Chabela Ramírez, the black singer and activist born in Montevideo in 1958, is a singular personality of candombe, the only multi-form Afro-Uruguayan musical genre. Retracing her trajectory leads us through the history of Uruguay's black community (10% of the total population) and candombe, with particular attention on how this musical expression went from devalued practice to national heritage in a country deeply marked by a Eurocentric ideology. Ramírez founded and gave voice, with Afrogama, the choir and dance group that she leads, to a unique aesthetic thought that brought meaning to candombe via the field of Afro-religions (Umbanda and Batuque).
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.
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.
"Dominican culture and society can be characterized as a hybrid whose nature is expressed in various domains. For example, folk or popular Catholicism, the religion of some 90 percent of the national population, is in summary a cultural amalgamation. But deconstructed, it can be seen to retain elements of the various contributors to its eclectic configuration: Spanish of different regions, classes, Catholic religious orders, and even religions with regard to Judaic and Islamic features retained in Spanish folk Catholicism; West and Central African of various ethnic origins; continuities of native Taíno beliefs and practices; and other origins, such as the possible East Indian origin of the vodú deity of the “black” Guedé family, Santa Marta la Dominadora." -The Author
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
191 p., Comparing Cuban American and African American religiosity, this book argues that Afro-Cuban religiosity and culture are central to understanding the Cuban and Cuban American condition. It interprets this saturation of the Afro-Cuban as transcending race and affecting Cubans and Cuban Americans in spite of their pigmentation or self-identification.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
369 p., This title includes discussions of Ernest Hemingway's life and works. Includes Philip Melling's "Cultural imperialism, Afro-Cuban religion, and Santiago's failure in Hemingway's The old man and the sea."
Greenfield,Sidney M. (Author) and Droogers,A. F. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2001
Published:
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
232 p, Contents: Recovering and reconstructing syncretism / André Droogers, Sidney M. Greenfield -- A Yoruba healer as syncretic specialist: herbalism, rosicrucianism and the Babalawo / Frank A. Salamon -- Population growth, industrialization and the proliferation of syncretized religions in Brazil / Sidney M. Greenfield -- Ethnicity, purity, the market and syncretism in Afro-Brazilian cults / Roberto Motta -- Religious syncretism in an Afro-Brazilian cult house / Sergio F. Ferretti -- The presence of non-African spirits in an Afro-Brazilian religion: a case of Afro-Amerindian syncretism? / Mundicarmo M.R. Ferretti -- The reinterpretation of Africa: convergence and syncretism in Brazilian Candomblé / Sidney M. Greenfield -- Possession and syncretism: spirits as mediators in modernity / Inger Sjørslev -- Joana's story: syncretism at the actor's level / André Droogers -- Ragga cowboys: country and western themes in Rastafarian-inspired Reggae music / Werner Zips -- Polyvocality and constructions of syncretism in Winti / Ineke van Wetering -- Seeking syncretism: the case of Sathya Sai Baba / Morton Klass
