Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as a Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions
Friday April 18, 2008 3:00-5:00 pm
Room 270, Intercultural Center
RSVP requested: berkleycenter@georgetown.edu
Scholars tend to regard enslavement as a form of disability inflicted upon the enslaved. This event confronts the irony that not all black Atlantic peoples and religions conceive of slavery as an equally deficient condition or as the opposite of freedom and other rights that are due to respected human beings. Indeed, the religions of enslaved Afro-Latin Americans and their descendants—including Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban and Cuban diaspora Ocha (or Santería), and Haitian Vodou—are far more ambivalent about slavery than most scholars and most Black North Americans might expect. In these religions, the slave is often understood to be the most effective spiritual actor—either as the most empowering servant of the supplicant’s goals or as the most effective model for supplicants’ own action upon the world. These ironies are employed to illuminate the unofficial realities of both the Abrahamic faiths and the North American practices of “freedom.”
This lecture series features well-known anthropologists of religion and politics, drawn from major universities of and Europe. They are invited to explore the complex and changing nexus of religion and identity, drawing on diverse fieldwork from around the world. Sensitive issues of “race” and its politicization, multiculturalism, global and local media influence, colonial legacies, missionary activities and “cultural clashes” are highlighted to enable the broader Georgetown community to consider the anthropology of religion in new ways.
J. Lorand Matory is Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Choice magazine recognized his book Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (2005[1994]) as a notable book of 1994, and his Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (2005) won the Melville J. Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association for the best book of the year. He researches the circum-Atlantic movements and transformations of Yoruba religion, as well as ethnic diversity in the black population of the United States. In 2008 his manuscript in progress, The Other African Americans, will be delivered as the University of Rochester's Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series, the most prestigious in the discipline of anthropology. With the support of the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, he has conducted extensive field research in Brazil, Nigeria, the US, Jamaica, and Trinidad.