Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic

Description

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015

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.

Preface
1. On the Materiality of Black Atlantic Rituals / Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders
2. Reconstructing the Archaeology of Movement in Northern Ghana: Insights into Past Ritual Posture and Performance / Timothy Insoll and Benjamin W. Kankpeyeng
3. Sacred Vorticies of the African Atlantic World: Materiality of the Accumulative Aesthetic in the Hueda Kingdom, 1650-1727 / Neil Norman
4. Cowries and Rituals of Self-Realization in the Yoruba Region, West Africa, ca. 1600–1860 / Akinwumi Ogundiran
5. Spiritual Vibrations of Historic Kormantse and the Search for African Identity Diaspora Identity and Freedom / E. Kofi Agorsah
6. Rituals of Iron in the Black Atlantic World / Candice Goucher
7. Transatlantic Meanings: African Rituals and Material Culture from the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean / Pablo F. Gómez
8. "Instruments of Obeah": The Significance of Ritual Objects in the Jamaican Legal System, 1760 to Present / Danielle Boaz
9. Charms and Spiritual Practitioners: Negotiating Power Dynamics in an Enslaved African Community in Jamaica / Paula Saunders
10. Mundane or Spiritual? – The Interpretation of Glass Bottle Containers Found on Two Sites of the African Diaspora / Matthew Reeves
11. Ritual Bundle in Colonial Annapolis / Mark P. Leone, Jocelyn E. Knauf and Amanda Tang
12. Dexterous Creation: Material Manifestations of Instrumental Symbolism in the Americas / Christopher C. Fennell
13. Ritualized Figuration in Special African-American Yards / Grey Gundaker
14. "I Cry 'I Am' For All to Hear Me": The Informal Cemetery in Central Georgia / Hugh B. Matternes and Staci Richey
15. Spatial and Material Transformations in Commemoration on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands / Helen C. Blouet
16. "As Above, So Below": Ritual and Commemoration in African-American Archaeological Contexts in the Northern United States / Cheryl J. LaRoche
17. Cape Coast Castle and Rituals of Memory / Brempong Osei-Tutu
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• Ethnic Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• África
• América
• Biblical archaeology
• General officer
• History of Africa
• General
• American
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253013910
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

MATERIALITIES OF RITUAL IN THE BLACK ATLANTIC
BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA
FOUNDING EDITORS
Darlene Clark Hine

