Ritual Transformations of Consciousness

Monday, May 15, 2023

Afternoon

1:00 – 1:30 | Arrival and Check-in

1:30 - 1:35 | Welcome Martin Jean, Director of the ISM

1:35 – 3:05 | Vocality, Transformation and Ritual Mounting in Haitian Vodou (Dining Room)

• Elizabeth McAlister, “Creolophone Women’s Fugitive Speech: Bizango hums and vocal transformations”
• Hillel Horacio Athias-Robles, “Doubt and the Displacement of Consciousness in Mounting Across Africana Religions”
• Collin Edouard, “The Memories Within our Voices: A Theoretical Approach to Vocality & Ritual Mounting in Haitian Vodou”
• Ambre Dromgoole, Chair

3:05 – 3:30 | Coffee Break

3:30 – 5:00 | Pan-African Perspectives on Material Culture, Ritual and Trance (Dining Room)

• Richard Jankowsky, “Affordances and Ambiguities of Ritual Repair and Transformations of Consciousness in North Africa”
• Allen Roberts, “A Congolese Furtum Sacrum: Mystical Trajectories of a Mission Madonna” (Zoom)
• Deborah Kapchan, “Possessed by Possession: The Play of Paradox”
• Jon Bullock, Chair

5:00 – 6:00 | Opening Reception (Foyer/Patio)

Dinner on your own. There will be a reservation sign-up form to group conference attendees at downtown restaurants.

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Morning

9:00 – 10:00 | Continental Breakfast (Upper Lobby)

10:00 – 11:00 | Dialogic Keynote I (Dining Room) - The Drum and the AR-15: From the Church of Music to the Cult of the Gun

• Steven Friedson
• J. Lorand Matory
• Elyan Hill, Moderator

11:00 – 11:15 | Morning Break

11:15 – 12:45 | Afro-Caribbean Dance, Drum, and Song in Ritual and Religious Contexts (Amphitheatre)

• Michael Iyanaga - “When Caboclos Sing Catholic Sambas: Reimagining the African Religious Legacy in Bahia, Brazil” (Zoom)
• Helmar Kurz – “Afro-Brazilian Ritual Performance: An Alternative Modernity” (Zoom)
• Zainabu Jallo, “Dialectics of a Rooted Diaspora”
• Jeremiah Lockwood, Chair

Afternoon

12:45 – 2:00 | Lunch (Dining Room)

2:00 – 3:30 | Dance, Trance, and Sacraments in the Black Church (Amphitheatre) 

• Brendan Thornton, “Travel & Trance: A Phenomenology of Transcendental Pilgrimage in the Spiritual Baptist Faith”
• Corwin Malcolm Davis, “In a Nobler, Sweeter Song: Black Protestant Sacraments and Ritualized Temporalities”
• Clare Byrne, “Human/Divine Choreography: Dance Ministry in the A.M.E. Church”
• Nedelka Prescod, Chair

3:30 – 4:00 | Coffee Break (Upper Lobby)

4:00 – 5:00  | Standalone Performance-Demonstration (Dining Room)

• Mojuba Dance Collective & Imamou Lele Dance and Drum Ensemble

Dinner on your own. There will be a reservation sign-up form to group conference attendees at downtown restaurants.

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Morning

9:00 – 10:00 | Continental Breakfast (Upper Lobby)

10:00 – 11:00 | Dialogic Keynote II -  Sonic Consciousness at the Crossroads (Dining Room)

• Rhon Manigault-Bryant
• Michael Veal
• Melvin Butler, Moderator

11:00 – 11:15 | Morning Break

11:15 – 12:45 | Roundtable: Sounding/Voicing/Embodying Blackness in the Early Modern Iberian World (Amphitheatre)

• Cesar Favila
• Ireri Chávez Bárcenas
• Bernard Gordillo Brockmann (Chair)
• Nicholas Jones

Afternoon

12:45 – 1:45 | Lunch (Dining Room)

1:45 – 3:15 | New Approaches in the Black Sacred Arts (Amphitheatre)

• J. Christian Greer, “The Mothership Connection: The Afro-Centric Psychedelicism of Parliament Funkadelic” (Zoom)
• Juan Suárez Ontaneda, “‘El nazareno me dijo’: The Musical Hagiography of Ismael Rivera”
• Viktor L. Givens, “The vernacular sublime”
• Ronald Jenkins, Chair

3:45 – 4:00 | Coffee Break (Upper Lobby)

4:00 –5:00 | Concluding Discussions (Amphitheatre)

Dinner on your own. There will be a reservation sign-up form to group conference attendees at downtown restaurants.

Departures

Bio

Dr. LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant serves as the Director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Director for Black Culture and History and Professor of African, African-American and Diaspora Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A proud native of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, she wholly and critically grapples with the profound questions that inform our understandings of gender, race, culture, and religious expression, evident in her book Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah-Geechee Women (2014) and her award-winning documentary short death.everything.nothing. (2020). Whether investigating practices of specific communities, exploring cultural production at the popular level, considering the impact of new technologies, or creating documentary shorts, critical to Dr. Manigault-Bryant’s research and teaching are explorations of how Black women throughout the Diaspora engage religion and spirituality to navigate the contours of life. 

Bio

Steven Friedson is University Distinguished Research Professor of Music and Anthropology at the University of North Texas. For the past thirty-five years he has been conducting comparative research on music and ritual in Africa. His initial work in northern Malawi, under the auspices of a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, takes a phenomenological approach to musical experience in traditional diagnostics and therapeutics. This was followed by a long-term research project in the Volta Region of Ghana, studying one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast, a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the Northern Region of the country. He is author of Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing (University of Chicago Press 1996), and Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land (University of Chicago Press 2009), winner of the Alan P. Merriam Prize for Outstanding Book in Ethnomusicology. He was the first ethnomusicologist to be named a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to finish the final book of a planned trilogy on African music and ritual. In addition to his work in Africa, he has several publications on the weaponization of music in the “Global War on Terror.” In a previous life, he played keyboards in the 1960s rock band The Kingsmen (gold record “Louie Louie”).

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. 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.

