247 p., Discusses the diasporic origins of Palo Mayombe, a Kongo-Cuban religious tradition, while seeking to analyze how it fulfills, in a new transplanted setting, the spiritual needs of a given segment of the Cuban immigrant population in the United States—designated here as the “strangers in a new land”—“serving not only as a healing mechanism but also a vehicle towards the preservation of ethnic and cultural identity.”
"The Spanish expression--la cultura cura (culture heals)--is an affirmation of the potential healing power of a variety of cultural practices that together constitute the ethos of a people"
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
385 p., The study is not a work about religion but rather of black African identity. Leaning on three black African societies (Yoruba of Benin and Nigeria, Agni-Akan and Senufo Ivory Coast), the author investigates the notion of person. Faced with the question of death, passing moment of earthly existence of man to his condition.
