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- Convenors:
-
Eric Heuser
(University of Hamburg)
Roberto Strongman (University of California)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- V301
- Sessions:
- Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
This workshop will debate practices of religion and sexuality that challenge national discourses of the 'good' subject. In particular the panel will address the anxious states, fears, and moments of disquiet for the marginalised Caribbean subject.
Long Abstract:
Religion and sexuality are often discussed as separate and diametrically opposed poles disciplining the 'good' and the 'bad' citizen in national discourses. Popular and postcolonial religious and sexual categories of being and modes of social practices challenge the anxieties produced by the imposition and enforcement of these national narratives. What is the location of anxiety in the continuum of the appropriate and the dissident Caribbean subject? How do the various state apparatuses seek to resolve and even prolong these anxious states? Do Caribbean people respond and possibly subvert those structures to become active agents in the processes of their own subjectification? What are the implications of representing the Caribbean as world asylum and 'carnival of emotions' in relation to the 'rationality' of the nation?
Possible topics could include:
• Non-heteronormative sexualities
• Creole religions of the Caribbean
• The un/making of subjectivities
• Madness, anxiety, disquieted emotions
The workshop invites presentations covering religion and sexuality in the context of the Caribbean societies. We envision a panel made up of scholars from a variety of disciplines working on Caribbean societies employing distinct ethnographic approaches.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 13 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
In the contemporary context of Puerto Rico, characterized by the dependency on the USA, afroamerican religions and the recovery of indigenous Taíno heritage emerge as practices of identity resistance which express a sense of Puerto Rican nationalism associated with the larger Afro-Caribbean family.
Paper long abstract:
In contemporary Puerto Rico, Afro-American religions play a key role as nuclei of political resistance, as spaces in which Puerto Rican identity is claimed over a North American one. The same occurs with certain popular Catholic practices and the movement to recover the island's indigenous Taíno heritage.
Moreover, in all of these cults, movements and political discourses, the body, sexuality and material culture are constantly used and evoked. In afroamerican rituals, spiritual alterations are experienced through the body and sexual disorders are often interpreted in a social and moral tone. Sexuality is also visible in the material representations of the female divinities worshipped during ceremonies and in the possession rituals in which these divinities "descend". These goddesses are often used by Puerto Rican women in order to act, through religion, against the patriarchal culture which prevails on the island. Neotaíno's movement is sometimes associated with an ecological and mystic discourse which includes the claim of a "new" concept of body and sexual culture.
In this paper, based on an ongoing fieldwork, I propose to study these religions of resistance using a visual anthropology approach, a discipline which combines the study of the image as a research object, as an ethnographic method and as a part of anthropological discourse. This is an ideal perspective for analyzing the relationship between body, nationalism and popular religions in contemporary Puerto Rico, and for examining the relationship between the particular political and cultural characteristics of the island and other parts of the Caribbean region.
Paper short abstract:
My presentation will focus on how this concept of transcorporeality functions in the Cuban religion of Lucumí / Santería. It narrates my interaction, observations and conversations with Fran, a Cuban Lucumí initiate, as he reflects on the role that the religion acquires in the Cuban Diaspora in the United States. I provide a diasporic ethnography of Lucumí through this informant and the work and life of queer Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, followed by an extended discussion on the role of the body in the work of Cuban surrealist artist Wifredo Lam.
Paper long abstract:
My forthcoming book Black Atlantic Transcorporealities establishes the concept of transcorporeality as the distinct Afro-Diasporic cultural representation of the human psyche as multiple, removable and external to a body that functions as its receptacle. This unique view of the body, preserved in its most evident form in African religious traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, allows the regendering of the bodies of initiates who are mounted and ridden by deities of a gender different than their own during the ritual ecstasy of trance possession. Through discussions of novels, paintings, films and interviews, my book assembles and interprets a representative collection of such transcendental moments in which the commingling of the human and the divine produces subjectivities whose gender is not dictated by biological sex. In so doing, it demonstrates that while transcorporeality is rooted in the religious practice of trance possession, its effects spill over into the every day life of participants and observers of these religions and becomes a leading feature of nearly every aspect of Afro-Diasporic cultural production.
Paper short abstract:
Economic uncertainties and political disquiet in today’s Cuba has pronounced how relationships are often based on economic prospects, rather than ‘love’. This paper investigates the complex and entwined connections resulting from this disquiet, between marital and/or cohabitant partnerships and Santería religious practice, sorcery, as well as the nationalist goals of the Cuban revolution.
Paper long abstract:
Although Cuba is no longer in the 'Periodo Especial' that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, where the country's inhabitants relied almost exclusively on government remittances for their very survival, there remains an air of uncertainty and disquiet, as Cubans wait patiently and expectantly for what will come following the Castro governance. Cuba has not escaped the current global financial crisis, and the footsteps that Cubans now follow in their daily lives are familiar territory; one has to 'luchar' (fight), as in the Special Period, for all things material in order to survive. A series of social consequences follow this disquiet, among them a waning trust in the Socialist agenda, and an increase in followers of Santería and 'brujería' (sorcery). This paper aims to investigate the effects of economic uncertainty on marriages and households in relation to Cuba's original revolutionary aims and how these are contested within marital/cohabitant relationships through the daily use of various forms of religious divination in Santería practice as well as through the spells and curses of 'brujería'.
Paper short abstract:
My paper analyses practices of “Africanization” and competing constructions of “authentic tradition” within a globalized religious setting in Cuban Santería. It focuses transatlantic ritual exchanges, dealing for instance with gender issues, and discusses its local religious impacts.
