Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic [Hardcover]

Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where Africandescended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015Promises to become an essential work for Black Atlantic/African Diaspora scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Unique in its singular focus on both spiritual-religious and quotidian ritual practices and actions.This book marks an important advance in research on the archaeology of the black Atlantic; that is, the archaeological study of contacts, parallelisms, and ruptures that marked Old and New World communities during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. . . . Highly recommended.

Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candombl? by J. Lorand Matory (Princeton University Press, 2005). ISBN 9780691059440.

Preface
1. On the Materiality of Black Atlantic Rituals / Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders
2. Reconstructing the Archaeology of Movement in Northern Ghana: Insights into Past Ritual Posture and Performance / Timothy Insoll and Benjamin W. Kankpeyeng
3. Sacred Vorticies of the African Atlantic World: Materiality of the Accumulative Aesthetic in the Hueda Kingdom, 1650-1727 / Neil Norman
4. Cowries and Rituals of Self-Realization in the Yoruba Region, West Africa,l3>