Bio

Michael E. Veal has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1998. Before coming to Yale, he taught at Mount Holyoke College (1996 – 1998) and New York University (1997-1998). Veal’s work has typically addressed musical topics within the cultural sphere of Africa and the African diaspora. His 2000 biography of the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti uses the life and music of this influential African musician explore themes of African post-coloniality, the political uses of music in Africa, and musical and cultural interchange between cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. His documentation of the “Afrobeat” genre continued with the 2013 as-told-to autobiography Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat. Professor Veal’s 2007 study of Jamaican dub music examines the ways in which the studio-based innovations of Jamaican recording engineers during the 1970s transformed the structure and concept of the post-WWII popular song, and examines sound technology as a medium for the articulation of spiritual, historical and political themes. His forthcoming book Wait Until Tomorrow surveys under-documented periods in the careers of John Coltrane and Miles Davis that encapsulate the stylistic interventions of “free jazz” and “jazz-rock fusion,” and draws on the language of digital architecture in order to suggest new directions for jazz analysis.

Undergraduate courses that Professor Veal has taught have included: Music Cultures of the World; Theory & Practice of Ethnomusicology; Traditional and Contemporary Musics of Sub-Saharan Africa; Jazz in Transition 1960 -1985; Funk - The Re-Africanization of the American Popular Song Form; Jazz & Architecture; Music and the Post-Colonial and Popular Music: The Experimental Tradition. Graduate courses have included: Music in Africa; The Recording Studio in Sonic and Cultural Perspective; Topics in Jazz Studies; Recalibrating the Ethnographic Radar (A History of Ethnographic Recording) and Proseminar in Ethnomusicology.

Roundtable: Sounding/Voicing/Embodying Blackness in the Early Modern Iberian World

Abstract

Since the publication of Nicholas R. Jones’s book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, wide interest in and the study of black dance, soundscapes, and voices has exploded in academic circles within early modern Iberian Studies on both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing on sonic Blackness and textuality, this roundtable engages Jones’s work on black dances and black musical practices/tradition active in early modern Iberia, New Spain, and the Caribbean. Cesar Favila considers the early modern vocal archive and reflects on aurality with respect to the African Baroque among the inhabitants of New Spain’s cloistered convents. The materiality of black women’s bodies comes to the fore in a sonic and gendered critique of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Catholic narratives on the nature of temporal and eternal salvation. Ireri Chávez Bárcenas traces the performance of Blackness in cathedral villancicos informed by the Black festive practices of the African diaspora in New Spain. The recovery of defiant voices and expressions of collective identity in this repertoire amplifies the lived experiences of free and enslaved men and women of African descent that resisted or negotiated the restrictive structures imposed by Spanish rule. Bernard Gordillo Brockmann
explores a sensorial environment of the Spanish colonial cathedral coro in which constructed black women’s voices sang in devotion to God. The villancico de negro serves as a sonic-textual liminal space in which the Spanish and mestizo male gaze embodied and appropriated Blackness. Nicholas Jones’s intervention attends to the powerful ways Black Performance Studies and Black Sound Studies can productively impact and nuance the study of Blackness in Early Modern Iberian Studies writ large.

Bio

Ireri Chávez-Bárcenas is Assistant Professor of Music at Bowdoin College. She holds a doctoral degree in musicology from Princeton University and a master’s degree in religion and music from Yale University. She received the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Award for her book project Singing in the City of Angels: Race, Identity, and Devotion in Early Modern Puebla de los Ángeles. Her work analyzes the performance of villancicos within the institutional and social fabric of Puebla de los Ángeles and develops a new methodology for the study of function, meaning, and transmission of the vernacular song tradition in the Spanish empire. She has published journal articles and essays on the intersection of villancicos and early modern ideas of race, religion, and identity in New Spain, and the adaptation of conflicting historiographical interpretations of the conquest of Mexico in Vivaldi’s opera Motezuma.

Human/Divine Choreography: Dance Ministry in the A.M.E. Church

Abstract

This study proposes that, just as Black sacred dance was a vital but under-recognized source in the formation of American concert modern dance in the early 20th century, modern/contemporary dance is now “back” doing under-studied work in worship in Black churches. Particularly in two women-pastored African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E) congregations viewed in this study (Greater Allen Cathedral, Queens, and Ebenezer, Fort Washington) dance ministers are forging a synthesis of humanly-designed choreography and divinely-inspired holy dance, or shout. Thus liturgical dance ministry forms a sort of hybrid renewal, recalling African and African diasporic traditions. Modern dance, which erupted in the early 20th century out of aesthetics of industrialization and women’s embodied suffragist demands, drew from multiple cultural strands, including, significantly, African-American and Caribbean-located ecstatic, sacred and vernacular dance. In turn, modern/contemporary dance’s expressive plastique has (re-)opened doors to ministered dance in many churches, Black and white — to varying degrees of acceptance.

Bio

Clare Byrne is a teacher, choreographer, and performer. Her artistic work in dance and music has explored intersections of movement, saints, and sacramentality, in re-workings of her culturally Catholic heritage. She has taught in the dance programs at Muhlenberg College, Long Island University, Manhattanville College, and the Department of Music & Dance at the University of Vermont. She holds a B.A. in Dance from Connecticut College, and an M.F.A. in Dance from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Byrne is currently a candidate for a master’s in religion and music at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, researching intersections of movement and music in the Black Church. She toured as a founding member of Nicholas Leichter Dance, and has been the recipient of many residencies and grants such as the Jerome Robbins Bogliasco Fellowship in Dance, a Joyce SoHo Space Grant Residency, and a Meet the Composer grant.

In a Nobler, Sweeter Song: Black Protestant Sacraments and Ritualized Temporalities

Abstract

The two most recognized sacraments in Black Protestantism – namely, communion and baptism – serve as focal points of ritual activity and a specific type of ritual consciousness that relies upon their aesthetic and affective dimensions. I assert that the sacraments in Black Protestantism depend, in fact, upon the sounds, sights, smells/tastes, textures, and even embodiments of the ritual; the specific ways of preparing for the rituals are not ancillary tasks but instead are central to the spiritual technology. It is readily visible how, and why, many of the communities of practitioners are exacting about all aspects of the rituals, including codes and instructions around who can consecrate the elements for the ritual, who can enter the space of the altar or chancel, and when, and even which hands are trusted to distribute or touch the sacramental objects.