John McCluskey, Jr., and

David Barry Gaspar
EDITORS
Herman L. Bennett

Kim D. Butler

Judith A. Byfield

Tracy Sharpley-Whiting
Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic
EDITED BY
Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone [phone]
Fax [phone]
2014 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Materialities of ritual in the Black Atlantic / edited by Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders.
page cm. - (Blacks in the diaspora)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01386-6 (cloth) - ISBN 978-0-253-01391-0 (ebook) 1. African diaspora. 2. Blacks-Material culture- Atlantic Ocean Region. 3. Blacks-Material culture-Caribbean Area. 4. African Americans-Material culture. 5. Material culture-Atlantic Ocean Region. 6. Material culture-Caribbean Area. 7. Material culture-United States. 8. Ritual-Atlantic Ocean Region. 9. Ritual-Caribbean Area. 10. Ritual-United States. I. Ogundiran, Akinwumi, editor of compilation, author. II. Saunders, Paula V., editor of compilation, author. III. Series: Blacks in the diaspora.
DT16.5.M37 2014
306.45096-dc23
2014010218
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
Robert Farris Thompson (b. 1932)
Ogun, the pathfinder in Black Atlantic Studies, and
Otegbeye (ca. 1840-1890)
Orphan of the Middle Passage, gentle warrior of Ibadan, Ogun-Osoosi, the restorer of memory
- AO
AND
Many people in the Black Atlantic world who have and continue to engage in ritual: your practice has not gone unnoticed.
- PS
CONTENTS
Preface
1. On the Materiality of Black Atlantic Rituals
Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders
2. Reconstructing the Archaeology of Movement in Northern Ghana: Insights into Past Ritual Posture and Performance
Timothy Insoll and Benjamin W. Kankpeyeng
3. Sacred Vortices of the African Atlantic World: Materiality of the Accumulative Aesthetic in the Hueda Kingdom, 1650-1727 CE
Neil L. Norman
4. Cowries and Rituals of Self-Realization in the Yoruba Region, ca. 1600-1860
Akinwumi Ogundiran
5. Spiritual Vibrations of Historic Kormantse and the Search for African Diaspora Identity and Freedom
E. Kofi Agorsah
6. Rituals of Iron in the Black Atlantic World
Candice Goucher
7. Transatlantic Meanings: African Rituals and Material Culture in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean
Pablo F. G mez
8. Instruments of Obeah : The Significance of Ritual Objects in the Jamaican Legal System, 1760 to the Present
Danielle N. Boaz
9. Charms and Spiritual Practitioners: Negotiating Power Dynamics in an Enslaved African Community in Jamaica
Paula Saunders
10. Mundane or Spiritual? The Interpretation of Glass Bottle Containers Found on Two Sites of the African Diaspora
Matthew Reeves
11. Ritual Bundle in Colonial Annapolis
Mark P. Leone, Jocelyn E. Knauf, and Amanda Tang
12. Dexterous Creation: Material Manifestations of Instrumental Symbolism in the Americas
Christopher C. Fennell
13. Ritualized Figuration in Special African American Yards
Grey Gundaker
14. I Cry I Am for All to Hear Me : The Informal Cemetery in Central Georgia
Hugh B. Matternes and Staci Richey
15. Spatial and Material Transformations in Commemoration on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands
Helen C. Blouet
16. As Above, So Below : Ritual and Commemoration in African American Archaeological Contexts in the Northern United States
Cheryl J. LaRoche
17. Cape Coast Castle and Rituals of Memory
Brempong Osei-Tutu
References
List of Contributors
Index
PREFACE
Broadly, the human experience of material-things, objects, and their contexts-in ritual domains is the subject of this book, with emphasis on the everyday rituals that define human conditions in the Black Atlantic. There are indeed many studies that have examined different aspects of spiritual and religious traditions of African-descended populations in the Atlantic world. This current book is different in its focus on the material dimensions of quotidian rituals. The overriding question that guides the volume is how objects, places, and landscapes are mobilized to fulfill their communicative, symbolic, and semiotic roles in the rituals of everyday life dealing with the different ramifications of human conditions, including birth, death, healing, wellness, social preservation, self-realization, memory, and identity formation, and the consequences for forging meaningful human existence.
We have sought to answer this question across different temporal and spatial planes. In the process, the contributors offer important insights into the agentive action of the material life on the cultural formation processes through which rituals were invented and mobilized in the making of modern black subjectivities. They take us out of the synchronic boundaries of meanings that have dominated the literature to the open field of meaningfulness that highlight Black Atlantic rituals as innovative cultural processes and products enmeshed in sociopolitical and economic realities as well as spiritual and power relations. This collection of integrated essays also examines how the entanglement of the African-descended peoples in different spheres of the Atlantic encounters-commerce, commodification, slavery, Middle Passage, colonialism, and post-emancipation-shaped the forms, contents, and meanings of ritual practices; and how, through rituals, the Africana peoples created different understandings of their material conditions in the Atlantic world.
This book is a sequel to Archaeology of the Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora (Indiana University Press 2007, paperback 2010), co-edited by one of us. This earlier work is an introductory volume on the subject of Black Atlantic archaeology in general. The current book, Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic , offers a more focused theme. It centers on what rituals do in individualized contexts and community settings, as meaningful representations of social realities in the modern world. It showcases the materials with which everyday ritual practices were constituted as a set of actions through which thought is realized. It also highlights how the material practices in ritual are thoughtful processes through which action is constituted and made meaningful. Hence, in seventeen chapters, the contributors privilege materiality as a conceptual and empirical starting point for investigating ritual practice in the Africana world. They inject the variegated African and African Diaspora experiences into the bourgeoning literature on ritual and materiality as critical sites for investigating human conditions. Each chapter is a product of original research that taps into two or more evidentiary sources including archaeological, archival, mythistorical, folklore, mortuary, and ethnographic studies. We, however, foreground archaeological perspectives in the questions and thematic priorities that constitute the substantive focus of the volume. Hence, the book highlights the archaeological resonances of some of the issues that are increasingly becoming vital in material, ritual, and religious studies. The book also showcases the kinds of interdisciplinary dialogues that need to take place between archaeology and other disciplines in Black Atlantic studies, especially history and cultural anthropology.
It is not possible to cover all of the geographical and thematic scopes for the dense topic we have taken up in this volume. Many chapters demonstrate circumatlantic and transatlantic perspectives in their multisited empirical, conceptual, and comparative pursuits across the ocean and within particular Atlantic regions, while others are cisatlantic-focusing on particular places in the Atlantic world (Armitage 2002). Overall, the volume concentrates on four areas: the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, and their hinterlands; the U.S. eastern seaboard; the Caribbean; and the northern coastlands of South America. There is also secondary reference to the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa. We hope the conceptual issues raised and the methodological paths pursued in these case studies open new directions for engaging materialities of ritual in the wider terrains of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora, while also serving as a springboard for exploring new questions about cultural formation, materiality, and ritual process in general.
Most of the chapters in this book evolved from papers presented in the symposium on Materialities and Meanings of Rituals in Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora at the Society of Histori