Download or read book Guyanese Komfa written by Michelle Asantewa and published by . This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Komfa Work Ritualizing Racecraft and Nation in Guyana s Spiritualist Faiths written by Jeremy Jacob Peretz and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Dissertation offers ethnographic exploration of Komfa, ritual engaged to "entertain the ancestors" that is central to the way of life of Spiritualists in Guyana. Komfa involves profound introspections and elaborate communal celebrations dedicated to "the Seven Nations" of spirits who represent colonial British demography. Practiced primarily by Guyanese women of African descent and considered an Africa-derived or -inspired tradition, Komfa worldview draws upon cultural inheritances of various Guyanese backgrounds. Embracing Komfa worlds serves as historical and genealogical inquiry into often indistinct, polysemous pasts, wherein ethnoracially identified and identifying spirit-guides lead devotees through emancipatory journeys of familial and personal (re)discovery. In dance, drumming, altar-making, and spirit possession, devotees cultivate transformative relationships, including those reaching beyond the grave. Through this "Work" of deep relatedness, Spiritualists confront specters of ethnic and racial exploitations of the past--as well as their intersections with dynamics of gender and sexuality--that continue to haunt their everyday existences within pluralist postcolonial Guyana's politics of ethnonationalism. In communion with the dead, mediums bring past-generational life experiences to bear on their manifestations of recuperated futures. Embodying long-departed presences has encouraged practitioners to repossess complexly layered, expansive selves based in intimately interconnected subjectivities, and to thus open themselves to the ambiguities of ethnoracial assemblages, "transgressive" gender identities, and "noncompliant" sexualities. The study interrogates Komfa's socially situated histories and contemporary meanings and value within practitioners' lives. A key concern throughout is Komfa's role in supporting Guyanese--specifically as descendants of colonized, enslaved, displaced, and indentured peoples of mainly African, Indigenous, and Asian heritages--in challenging and redirecting the basis of their subjugation under Europeans' regimes of production that endeavored to commodify people as possessable property. As Guyana's Creolese language term for "spirit possession," Komfa has provided a ritual means through which Spiritualists have rejected and reformulated customary and legal dispossession of personhood through engendering multiplicities of being(s) whose humanities are not grounded in the labor of the plantation, but instead in the intersubjective Spiritual Work of social interrelatedness. For devotees, "Spiritual life," after all, "is life with the spirits," a social understanding that generally presupposes the humanity of the revivified dead, and one that also, inadvertently or not, tends to envision unending permutations of Guyanese ancestries at Work in the lives of their mediums and other members of their Spiritual families. Like all memory, spirits become manifest in the present moments of their re-membering--in ritual performance, divination, dreams, visions, prophecy, and everyday insights--and so the legacies they recall are fundamentally lessons for contemporary times.
Download or read book African Goddess Initiation written by Abiola Abrams and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sacred feminine initiation of self-love and soul care rituals, tools, and exercises. Spiritual teacher, intuitive coach, and award-winning author, Abiola Abrams invites you to activate African goddess magic to transmute your fears and limiting beliefs, so that you can create more happiness, abundance, and self-acceptance. Africa is a continent of 54+ countries, and her children are global. There is no one African spiritual tradition. Our ancestors who were trafficked in "The New World" hid the secrets of our orishas, abosom, lwas, álúsí, and god/desses behind saints, angels, and legendary characters. From South Africa to Egypt, Brazil to Haiti, Guyana to Louisiana, goddess wisdom still empowers us. Writes Abiola, "Spirit told me, "We choose who shows up." And if you are holding this book, then this sacred medicine is meant for you. In this book, you will meet ancient goddesses and divine feminine energy ancestors, legendary queens, and mystical spirits. As you complete their powerful rituals, and ascend through their temples, you will: . Awaken generational healing in the Temple of Ancestors; . Manifest your miracles in the Temple of Conjurers; . Release the struggle in the Temple of Warriors; . Embrace your dark goddess self in the Temple of Shadows; . Heal your primal wounds in the Temple of Lovers; . Liberate your voice in the Temple of Griots; . Open your third eye intuition in the Temple of Queens; and . Surrender, meditate, and rise in the Temple of High Priestesses. Welcome to your goddess circle!
Download or read book The Biopolitics of Beauty written by Alvaro Jarrín and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Biopolitics of Beauty examines how beauty became an aim of national health in Brazil. Using ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazilian hospitals, the author shows how plastic surgeons and patients navigate the public health system to transform beauty into a basic health right. The book historically traces the national concern with beauty to Brazilian eugenics, which established beauty as an index of the nation’s racial improvement. From here, Jarrín explains how plastic surgeons became the main proponents of a raciology of beauty, using it to gain the backing of the Brazilian state. Beauty can be understood as an immaterial form of value that Jarrín calls “affective capital,” which maps onto and intensifies the social hierarchies of Brazilian society. Patients experience beauty as central to national belonging and to gendered aspirations of upward mobility, and they become entangled in biopolitical rationalities that complicate their ability to consent to the risks of surgery. The Biopolitics of Beauty explores not only the biopolitical regime that made beauty a desirable national project, but also the subtle ways in which beauty is laden with affective value within everyday social practices—thus becoming the terrain upon which race, class, and gender hierarchies are reproduced and contested in Brazil.