Particularly with an eye toward doctrinal and creedal professions in a “communion of the saints,” I argue that the rituals are established and guarded in such a way because they demonstrate an engagement with copresence, one that facilitates a spiritual technology concerning both the Divine and toward the ancestral realm. It is the affective expressions of the rituals which serve as the aperture to the copresence represented in a “communion of the saints,” a presence in Black Protestantism that can also be read in African diasporic religious terms. Moreover, the artistic natures of the liturgical construction, I suggest, are significant for cultivating such copresence, and even for signifying an alternative temporality. This paper will explore the white gloves adorning cleaned hands, the baked bread following recipes of cultural lineages, and the distinctive sonic preludes and invocations propelling the participants of such rituals toward an engagement with the invisible realm, wherein time is suspended, and the veil is thin.

Bio

Corwin Malcolm Davis is a PhD student in Emory University in the Person, Community, and Religious Life area of study, and earning a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He earned a B.A. from Belmont University and a M.Div. from Vanderbilt University as the Dean’s Scholar, with a concentration in Black Religion and Culture Studies. At Emory, Davis has received the George W. Woodruff Fellowship, the Centennial Scholars Fellowship, and externally, a Louisville Institute Doctoral Fellowship. He currently serves as the Associate Director of the Theological Education between the Times project, and as the Director of the Writing Center for Emory’s Candler School of Theology. A third-generation minister, The Reverend Davis is an ordained Itinerant Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The Memories Within our Voices: A Theoretical Approach to Vocality & Ritual Mounting in Haitian Vodou

Abstract

When devotees sing (voye chante) Vodou liturgical songs, Haitian ancestral memories circulate and spirits are invited into the ceremonial space as lwa monte chwal li (the spirit mounts its horse). At a fèt (ceremony), altars are layered with offerings for the lwa (Vodou spirits). Among the many offerings, food, alcoholic beverages, and cigars decorate the altar, giving thanks and inviting the lwa into the spiritual space. But what about unseen offerings that do not reside on the altar? Which instruments do the lwa respond to and which songs invoke their presence in the sacred rite that Vodou scholars and devotees refer to as ritual mounting? Which embodied memories manifest through the voices of Vodouzian (Vodou devotees) that communicate directly with the lwa to encourage ritual mounting?
 

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and musical analysis, this paper investigates how
vocality as expressed by manbo, houngan, and hounsi (Vodou priestesses, priests, and entry
initiates, respectively) allows devotees to become sacred singing ensembles in ceremony and
communicate directly with the spirits. My research on vocality in Haitian Vodou serves as an
offering to the lwa as I examine what musical utterances, tone colors, glottal stops,
homorhythmic segments, and musical forms create a space where ritual mounting can be
possible and the lwa can do their work. As a foundation for my research, I build upon the work of ethnomusicologists Gerdès Fleurant (1996) and Lois Wilcken (2010) who focus on Vodou rituals and instrumentation in search of the divine messages exchanged within musical time and space. Analyzing sacred songs performed in Vodou ceremonies, I assert that initiates’ vocality embodies ancestral memories and offers healing through spirit visitations in ritual mounting. Ultimately, I demonstrate how Vodouizan’s vocalization of sacred songs in ceremony serves as one of the primary modes through which spirits are invited into our beings.

Bio

Collin Edouard is an educator, author, activist, and music director who focuses his career on equity, inclusivity, and representation. He has invested time in the theoretical and practical study of music and music education at the University of Cambridge (Gates Cambridge Scholar), Columbia University(Dr. Beverly E. Johnson Annual Fund Scholar), The City College of New York (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa 2016) and Seminole State College of Florida. Currently, Collin is a second-year ethnomusicology Ph.D. Student at Yale University researching the vocality in a Haitian Vodou ceremony. He is an adjunct professor of music at the University of Bridgeport and created a course called “Music of the Global South.” In this course, students survey several cultures, building connections within several diasporic communities. Collin focuses on expanding access to music and music education, particularly with music less frequently circulated. He is a contributing author in The New Teacher’s Guide to OvercomingCommon Challenges, Curated Advice from Award-Winning Teachers. He taught music in Spain, Uganda, Turkey, India, Iraq, England, and the United States. Collin has initiated music festivals, created choirs, adjusted music curricula, and continues to advocate for BIPOC lives and voices.

Roundtable: Sounding/Voicing/Embodying Blackness in the Early Modern Iberian World

Abstract

Since the publication of Nicholas R. Jones’s book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, wide interest in and the study of black dance, soundscapes, and voices has exploded in academic circles within early modern Iberian Studies on both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing on sonic Blackness and textuality, this roundtable engages Jones’s work on black dances and black musical practices/tradition active in early modern Iberia, New Spain, and the Caribbean. Cesar Favila considers the early modern vocal archive and reflects on aurality with respect to the African Baroque among the inhabitants of New Spain’s cloistered convents. The materiality of black women’s bodies comes to the fore in a sonic and gendered critique of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Catholic narratives on the nature of temporal and eternal salvation. Ireri Chávez Bárcenas traces the performance of Blackness in cathedral villancicos informed by the Black festive practices of the African diaspora in New Spain. The recovery of defiant voices and expressions of collective identity in this repertoire amplifies the lived experiences of free and enslaved men and women of African descent that resisted or negotiated the restrictive structures imposed by Spanish rule. Bernard Gordillo Brockmann explores a sensorial environment of the Spanish colonial cathedral coro in which constructed black women’s voices sang in devotion to God. The villancico de negro serves as a sonic-textual liminal space in which the Spanish and mestizo male gaze embodied and appropriated Blackness. Nicholas Jones’s intervention attends to the powerful ways Black Performance Studies and Black Sound Studies can productively impact and nuance the study of Blackness in Early Modern Iberian Studies writ large.

Bio

Cesar Favila is assistant professor of musicology at UCLA. This academic year he was the Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow in Music Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and a recipient of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award. His research and teaching attend to the intersections of music, religion, gender, and race with respect to Mexican music from colonial New Spain to the contemporary Chicano experience. He is the author of Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain, the first book to investigate women’s music-making in colonial Latin America, forthcoming this fall in the “Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music Series” of Oxford University Press.

The Vernacular Sublime

Abstract

Part ritual performance, part academic lecture the presentation is devised to examine how the domestic space serves as the fundamental threshold for spiritual communication, and catharsis. The presentation’s guiding question “how might a more expanded and paraphysical interpretation of the domestic site assist in cultural preservation and evolution. What happens when we see the curio cabinet, the kitchen, the knick knacks on the shelves, as something much more than clutter filling the corners, rather as atlas objects into the realm of the invisible.

