its adherents encountered both native South American belief systems and European Christianity, and the African system of medicinal plant classification that allowed Candomblé to survive and even thrive in the New World. This research casts new light on topics ranging from the creation of African American cultures to tropical rain forest healing floras.

Searching for Africa in Brazil

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822392046
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Searching for Africa in Brazil by : Stefania Capone Laffitte

Download or read book Searching for Africa in Brazil written by Stefania Capone Laffitte and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Nagô (Yoruba) cult in the northeastern state of Bahia. In contrast to other researchers, Capone foregrounds the agency of Candomblé leaders. She demonstrates that they successfully imposed their vision of Candomblé 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.

Africas of the Americas

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9047432703
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (474 download)

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Book Synopsis Africas of the Americas by :

Download or read book Africas of the Americas written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-03-31 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Searching for Africa in Brazil

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Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press Books
ISBN 13 : 9780822346258
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (462 download)

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Book Synopsis Searching for Africa in Brazil by : Stefania Capone Laffitte

Download or read book Searching for Africa in Brazil written by Stefania Capone Laffitte and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Nagô (Yoruba) cult in the northeastern state of Bahia. In contrast to other researchers, Capone foregrounds the agency of Candomblé leaders. She demonstrates that they successfully imposed their vision of Candomblé 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.

Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478013117
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas by : Yolanda Covington-Ward

Download or read book Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas written by Yolanda Covington-Ward and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifá practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healing, and sexual and gender politics. In this way, the body is a crucial site of religiously motivated social action for people of African descent. Contributors. Rachel Cantave, Youssef Carter, N. Fadeke Castor, Yolanda Covington-Ward, Casey Golomski, Elyan Jeanine Hill, Nathanael J. Homewood, Jeanette S. Jouili, Bertin M. Louis Jr., Camee Maddox-Wingfield, Aaron Montoya, Jacob K. Olupona, Elisha P. Renne

Fragments of Bone

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252072057
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Fragments of Bone by : Patrick Bellegarde-Smith

Download or read book Fragments of Bone written by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fragments of Bone, thirteen essayists discuss African religions as forms of resistance and survival in the face of Western cultural hegemony and imperialism. The collection presents scholars working outside of the Western tradition with backgrounds in a variety of disciplines, genders, and nationalities. These experts draw on research, fieldwork, personal interviews, and spiritual introspection to support a provocative thesis: that fragments of ancestral traditions are fluidly interwoven into New World African religions as creolized rituals, symbolic systems, and cultural identities. Contributors: Osei-Mensah Aborampah, Niyi Afolabi, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Randy P. Conner, T. J. Desch-Obi, Ina Johanna Fandrich, Kean Gibson, Marilyn Houlberg, Nancy B. Mikelsons, Roberto Nodal, Rafael Ocasio, Miguel "Willie" Ramos, and Denise Ferreira da Silva

Manipulating the Sacred

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Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780814328521
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (285 download)

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Book Synopsis Manipulating the Sacred by : Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara

Download or read book Manipulating the Sacred written by Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first art historical study of Yoruba-descended African Brazilian religious art based on an author's long-term participation in and observation of private and public rituals.

City of 201 Gods

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520265564
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis City of 201 Gods by : Jacob Olupona

Download or read book City of 201 Gods written by Jacob Olupona and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author focuses on one of the most important religious centers in Africa: 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. He describes how the city went from great prominence to near obliteration and then rose again as a contemporary city of gods. Throughout, he 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.

Spirit Song

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199368228
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

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Book Synopsis Spirit Song by : Marc Gidal

Download or read book Spirit Song written by Marc Gidal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explains how a multi-faith community in Brazil uses music both to combine and segregate three Afro-Brazilian religions: Batuque, Umbanda, and Quimbanda. It is a book-length study in English about music in Afro-Brazilian religions, which have synthesized African religions, folk Catholicism, Amerindian traditions, and in some cases European Spiritism.

Spirits and Trance in Brazil

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 147425568X
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis Spirits and Trance in Brazil by : Bettina E. Schmidt

Download or read book Spirits and Trance in Brazil written by Bettina E. Schmidt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bettina E. Schmidt explores experiences usually labelled as spirit possession, a highly contested and challenged term, using extensive ethnographic research conducted in São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil and home to a range of religions which practice spirit possession. The book is enriched by excerpts from interviews with people about their experiences. It focuses on spirit possession in Afro-Brazilian religions and spiritism, as well as discussing the notion of exorcism in Charismatic Christian communities. Spirits and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experience is divided into three sections which present the three main areas in the study of spirit possession. The first section looks at the social dimension of spirit possession, in particular gender roles associated with spirit possession in Brazil and racial stratification of the communities. It shows how gender roles and racial composition have adapted alongside changes in society in the last 100 years. The second section focuses on the way people interpret their practice. It shows that the interpretations of this practice depend on the human relationship to the possessing entities. The third section explores a relatively new field of research, the Western discourse of mind/body dualism and the wide field of cognition and embodiment. All sections together confirm the significance of discussing spirit possession within a wider framework that embraces physical elements as well as cultural and social ones. Bringing together sociological, anthropological, phenomenological and religious studies approaches, this book offers a new perspective on the study of spirit possession.

The Public Face of African New Religious Movements in Diaspora

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Author :
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 1472420128
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (724 download)

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Book Synopsis The Public Face of African New Religious Movements in Diaspora by : Dr Afe Adogame

Download or read book The Public Face of African New Religious Movements in Diaspora written by Dr Afe Adogame and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growing pace of international migration, technological revolution in media and travel generate circumstances that provide opportunities for the mobility of African new religious movements (ANRMs) within Africa and beyond. ANRMs are furthering their self-assertion and self-insertion into the religious landscapes of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Their growing presence and public visibility seem to be more robustly captured by the popular media than by scholars of NRMs, historians of religion and social scientists, a tendency that has probably shaped the public mental picture and understanding of the phenomena. This book provides new theoretical and methodological insights for understanding and interpreting ANRMs and African-derived religions in diaspora. Contributors focus on individual groups and movements drawn from Christian, Islamic, Jewish and African-derived religious movements and explore their provenance and patterns of emergence; their belief systems and ritual practices; their public/civic roles; group self-definition; public perceptions and responses; tendencies towards integration/segregation; organisational networks; gender orientations and the implications of interactions within and between the groups and with the host societies. The book includes contributions from scholars and religious practitioners, thus offering new insights into how ANRMs can be better defined, approached, and interpreted by scholars, policy makers, and media practitioners alike.

Sàngó in Africa and the African Diaspora

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Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780253220943
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Sàngó in Africa and the African Diaspora by : Joel E. Tishken

Download or read book Sàngó in Africa and the African Diaspora written by Joel E. Tishken and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-22 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sàngó in Africa and the African Diaspora is a multidisciplinary, transregional exploration of Sàngó religious traditions in West Africa and beyond. Sàngó—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 Sàngó, the historical Sàngó, and syncretic traditions of Sàngó worship. Readers with an interest in the Yoruba and their religious cultures will find a diverse, complex, and comprehensive portrait of Sàngó worship in Africa and the African world.