Download or read book Mama Lou Tales written by Michelle Asantewa and published by . This book was released on 2016-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions written by Michelle A. Gonzalez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions offers a comprehensive overview of Caribbean religions. The Caribbean is a microcosm of the world's religions, but the small geographic space resulted in the encounter of global religions and indigenous religious practices. The racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of this region makes brief introductions to Caribbean religions incapable of truly addressing its complex and diverse religious landscape. The Handbook also elaborates on the diversity of the religious traditions and the national particularity of the region while also considering multiple geographic settings. It mentions how often Caribbean religion is studied through the perspective of a discrete religious tradition or geographic setting"--
Download or read book Rediasporization written by Gillian Richards-Greaves and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rediasporization: African-Guyanese Kweh-Kweh examines how African-Guyanese in New York City participate in the Come to My Kwe-Kwe ritual to facilitate rediasporization, that is, the creation of a newer diaspora from an existing one. Since the fall of 2005, African-Guyanese in New York City have celebrated Come to My Kwe-Kwe (more recently called Kwe-Kwe Night) on the Friday evening before Labor Day. Come to My Kwe-Kwe is a reenactment of a uniquely African-Guyanese pre-wedding ritual called kweh-kweh, and sometimes referred to as karkalay, mayan, kweh-keh, and pele. A typical traditional (wedding-based) kweh-kweh has approximately ten ritual segments, which include the pouring of libation to welcome or appease the ancestors; a procession from the groom’s residence to the bride’s residence or central kweh-kweh venue; the hiding of the bride; and the negotiation of bride price. Each ritual segment is executed with music and dance, which allow for commentary on conjugal matters, such as sex, domestication, submissiveness, and hard work. Come to My Kwe-Kwe replicates the overarching segments of the traditional kweh-kweh, but a couple (male and female) from the audience acts as the bride and groom, and props simulate the boundaries of the traditional performance space, such as the gate and the bride’s home. This book draws on more than a decade of ethnographic research data and demonstrates how Come to My Kwe-Kwe allows African-Guyanese-Americans to negotiate complex, overlapping identities in their new homeland, by combining elements from the past and present and reinterpreting them to facilitate rediasporization and ensure group survival.
Download or read book The Gut written by Elizabeth Pérez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the head is religion, the gut is magic. Taking up this provocation, this Element delves into the digestive system within transnational Afro-Diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Lucumí (also called Santería). It draws from the ethnographic and archival record to probe the abdomen as a vital zone of sensory perception, amplified in countless divination verses, myths, rituals, and recipes for ethnomedical remedies. Provincializing the brain as only one locus of reason, it seeks to expand the notion of 'mind' and expose the anti-Blackness that still prevents Black Atlantic knowledges from being accepted as such. The Element examines gut feelings, knowledge, and beings in the belly; African precedents for the Afro-Diasporic gut-brain axis; post-sacrificial offerings in racist fantasy and everyday reality; and the strong stomachs and intestinal fortitude of religious ancestors. It concludes with a reflection on kinship and the spilling of guts in kitchenspaces.
Download or read book The Burden of the Ancients written by Allen J. Christenson and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Maya theology, everything from humans and crops to gods and the world itself passes through endless cycles of birth, maturation, dissolution, death, and rebirth. Traditional Maya believe that human beings perpetuate this cycle through ritual offerings and ceremonies that have the power to rebirth the world at critical points during the calendar year. The most elaborate ceremonies take place during Semana Santa (Holy Week), the days preceding Easter on the Christian calendar, during which traditionalist Maya replicate many of the most important world-renewing rituals that their ancient ancestors practiced at the end of the calendar year in anticipation of the New Year’s rites. Marshaling a wealth of evidence from Pre-Columbian texts, early colonial Spanish writings, and decades of fieldwork with present-day Maya, The Burden of the Ancients presents a masterfully detailed account of world-renewing ceremonies that spans the Pre-Columbian era through the crisis of the Conquest period and the subsequent colonial occupation all the way to the present. Allen J. Christenson focuses on Santiago Atitlán, a Tz’utujil Maya community in highland Guatemala, and offers the first systematic analysis of how the Maya preserved important elements of their ancient world renewal ceremonies by adopting similar elements of Roman Catholic observances and infusing them with traditional Maya meanings. His extensive description of Holy Week in Santiago Atitlán demonstrates that the community’s contemporary ritual practices and mythic stories bear a remarkable resemblance to similar cultural entities from its Pre-Columbian past.