Bio

Viktor Givens is a found object installation performance artist whose practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of ancestral objects to activate spaces for site specific public rituals. By connecting the material culture of his ancestors with pre and post modern spiritual theologies, le. Givens hopes to extend and reimagine the folk customs of his family . His material archive is comprised of the forgotten and discarded household items found during excavations of East Texas, Louisiana, Havana Cuba and Mexico City. . Through the accumulation of these rich cultural artifacts , le. Givens. seeks to create spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual memory.

Roundtable: Sounding/Voicing/Embodying Blackness in the Early Modern Iberian World

Abstract

Since the publication of Nicholas R. Jones’s book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, wide interest in and the study of black dance, soundscapes, and voices has exploded in academic circles within early modern Iberian Studies on both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing on sonic Blackness and textuality, this roundtable engages Jones’s work on black dances and black musical practices/tradition active in early modern Iberia, New Spain, and the Caribbean. Cesar Favila considers the early modern vocal archive and reflects on aurality with respect to the African Baroque among the inhabitants of New Spain’s cloistered convents. The materiality of black women’s bodies comes to the fore in a sonic and gendered critique of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Catholic narratives on the nature of temporal and eternal salvation. Ireri Chávez Bárcenas traces the performance of Blackness in cathedral villancicos informed by the Black festive practices of the African diaspora in New Spain. The recovery of defiant voices and expressions of collective identity in this repertoire amplifies the lived experiences of free and enslaved men and women of African descent that resisted or negotiated the restrictive structures imposed by Spanish rule. Bernard Gordillo Brockmann explores a sensorial environment of the Spanish colonial cathedral coro in which constructed black women’s voices sang in devotion to God. The villancico de negro serves as a sonic-textual liminal space in which the Spanish and mestizo male gaze embodied and appropriated Blackness. Nicholas Jones’s intervention attends to the powerful ways Black Performance Studies and Black Sound Studies can productively impact and nuance the study of Blackness in Early Modern Iberian Studies writ large.

Bio

Bernard Gordillo Brockmann, a native of Nicaragua, is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of California at Riverside. His scholarship lies at the crossroads of music, sound, and politics, and indigeneity in Latin America and the region’s historical relations with the United States. Under contract with the Oxford University Press, his book project, Canto de Marte: Art Music, Popular Culture, and U.S. Intervention in Nicaragua, examines the cultural impact of early twentieth-century United States intervention through the art and popular music of Nicaraguan composer Luis Abraham Delgadillo. He serves as area editor for Central America with the Grove Dictionary of Latin American and Iberian Music.

The Mothership Connection: The Afro-Centric Psychedelicism of Parliament Funkadelic

Abstract

During the 1970s, George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic became one of the top selling musical acts in the world. Playing in front of tens of thousands, they traveled the globe putting on massive psychedelic assemblies, in which lysergic acid diethylamide (“LSD”) was distributed, consumed, and celebrated en masse. Following psychedelicist music collectives such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, Parliament Funkadelic approached their concerts not as simply musical events, but as liminal zones in which the combination of LSD and their heavy grooves merged audience and performer into a “groupmind,” or collective consciousness. Moreover, they attempted to augment this transpersonal mind-melding by utilizing over-the-top stage productions, which climaxed with the landing of a massive ornamental UFO, “the Mothership.” Together, the band and fans greeted the Mothership’s arrival by repeating the mantra, “every-thing-is-on-the-one” over and over again. Once landed, the Mothership expelled roughly a dozen alien emissaries who used futuristic technologies to elevate the audience into a higher spiritual dimension. Altogether, the landing of the Mothership was more than a theatrical gimmick, but a Funkadelic invitation for individual and collective transformation.
 

The neglect of the Funkadelic movement in the historiography of psychedelicism speaks
to a number of commonplace inaccuracies, which distort the way scholars understand
new religious movements centered on the use of mind-altering drugs. As a methodological intervention, this paper historicizes Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership performance within the group’s Afro-futurist ideology. Special attention will be paid to how the popularization of the Funkadelic movement shifted the racial demographics of psychedelicism, and decolonized its cultural signifiers in the decades following the high point (so to speak) of psychedelic culture in the Sixties. The paper concludes by proposing a new foundation for the study of psychedelic religious movements.

Bio

Dr. J. Christian Greer is a scholar of Religious Studies specializing in the global history of psychedelic spirituality. While a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Divinity School, he led a series of research seminars that culminated in the creation of the Harvard Psychedelic Walking Tour, a free audio guide detailing how the Harvard community has shaped the modern history of psychedelic culture. His latest book, Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots (OSGH Press) analyzes pilgrimage folklore that animates the rain-forest landscapes of Japan’s Kii peninsula, and his forthcoming book, Angelheaded Hipsters: Psychedelic Militancy in Nineteen Eighties North America (Oxford University Press), explores the expansion of psychedelic culture in the late Cold War era. He is currently a lecturer at Stanford University.

When Caboclos Sing Catholic Sambas: Reimagining the African Religious Legacy in Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

In this paper I analyze the historical, cosmological, and musical-choreographic dimensions of the Caboclo deity as it appears, exists, and acts within the context of Catholic saint festivities in Bahia, Brazil. As part of this analysis, I argue that the central African-derived aesthetic and cosmological qualities of the Caboclo represent an often neglected facet of African-derived spirit possession in Brazil. After all, many Catholic devotees understand the Caboclo in ways that diverge––though never entirely––from the more orthodox view of the Caboclo held by many practitioners of other Black religious traditions, such as Candomblé and Umbanda. This more typical view, time-worn in the literature on Black religions in Brazil, presents the Caboclo pantheon in opposition to that of West African-derived Orixás: instead of regal African gods with names in Yoruba or Fon, Caboclos would be bawdy sailors, Indian chiefs, cowboys, sultans, and other post-Middle Passage Brazilian figures who use their human mediums to sing, samba dance, and offer council. Meanwhile, “Caboclo” is understood by countless Catholic devotees in Bahia as a designation of a broader ancestral pantheon that includes not only sailors, sultans, and cowboys but also Orixás and even Catholic saints. Importantly, this alternative Caboclo cosmology reveals one of the many ways certain Catholic cosmologies in Bahia overlap with those of other Black religions. Drawing primarily on over a decade of ethnographic and archival work in Bahia, this paper offers an ethnographic overview of Caboclo veneration among Catholic devotees in Bahia before tracing its antecedent practices back through time and space, looking not only at the calundu––a central African-derived musical healing ritual practiced all over colonial Brazil––but also at important precolonial and early modern central African practices and cosmologies. With this historically-informed and geographically expansive ethnographic understanding of the Caboclo in Bahian Catholic contexts, I hope to offer a frequently neglected view of the depth and diversity of the African  legacy in Bahia, Brazil, and the Americas more generally.