Paper long abstract:
My paper analyses practices of "Africanization" and competing constructions of "authentic tradition" within a globalized religious setting in Cuban Santería. I focus on a specific project of ritual innovation headed by one of the most famous cult leaders in the trans-local religious sphere in Cuba. Especially it deals with the female initiation into the cult of Ifá which has caused a broader religious conflict which has to be considered as being highly influenced by global debates on Yoruba Religion as a result of general globalization processes within the larger Yoruba Diaspora. My paper will offer an introduction into recent Cuban debate on this controversially discussed ceremony focusing on religious protagonists. Finally I will link this to a broader transnational debate and issues of gender and women's emancipation within religious practice of Cuban Santería.
Paper short abstract:
This research project will frame two insular and culturally fragmented societies: Java and Trinidad—both island societies that stand in an antipodal and parallel relationship to one another. It interrogates how local perceptions of religion and sexuality contribute to shaping the good national subject and how they are both responsible for the making and unmaking of subjectivities.
Paper long abstract:
This research project will frame two insular and culturally fragmented societies: Java and Trinidad—both island societies that stand in an antipodal and parallel relationship to one another. It interrogates how local perceptions of religion and sexuality contribute to shaping the good national subject and how they are both responsible for the making and unmaking of subjectivities. Both Java and Trinidad are island societies which are homes to syncretic, diasporic Islams whose creolization with local belief systems renders them more receptive to non-heteronormative sexualites than orthodox Islam. Therefore, my interest in the relationship of Islam, local belief systems and alternative sexualities leads me to hypothesize that syncretic religions structure and support syncretic sexual and social lives. Along the same lines, my project looks at the ways in which Trinidadian and Javanese Islams exclude, include, and rank subjects in their respective societies and how each guards and regulates access to citizenship and social status. Through ethnographic work in Java and Trinidad, I seek to understand how friendship networks of marginalized people contribute to overcome societal marginalization and disempowerment. A secondary component of this project investigates how social movements function as practices of friendship linking the individual to society. This contributed to our understanding of how practices of marginalization are related to gendered culture and religious politics in these two distant, yet comparable archipelagic nation states. Through the working notion of "transoceanic syncretisms", this project revitalizes theoretical frameworks of Gender Studies, Anthropology of Religion, and Socio-Cultural Change.
Paper short abstract:
Medical and religious cosmologies in Trinidad are intertwined and illnesses may have a spiritual cause. While cosmological beliefs may help deal with uncertainty in life as well as illness, spiritual illnesses may be expressions of the experience of uncertainty and modernity
Paper long abstract:
Across the different healing systems used in Trinidad, health and religion are closely linked. Biomedicine, "bush" medicine and new alternative therapies (which have recently grown as a sector) contain strong spiritual elements and prayer is also commonly used as part of healing.
Religion holds a central role in Trinidadian life more generally, perhaps related to the uncertainty and anxiety of modernity and globalization, and the high rates of crime and violence (and perception of a poorly functioning justice system) the country faces. Spiritual belief may provide existential security where there is little actual security; Afro-Trinidadian cosmological beliefs place the world under God's control, although "Satan is always there". Cosmological beliefs providing explanation for misfortune are central to both medicine and religion and illnesses may also have spiritual cause. Afflictions may be a punishment from God or the devil, or someone (frequently a jealous neighbour) may have "put something on you". While some illnesses are particularly linked to a spiritual cause, a spiritual explanation may be suspected for other cases where a biomedical diagnosis cannot be reached, where illnesses do not follow their expected course, or where a sudden change has occurred in the person. Spiritual understandings of health also address uncertainties in illness or circumstance therefore.
Spiritual illness in Trinidad not only continues to exist through modernity but may be enforced through it. While spiritual beliefs may help deal with uncertainty, Trinidadian worldview suggests that some illnesses and symptoms may themselves be expressions of the uncertainty of modernity.
Paper short abstract:
The Caribbean has seen a radical expansion of massive deaths due to crime, disease and natural disasters. How does one bring order to the imbalances of life through mourning and other rites is a very critical question to pose. How does one deal with extraordinary disturbances and suffering that cause profound personal and collective trauma is another important question to probe. In Haiti, after the January 12, 2010 earthquake which killed 300,000 people, rendered ten percent of the population disabled, displaced three million, and left a million homeless and an entire population traumatized, religion provided some counterbalance to this moment of indescribable physical destruction, utmost devastation, and sheer despondency among those who continue to mourn their dead and care for the living. Haiti is now sacred ground. Using primarily a framework grounded in Vodou metaphysics, this paper probes cosmological connections between the dead and the living and attempts to understand and process communal suffering and loss by asking how death is understood and conceptualized, and how ways of dying and mourning impact the living. This exploration has implications for understanding not only how a community deals with transitions from one existence to a next and concepts of the hereafter, but also it throws into relief how a society values life and how it deals with trauma of great magnitude.
Paper long abstract:
The Caribbean has seen a radical expansion of massive deaths due to crime, disease and natural disasters. How does one bring order to the imbalances of life through mourning and other rites is a very critical question to pose. How does one deal with extraordinary disturbances and suffering that cause profound personal and collective trauma is another important question to probe. In Haiti, after the January 12, 2010 earthquake which killed 300,000 people, rendered ten percent of the population disabled, displaced three million, and left a million homeless and an entire population traumatized, religion provided some counterbalance to this moment of indescribable physical destruction, utmost devastation, and sheer despondency among those who continue to mourn their dead and care for the living.
Haiti is now sacred ground. Using primarily a framework grounded in Vodou metaphysics, this paper probes cosmological connections between the dead and the living and attempts to understand and process communal suffering and loss by asking how death is understood and conceptualized, and how ways of dying and mourning impact the living. This exploration has implications for understanding not only how a community deals with transitions from one existence to a next and concepts of the hereafter, but also it throws into relief how a society values life and how it deals with trauma of great magnitude.