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.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015

About the Author

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.

Reviews

This book marks an important advance in research on the archaeology of the black Atlantic; that is, the archaeological study of contacts, parallelisms, and ruptures that marked Old and New World communities during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. . . . Highly recommended.

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Book Information
ISBN 9780253013866
Author Akinwumi Ogundiran
Format Hardback
Page Count 410
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 762g