Bio

Michael Iyanaga (PhD Ethnomusicology, University of California) is Associate Professor of Music and Latin American Studies at William and Mary. His primary interests include Catholic saint festivities in Latin America and Africa since the 15th century, though he also publishes frequently on issues of intellectual history and translation theory. Iyanaga’s first book, Alegria é devoção: sambas, santos e novenas numa tradição afro-diaspórica da Bahia (Editora da Unicamp, 2022), is a musical ethnography about domestic festivities for Catholic saints in Bahia, Brazil.

Dialectics of a Rooted Diaspora

Abstract

This paper evaluates the designation of “diasporic community” upon Afro-Brazilians which may sound ineligible. Diasporic consciousness in the case of Afro-Brazilians was immediate. The condition for the survival of this consciousness was based on the large numbers of enslaved persons who could share commonalities and bond within a religious practice. By the first quarter of the 19th century, Salvador de Bahia, a north-eastern state of Brazil, was primarily made up of people of African descent. Afro-Brazilian cultural identity began to shape the atmosphere of the capital, and cities like Rio de Janeiro experienced socio-cultural transformation following the abolition of the slave trade in Brazil. From this historical backdrop, this paper argues that Candomblé in Brazil comprises what I refer to as a “rooted diasporic community” that still considers Africa as the core source of spiritual reference. Driven by the theory that the diasporic way of being is characterised by “transactions, processes, mutations, practices” (During 6), which reveal a sense of nostalgia for the homeland (Safran1991), this paper shows the material ways in which diasporic consciousness has been produced, as anything but static, with examples of transformations of artefacts for over 400 years. In the specific context of Candomblé, this talk proposes the understanding of diasporic consciousness as a palimpsest of memories expressed in multiple ways, including its ritual objects. Following some momentous historical contingencies of Candomblé’s material Culture, this paper converges and analyses the cosmological, ontological and epistemological underpinnings of Candomblé’s ritual artefacts through the framework of semiotic ideology.

Bio

Zainabu Jallo is a Post-Doctoral Researcher and lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, and the University of Bern, both in Switzerland. she is also a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Anthropology at USP - Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. Jallo is one of the Principal Investigators of the” Sacral Architecture Africa” Project. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts England and a member of the UNESCO Coalition of Artists for the General History of Africa. Her scholarly interests include Museum Anthropology, Diaspora studies, Iconic criticism, and Material Culture.

Affordances and Ambiguities of Ritual Repair and Transformations of Consciousness in North Africa

Abstract

In the spirit of Steven Friedson’s attentiveness to the inseparability of music and ritual transformations of consciousness (“music as ritual and ritual as music,” 2009: 12), this paper expands on my prior work exploring how ritual might be understood as an act of revealing music’s powers of intervention and transformation. I examine the multiple affordances of ritual healing music that not only include individual healing and transcendence, but also historical, social, and even economic repair for Tunisians of sub-Saharan heritage and other underrepresented minorities in North Africa. With particular attention paid to the ritual dynamics of performance (Kapferer 2005), particularly the architecture of time (Rouget 1985) created by musical form, sonic density, and processes of intensification, I explore the “imaginative horizons” (Crapanzano 2004) evoked by ritual music that reinforce and
challenge a sense of betweenness attending to human and spirit worlds, shattered and repaired selves, and proximate and distant histories and geographies. Ritual transformations of consciousness, from this perspective, are not mysteries to be solved, but rather constitute sites of emergent meanings and ambiguities. Indeed, I shall suggest, it is in part the mystery, or inarticulable “secret” (Arabic: sirr) of ritually transformed consciousness (Arabic: wijd;
takhmīr) that allows for the multiple affordances of ritual transformations of consciousness and encourages, however obliquely or incompletely, the work of ritual repair.

Bio

Associate Professor, Tufts University. Formerly on the faculty of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Through ethnographic methods, his research revolves around the intersection of music, ritual, and power in North Africa, particularly music’s capacity to heal and create transcendence, to maintain and narrate histories of underrepresented populations, and to serve as a flashpoint for debates over cultural, religious, and political identities. His latest book, Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form, was recently published by the University of Chicago Press. His previous monograph, Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia (Chicago: 2010), received three honorable mention awards for book prizes from academic societies in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and North African Studies. He is a two-time National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow as well as a Fulbright Fellow and an American Institute for Maghrib Studies Fellow.

Roundtable: Sounding/Voicing/Embodying Blackness in the Early Modern Iberian World

Abstract

Since the publication of Nicholas R. Jones’s book Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, wide interest in and the study of black dance, soundscapes, and voices has exploded in academic circles within early modern Iberian Studies on both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing on sonic Blackness and textuality, this roundtable engages Jones’s work on black dances and black musical practices/tradition active in early modern Iberia, New Spain, and the Caribbean. Cesar Favila considers the early modern vocal archive and reflects on aurality with respect to the African Baroque among the inhabitants of New Spain’s cloistered convents. The materiality of black women’s bodies comes to the fore in a sonic and gendered critique of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Catholic narratives on the nature of temporal and eternal salvation. Ireri Chávez Bárcenas traces the performance of Blackness in cathedral villancicos informed by the Black festive practices of the African diaspora in New Spain. The recovery of defiant voices and expressions of collective identity in this repertoire amplifies the lived experiences of free and enslaved men and women of African descent that resisted or negotiated the restrictive structures imposed by Spanish rule. Bernard Gordillo Brockmann explores a sensorial environment of the Spanish colonial cathedral coro in which constructed black women’s voices sang in devotion to God. The villancico de negro serves as a sonic-textual liminal space in which the Spanish and mestizo male gaze embodied and appropriated Blackness. Nicholas Jones’s intervention attends to the powerful ways Black Performance Studies and Black Sound Studies can productively impact and nuance the study of Blackness in Early Modern Iberian Studies writ large.

Bio

Nicholas R. Jones (Yale) is the former 2021-2022 King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s (KJCC) Scholar-in-Residence at New York University. He is the author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, January 2021) with Chad Leahy. Jones also co-edits the Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham. Jones’s research has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and he is completing his second solo-authored monograph entitled Cervantine Blackness. Jones has also held visiting appointments at Georgetown University and New York University.

