327 p., "This research is in response to the general academic need to examine how black histories have been conceived and written. Instead of folklore, I look to the Osainistas (healers and herbalists initiated into the secrets of Osain) in Cuba as possible partners in a conversation in collaborative conservation. My study of Lucumí (Yorùbá-derived) religion and Osain (deity of the sacred forests, herbs and healings) reveals an embodied understanding of nature through which the boundaries of subject as well as material and spiritual become collapsed and traversed through specialized communication techniques. Ways of knowing through invocations, praise poetry, music and dance are essential to nearly all Yorùbá ritual in which spiritual forces are actualized-evoking and thus invoking spirit into physical form. Yorùbá employ these embodied techniques to transcend boundaries and open communication among spirit, material, temporal and spatial worlds, particularly to understand and work with natural resources. This embodied knowledge is, as Yvonne Daniel argues in her book Dancing Wisdom , "rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge" (2005:4). This intermittently conducted 2003-06 ethnographic study, relies on what I am calling evocative ethnography, which is organized around ethnography using visual and cognitive techniques along with archival research to explore how Lucumí conceptualize nature and how I can translate these embodied perceptions." --The Author.
After [Jean-Jacques Dessalines]' death, [Henri Christophe] assumed leadership of Haiti, but the mulatto minority South set up its own republic under Pétion. Christophe committed suicide in 1820 amid an uprising over his forced labor policies. Pétion's successor, JeanPierre Boyer, reformed the two republics into one Haiti. Boyer ruled until his government collapsed in 1843 due to political rivalry. Until 1915, only two of the 21 governments since 1843 were not dismantled by coups d'états or political in-fighting. Except for agreement on the abolition of slavery, the state and nation were headed in opposite or different directions before the L'Ouverture adherents took over in 1804. The literature on Haiti, from Trinidadian C. L. R. James' classic book The Black Jacobins, to TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson's An Unbroken Agony, all tell the awful consequences of the "color curtain" in claustrophobic Haiti.
The representations of Haiti and Haitians that appeared in mainstream news coverage of the disaster reproduced narratives and stereotypes dating to at least the 19th century. Today, understanding the continuity of these representations matters more than ever.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: D08705
Notes:
Pages 240-249 in Gordon Wilson, Pamela Furniss and Richard Kimbowa (eds.), Environment, development and sustainability: perspectives and cases from around the world. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England. 290 pages.
