Passages & afterworlds
Subtitle: anthropological perspectives on death in the Caribbean
By: Maarit Forde & Yanique Hume, editors
Contributors: Duke University Press
Series: Religious cultures of African and African diaspora people; Religious cultures of African and African diaspora people
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 297
ISBN-13: 9781478000310; 9781478000143; 9781478002130
Copyright date: 2018
Subjects: Religious life and customs; Death; Funeral rites and ceremonies; Social aspects; Political aspects; Religious aspects; History
Other titles: Passages and afterworlds
Description: The contributors to this book explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction  -- Maarit Forde -- Chapter 1.; title: "The dead don't come back like the migrant comes back" : many returns in the Garifuna dügü  -- Paul Christopher Johnson -- Chapter 2.; title: Of vital spirit and precarious bodies in Amerindian socialities  -- George Mentore -- Chapter 3.; title: The making of ancestors in a Surinamese Maroon society  -- Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering and Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen -- Chapter 4.; title: Death and the construction of social space : land, kinship, and identity in the Jamaican mortuary cycle  -- Yanique Hume -- Chapter 5.; title: Mortuary rites and social dramas in Léogâne, Haiti / K -- aren Richman -- 6.; title: From Zonbi to Samdi : late transformations in Haitian eschatology  -- Donald Cosentino -- 7.; title: Governing death in Trinidad and Tobago  -- Maarit Forde -- Chapter 8.; title: Death and the problem of orthopraxy in Caribbean Hinduism : reconsidering the politics and poetics of Indo-Trinidadian mortuary ritual  -- Keith E. McNeal -- Chapter 9.; title: Chasing death's left hand : personal encounters with death and its rituals in the Caribbean -- Richard Price -- Aftermath: Life and postlife in Caribbean religions /-- Aisha Khan.