Download or read book Thinking Through Animals written by Matthew Calarco and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapidly expanding field of critical animal studies now offers a myriad of theoretical and philosophical positions from which to choose. This timely book provides an overview and analysis of the most influential of these trends. Approachable and concise, it is intended for readers sympathetic to the project of changing our ways of thinking about and interacting with animals yet relatively new to the variety of philosophical ideas and figures in the discipline. It uses three rubrics—identity, difference, and indistinction—to differentiate three major paths of thought about animals. The identity approach aims to establish continuity among human beings and animals so as to grant animals equal access to the ethical and political community. The difference framework views the animal world as containing its own richly complex and differentiated modes of existence in order to allow for a more expansive ethical and political worldview. The indistinction approach argues that we should abandon the notion that humans are unique in order to explore new ways of conceiving human-animal relations. Each approach is interrogated for its relative strengths and weaknesses, with specific emphasis placed on the kinds of transformational potential it contains.
Download or read book New Daughters of Africa written by Various Authors and published by Random House. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 798 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly three decades after her pioneering anthology, Daughters of Africa, Margaret Busby curates an extraordinary collection of contemporary writing by 200 women writers of African descent, including Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A glorious portrayal of the richness and range of African women's voices, this major international book brings together their achievements across a wealth of genres. From Antigua to Zimbabwe and Angola to the USA, overlooked artists of the past join key figures, popular contemporaries and emerging writers in paying tribute to the heritage that unites them, the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and their common obstacles around issues of race, gender and class. Bold and insightful, brilliant in its intimacy and universality, this landmark anthology honours the talents of African daughters and the inspiring legacy that connects them-and all of us.
Download or read book Sexing the Caribbean written by Kamala Kempadoo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-12 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The primary focus of the book is to illuminate intersections of gender, sexuality, work, race and economic relations in the Caribbean.
Download or read book UBEN HYENG The Ancestral Summons written by Odwirafo Kwesi Ra Nehem Ptah Akhan and published by Odwirafo Kwesi Ra Nehem Ptah Akhan. This book was released on 1997 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: UBEN-HYENG The Ancestral Summons UBEN-HYENG (u· ben' - shehng') is the combination of the Kenesu/Khanitu-Kamau (Nubian-Egyptian) term, Uben and the Twi-Akan term, Hyeng. The terms are defined in their respective languages as descriptive of drawing forth by illumination, to shine; bright, brilliant. As a name, they are representative of the revivifying energy of Creative Power. Just as the morning Sun calls for the rejuvenation of Earth, UBEN-HYENG is a summons for the rejuvenation of the culture. Contents: Origin and function of Our Spiritual Inheritance · Origin and purpose of: Libation · Ancestral and Deity worship · Ancestral and Deity possession · Ritual prayer · Ritual meditation · Ritual song and dance · Nature worship · Talismans and amulets · Ritual procreative activity · Oracular divination Nature and function of Idols · Necessity of making offerings · Origin and purpose of shrines · Necessity for Ancestral communication · Nature and function of the Goddesses and Gods · Nature and function of Ancestral names and Ancestral languages · Origin and purpose of immortality · Nature and function of cycles · Nature and function of Self-defense · Origin and purpose for sacrifice · Liberation and Ancestral religion · Law
Download or read book Developing the Dead written by Diana Espírito Santo and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its powerful influence on Cuban culture, Espiritismo has often been overlooked by scholars. Developing the Dead is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary Espiritismo in Cuba. Based on extensive fieldwork among religious practitioners and their clients in Havana, this book makes the surprising claim that Spiritist practices are fundamentally a project of developing the self. When mediums cultivate relationships between the living and the dead, argues Diana Espírito Santo, they develop, learn, sense, dream, and connect to multiple spirits (muertos), expanding the borders of the self. This understanding of selfhood is radically different from Enlightenment ideas of an autonomous, bounded self and holds fascinating implications for prophecy, healing, and self-consciousness. Developing the Dead shows how Espiritismo’s self-making process permeates all aspects of life, not only for its own practitioners but also for those of other Afro-Cuban religions.
Download or read book Comfa Religion and Creole Language in a Caribbean Community written by Kean Gibson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2001-05-16 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A description and analysis of the Guyanese religion known as "Comfa."
Download or read book Photos of the Gods written by Christopher Pinney and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chris Pinney demonstrates how printed images were pivotal to India's struggle for national and religious independence. He also provides a history of printing in India.
Download or read book Happiness Now written by Robert Holden and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Happiness NOW! is a truly powerful and radical exploration of one of life's most treasured goals. Packed with rich insights and practical wisdom, it offers a message of profound hope and healing for a generation that is often too busy chasing happiness to be truly happy. Robert Holden, PhD, presents a personal, warm and entertaining account of how he developed his pioneering work with The Happiness Project. Using a highly creative mix of stories, exercises, meditations, poetry and prayer, Robert shares his distinctive philosophy and practice of 'the how of happiness'. Visionary and practical, challenging and compassionate, Happiness NOW! gives you valuable keys to true self-acceptance, everyday abundance, loving relationships, inner success and lasting joy – starting NOW!
