J. Lorand Matory

Bio

J. Lorand Matory is the Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and the Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project at Duke University (https://sacredart.caaar.duke.edu/home). Professor Matory has conducted four decades of intensive research on the great religions of the Black Atlantic—West African Yoruba religion, West-Central African Kongo religion, Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería/Ocha, and Haitian Vodou—as well as their implications for Western social theory.  He is also the executive producer, creative producer, or screenwriter of five documentary films.

His book Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Ọyọ Yoruba Religion (1994) was a Choice Magazine outstanding book of the year, and his Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (2005) won the Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association.  Professor Matory was also selected to deliver anthropology’s most prestigious annual address, the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, which resulted in the book Stigma and Culture: Last-Place Anxiety in Black America (2015).  His latest book, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (2018), won the American Academy of Religion’s Prize for Excellence in the Study of Religion for the Analytical-Descriptive Studies, the Senior Book Prize of the American Ethnological Society, and the J.I. Staley Prize of the School for Advanced Research. His next book is titled Slavery in the Heart of Freedom: Race, Religion, and Politics through the Lens of BDSM.

From 2003 to 2011, he served on the Presidential Advisory Committee on Cultural Property at the US Department of State. He has also received the Distinguished Africanist Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, one of Europe’s highest academic distinctions.