The Continuum: Drum, Song and the Dancing Body

Abstract

In collaboration, Mojuba! Dance Collective (Cleveland, OH), an African Contemporary dance company dedicated to sharing the stories, culture, and embodied knowing of the African Diaspora to cultivate rich and transformative community experiences and Imamou Lele (New York, New York), an ensemble of dancers, percussionists, and vocalists sewn together in the spirit of Haiti to uplift, preserve, and promote the traditional works of the island will present traditional drum rhythms played by master musicians along with ritual dances and invocation.

We are interested in actively engaging through an embodied ritual experience which connects altar building, song, and dance in a tapestry of spiritual collaborative encounter. We plan to share a performance piece which would incorporate spiritual elements such as traditional Vodou songs of invocation, drum patterns, ritual dance, and colors that the audience would first experience collectively through lecture demonstration. This effort to tell the stories of people of the African Diaspora strategically employs spirituality in a digestible way which will be translated through performance in its actual ritual form. In combining altar set up, libation, and brief lecture, the audience will be taken through a hands-on ritual experience which will then be carried out throughout the performance. There is potential for transcendence and spiritual connection, and certainly greater understanding and community activation through this transformative experience.

Bio

Alexandra Jean-Joseph is an educator, dancer, choreographer, and priestess of Haitian Vodou. She studied Psychology with a focus on Child and Adolescent Mental Health Studies at New York University. As a performing artist, she has studied under, performed, and collaborated with notable Haitian master instructors Mikerline Pierre, Julio Jean, Nadia Dieudonné, Peniel Guerrier, Jessica St. Vil Ulysse, and Adia Whitaker. In 2018, Alexandra co-founded Imamou Lele, to promote and preserve the folkloric and traditional works of Haiti. As Artistic Director, Alexandra actively engages and collaborates with community to uplift and promote healing through offerings of dance and drum classes, workshops, and performances. She strives to preserve the connection between Haitian Dance and Vodou rites and to promote dance as an experience where spirit and art meet. As a practitioner of Haitian Vodou, specifically a manbo (priestess), Alexandra practices with her spiritual family at Le Temple D’Olohoum in Queens, New York.

Possessed by Possession: The Play of Paradox

Abstract

What does it mean to be possessed, to become another? What changes in the brain, in the body and emotions? Does the ability to empathize increase with the experience of spirit possession, as it does in meditation for example? And what of the capacity to listen, and to hear? What kind of possession are ethnographers performing in our studies of possession? Why and for whom?

In the vast literature on spirit possession (and the trance that accompanies it) authors rarely inhabit the emic point of view. Rather, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists either explain the phenomenon in rational terms — as catharsis, as a reaction to traume, as symbolic play, as a system of social cohesion or as a means of gender-bending and temporary power inversion – or they describe it aesthetically as musically-induced and sensorial performance. The musical angle is perhaps closest to current understandings of entrainment and subsequent brain plasticity, though the question remains: why are Western scholars possessed with possession? Is it because it shatters our narratives of coherent subjectivity? Why the need to translate spiritual realities, particularly those of Africa and its diaspora, in material and linguistic terms? What does this translation allow “us,” we who study possession trance, to know and to do? More importantly, what does trance allow us to be?

This paper begins by examining the processes of inter-semiotic translation at work in scholarship on trance, before moving on to suggest that the most humble and honest approach to these rituals is one that acknowledges both the inherent biases of all authorship and the productive role of paradox at the root of human existence.

Bio

Deborah Kapchan is a writer, translator and ethnographer specializing in North African art and poetry. Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and a Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of five books as well as numerous essays on sound, narrative and poetics. Her works include Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (1996), as well as Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace (2007)  Her latest work, Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry (2020), was shortlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Prize for Poetry.

Afro-Brazilian Ritual Performance: An Alternative Modernity

Abstract

With his concept of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has illustrated how African-descendant artists create countercultures to resist a European hegemony in what is called modernity, excluding “African” practices and knowledge as “traditional” and backward. In the same way, African-American religions are not a mere survival of cultural heritage but serve as counterculture and a form of resistance against the elites’ attempts to “whiten” black people.

The Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé is an example of such a subversive potential. Historically, participants camouflaged their forbidden practices by equaling their gods to Catholic saints. It was not syncretism or hybridization but a strategy to implement their values and knowledge in the new environment. Whereas their various ritual practices primarily seem to connect humans to their African gods and ancestors through symbolic representations, African-related aesthetics, and spirit possession, they provide metacommentaries on the Brazilian reality and promote an alternative model of modernity. Contemporary importance in the Brazilian public culture illustrates the impact this strategy generated.
 

Based on ethnographic and literature research, this paper analyzes Candomblé initiation processes, ritual practices, and public ceremonies with a focus on their performativity. It discusses how they relate to the historical collective trauma of slavery and social marginalization and invert this experience toward the empowerment and agency of participants. It illustrates how Candomblé communities aesthetically create, communicate, and implement alternative modernity within their ritual practices. In this regard, it will also be necessary to investigate the healing aspect of candomblé in terms of a transformation of experience and the provision of strategies to cope with structural violence. The papers finishes with a brief outlook on the future of these practices in new diasporas, for example,
Brazilians in Germany.

Bio

Helmar Kurz studied Ethnology, Science of Religion, and Archaeology and is a research fellow and lecturer at the Department of Social & Cultural Anthropology in Muenster, Germany. His research areas are Anthropology of Religion, Medical Anthropology, Migration, Transcultural Psychiatry, Media, and the Anthropology of the Body/Senses. From 2015-2018 he engaged in the research program “Diversification of Mental Health: Therapeutic Spaces of Brazilian Spiritism” funded by DFG (German Research Foundation), resulting in his Ph.D. thesis “Voice of Good Sense: Diversification of Mental Health and the Aesthetics of Healing in Brazilian Spiritism”. He is a board member of the Association for Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM) and co-editor of the affiliated Curare: Journal of Medical Anthropology.

The Continuum: Drum, Song and the Dancing Body

Abstract

In collaboration, Mojuba! Dance Collective (Cleveland, OH), an African Contemporary dance company dedicated to sharing the stories, culture, and embodied knowing of the African Diaspora to cultivate rich and transformative community experiences and Imamou Lele (New York, New York), an ensemble of dancers, percussionists, and vocalists sewn together in the spirit of Haiti to uplift, preserve, and promote the traditional works of the island will present traditional drum rhythms played by master musicians along with ritual dances and invocation.

