Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic - Hardcover

by Akinwumi Ogundiran (Editor), Paula Saunders (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

Akinwumi Ogundiran is Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology, and History and Chair of the Africana Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is editor (with Toyin Falola) of Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora (IUP, 2007).

Paula Saunders is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York.