85 p., This thesis examines the practice of Obeah--an Afro-Caribbean system of healing, harming, and divination through the use of spiritual powers--within two slave communities in Berbice and Demerara (British Guiana). This study is based primarily on legal documents--including testimony from more than a dozen slaves--generated during the criminal trials of two men accused of practicing Obeah in 1819 and 1821-22. In contrast to most previous studies of Obeah, which have been based largely on descriptions provided by British observers, this project takes advantage of this complex, overlapping body of evidence to explore the social dynamics of Obeah as experienced by enslaved men and women themselves, including Obeah practitioners, their clients, and other witnesses. This study reveals that Obeah rituals could be extremely violent, that Obeah practitioners were feared as well as respected among their contemporaries, that the authority of Obeah practitioners was based on demonstrable success, and that slave communities in general were complex social worlds characterized by conflict and division as well as by support and unity--conclusions that combine to produce a fresh, humane vision of Afro-diasporan culture and community under slavery.
Not rooted or identified as a Brazilian martial art, Capoiera Angola is the foundation of which African-Brazilians adapted the rhythmic form of self-defense and offense called Capoiera. The indigineous Capoiera Angola is the mother/father of Brazil's Capoeira, which was formed when Africans from Central Africa were brought to South America in bondage. Capoeira Angola goes further.
Dantas,Beatriz Góis (Author) and Berg,Stephen (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
198 p., Compares the formation of religious traditions and ethnic identities in the Brazilian states of Sergipe and Bahia, revealing how they diverged from each other due to their different social and political contexts and needs.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
316 p., An ethnography of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions including Candomble shows that the lines separating one tradition from another are much less fixed than anthropologists and Afro-Brazilian religious elites have maintained.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published in Portuguese in Campinas by Editora da Unicamp as A formação do Candomblé: História e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia, 2006., 398 p., Interweaving three centuries of transatlantic religious and social history with historical and present-day ethnography, Luis Nicolau Pares traces the formation of Candomble, one of the most influential African-derived religious forms in the African diaspora, with practitioners today centered in Brazil but also living in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas.