We are interested in actively engaging through an embodied ritual experience which connects altar building, song, and dance in a tapestry of spiritual collaborative encounter. We plan to share a performance piece which would incorporate spiritual elements such as traditional Vodou songs of invocation, drum patterns, ritual dance, and colors that the audience would first experience collectively through lecture demonstration. This effort to tell the stories of people of the African Diaspora strategically employs spirituality in a digestible way which will be translated through performance in its actual ritual form. In combining altar set up, libation, and brief lecture, the audience will be taken through a hands-on ritual experience which will then be carried out throughout the performance. There is potential for transcendence and spiritual connection, and certainly greater understanding and community activation through this transformative experience.

Bio

Jean Menesky Magloire is a New York based educator, percussionist, spoken word poet, community activist, and podcaster. A graduate of Brooklyn College, he currently works as a public school teacher. Originally from Haiti, he  grew up listening to the polyrhythmic sounds of the tanbou, the Haitian drum. He has studied traditional Haitian drumming and has trained to play Haitian ceremonial drum rhythms. As a musician and performing artist, he uses these rhythms along with traditional songs to educate, activate, and hold space for community. As a cultural activist, he uses the drum as a tool for social change and equity. He regularly offers drum classes, workshops, and actively supports local Haitian organizations with community programming. In 2018, Magloire co-found Imamou Lele, an ensemble of dance artists, musicians, and vocalists who present and preserve Haiti’s folkloric works. He currently serves as the Musical Director of the group. Magloire also hosts and produces The Sky Menesky Podcast, a radio style program that highlights artists, educators, activists, and community leaders in Brooklyn and abroad who are dedicated to promoting the culture of Haiti and the African diaspora.

Panel on Vocality, Transformation and Ritual Mounting in Haitian Vodou

Creolophone Women’s Fugitive Speech: Bizango hums and vocal transformations

Abstract

This presentation analyzes Caribbean Creolophone women’s speech, para-linguistic sounds, and songs as an underappreciated form of women’s self-fashioning and transformation. Afro-Creole women’s speech developed as a tradition within conditions of fugitivity (Derby 2014; Moten 2008). Fugitive speech here refers to speech and vocalized sounds, meant to be understood only by those in a position to know its meanings, under repressive conditions. Haitian women use vocal expressions to constitute themselves into collectivities that sustain and support them. The talk considers meta-linguistic sounds, and then the links between humming and magic that reveal themselves in the ethos of fugitivity and silence in the Bizango–magico-juridical secret societies–in Haiti. The paper considers the silences, sufferings, and punishments that men have visited on Creolophone women and the links between silence, para-linguistic sounds, suffering, and transformation.

Bio

Elizabeth McAlister is Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on Afro-Caribbean religions, music, and race theory, with a focus on Haiti. She is author of Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora, and, Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas as well as articles for Journal of Africana Religions, Small Axe, Novo Religio, Anthropological Quarterly, Black Music Research Journal, Newsweek, CNN, LA Times, and Foreign Policy. Her current research focuses on the rise of neo-Pentecostalism in Hati.

“El nazareno me dijo”: The Musical Hagiography of Ismael Rivera

Abstract

In Ismael Rivera’s iconic 1975 song “El nazareno” (The one from Nazareth), Jesus Christ not only speaks to the Puerto Rican singer, but he also interrupts “un bacilón,” a party at its peak. Rivera decides to listen, leaves the party, and experiences an epiphany. In the song, Jesus gives Rivera a series of advice that he takes to heart, and after the chorus sings “El nazareno me dijo,” we learn that Rivera has become a convert. Central to his conversion is the Black statue of Christ located in the church of Portobelo, a primarily Afro-descendant port in Panama. Rivera visited Portobelo in 1969 and attributes to “El Cristo Negro” (The Black Christ) the ability to leave behind his heroin addiction.

In this presentation, it will examine the musical and spiritual relationship between El Cristo Negro from Portobelo and Ismael Rivera. Using the concept of “musical hagiography” to understand Rivera’s symbolic canonization as the most well-known Afro-Puerto Rican singer of the twentieth century, it will analyze how Rivera’s symbolic hagiography became entangled with that of El Cristo Negro. He argues that by examining this hagiographic mimesis, we can gain a new understanding of the circulation of racial, spiritual, and musical discourses across the Caribbean. Analyzing Rivera’s interviews, liturgical records, handcrafted souvenirs outside the church in Portobelo, and Daniel Nina’s novel El nazareno (2017), this presentation examines spiritual transformations through Afro- Caribbean popular music.

Bio

Juan Suárez Ontaneda is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He examines the production of racialized discourses through performances in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru during the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, his work focuses on Abdias do Nascimento’s experimental theater, Nicomedes Santa Cruz’s radio broadcastings, Victoria Santa Cruz’s choreographies, Delia Zapata Olivella’s dance manuals, and Manuel Zapata Olivella’s street theater. In doing so, his research underscores how their performances created a vocabulary to denounce everyday experiences of racism and discrimination in Latin America. His research has been published in Modern Languages Notes, Alambique, and in the edited volume Fire Under My Feet: History, Race, and Agency in African Diaspora Dance (2021). He is currently working on a book manuscript that will come out from his dissertation.

A Congolese Furtum Sacrum: Mystical Trajectories of a Mission Madonna

Abstract

Works of African art often work: they possess efficacies to transform lives. Creation and performance of such significant things inevitably instigate narrative processes. Objects speak both figuratively and, sometimes, literally; and as they are recollected, their pathways continue. Through consideration of a Madonna sculpted in the 1930s by a Congolese artist, competing histories of Katangans and Catholic missionaries living along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika suggest ways to decolonize a central African aesthesis.
 

The Madonna was first associated with the Catholic Mission of Mpala (DRC). In 1885, a
Belgian outpost founded at Mpala in 1883 was ceded to Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa,
better known as the White Fathers. In 1898, White Fathers were joined by White Sisters who
remained at Mpala until 1953, with healthcare and girls’ education their preoccupations. First
missionaries created a de facto Christian Kingdom at Mpala with ramifications still felt in the
mid-1970s during the presenter’s years of doctoral research there.
 

Since the early 1960s, most of Mpala Mission has been abandoned, its medical clinic and
other services long lost. Sometime thereafter, a furtum sacrum was undertaken – that is, the
Madonna relocated through what some would understand as theft, others pious “assistance”
analogous to how saintly relics held in European churches were “liberated” and relocated during the Crusades at the behest of the divinities in question. Through her sculpture as an nkisi “power object,” the Madonna was “translated” to local hands to meet local needs. As “Mother of us all,” she yearned to once again bless rural children afflicted by epidemics, and she did so through the ministrations of a Bulumbu spirit medium. Chalk and iron oxide on the sculpture attest to “interformances” of votive exchange. Our Mother’s tale is presented through an anthropology of credibility to counter (neo)colonial credulity and Eurocentric epistemicide.

Bio

Allen F. Roberts is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the University of California, Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. A socio-cultural anthropologist by training, he and his late spouse, art historian, and fellow WAC professor Mary “Polly” Nooter Roberts (d.2018) engaged African arts through research, writing, teaching, and museum exhibitions. Their book Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (1996) won the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Award for Outstanding Museum Scholarship, and the African Studies Association recognized their A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (2003) as the best book of its year. AL co-edited and contributed to a volume dedicated to Polly’s memory that is entitled Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence and was published in late 2022. This presentation foreshadows AL’s return to Polly’s doctoral research in the D. R. Congo in the late 1980s and his own in the 1970s.

Doubt and the Displacement of Consciousness in Mounting Across Africana Religions

Abstract

While scholars of religion traditionally avoided value judgments on the veracity of religious claims, many still continued to view possession as a false phenomenon to be explained away by disparate theories – psychiatric, psychological, biological, and social. As an academic and a priest of Africana spirituality, I depart from the subjective premise that “mounting,” a preferred term emic to many Africana religions, is true, not only as a social fact, but as an actual phenomenon in which supernatural beings can come to inhabit humans for meaningful purposes. My paper will focus on the doubt, uncertainty, and insecurity that some practitioners of different Africana religious have around “mounting” in their perspective traditions, the impetus for which comes from my own anxieties during my development as a medium. While for most devotees mounting is a given, some may doubt whether specific mediums fake their experience for ulterior motives, including prestige and authority. For others, uncertainty and insecurity can manifest in the questioning of whether they themselves will ever be chosen as spiritual vessels by mounting entities, and what they lack if not; whether their altered states of being actually amount to mounting or its pre-stages; or whether their mounting will be recognized as such by others. At the heart of many of these doubts is the question as to whether the displacement or retention of individual consciousness serve as the metrics to validate mounting. I will explore the relationship between mounting and consciousness in several Africana traditions, including Haitian Vodou, from those for which unconsciousness must be an absolute, tested through harsh trails; to those that recognize mounting as a developmental process in which consciousness is progressively surrendered; to those that recognize that mounting will manifest differently for different individuals, some of whom will remain aware as their bodies are inhabited by those beyond.

Travel & Trance: A Phenomenology of Transcendental Pilgrimage in the Spiritual Baptist Faith

Abstract

This paper discusses the phenomenon of “travelling in the Spirit” among Spiritual Baptist Christians in Trinidad and Tobago. Spiritual Baptists do not merely talk about the spiritual world: they walk, swim, and climb through it, they measure its depths, chart its limits, and document its inhabitants; as a community, they work cooperatively to explore, map, and to verify it through the formal rite of “mourning,” a higher-consciousness-seeking ritual involving an extended period of prayer, fasting, seclusion, and deprivation. While on the mourning ground— an isolated room near or attached to the church—mourners, who are also called “pilgrim travelers,” through the cultivation of trance-like states, traverse the spiritual realm where they explore foreign landscapes and converse with gods, saints, and other beings who convey important messages and present them with gifts. Later, these expeditions are mapped by the “tracking” of Pointers—usually Leaders and Mothers of the church who are responsible for guiding pilgrims during the ritual—and recorded in summary reports given by mourners upon their return. By “giving their tracks,” that is, by giving an account of their spiritual journeys, pilgrims effectively serve as amateur cosmographers, cataloging the details of their experiences traveling the spiritual lands and revealing with each subsequent visit more of the mysteries that lie beyond the veil. Drawing on long-term comprehensive ethnographic research conducted in Trinidad and Tobago, this paper considers the role of supernatural pilgrimage alongside other modes of mystic self-transcendence in the church (including spirit mediumship, “catching power,” speaking in tongues, and astral travel) in constituting a novel phenomenology of Spirit that blurs hard distinctions between here/there, embodied/disembodied, human/divine, and for the faithful testifies to the tangible and thus incontrovertible influence of the spiritual dimension on their everyday lives. By comparing different genres of ecstatic practice employed by Spiritual Baptist churchgoers, he aims to contribute useful analysis and additional insight into the diverse modalities of spiritual engagement characteristic of Afro-Caribbean and other Black religious cultures.

Bio

Brendan Jamal Thornton is an anthropologist and associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His scholarship on religion and culture in the Caribbean has been published in Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Latin American Research Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the award-winning book Negotiating Respect: Pentecostalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Spiritual Authority in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida, 2016).

The Continuum: Drum, Song and the Dancing Body

Abstract

In collaboration, Mojuba! Dance Collective (Cleveland, OH), an African Contemporary dance company dedicated to sharing the stories, culture, and embodied knowing of the African Diaspora to cultivate rich and transformative community experiences and Imamou Lele (New York, New York), an ensemble of dancers, percussionists, and vocalists sewn together in the spirit of Haiti to uplift, preserve, and promote the traditional works of the island will present traditional drum rhythms played by master musicians along with ritual dances and invocation.

We are interested in actively engaging through an embodied ritual experience which connects altar building, song, and dance in a tapestry of spiritual collaborative encounter. We plan to share a performance piece which would incorporate spiritual elements such as traditional Vodou songs of invocation, drum patterns, ritual dance, and colors that the audience would first experience collectively through lecture demonstration. This effort to tell the stories of people of the African Diaspora strategically employs spirituality in a digestible way which will be translated through performance in its actual ritual form. In combining altar set up, libation, and brief lecture, the audience will be taken through a hands-on ritual experience which will then be carried out throughout the performance. There is potential for transcendence and spiritual connection, and certainly greater understanding and community activation through this transformative experience.

Bio

Errin Weaver is a choreographer, community activator, and the Executive Artistic Director of Mojuba! Dance Collective, an African contemporary dance company dedicated to exploring spiritual and cultural dance traditions of the African Diaspora to restore community wellness, share and validate the Black narrative experience, and reestablish cultural connection, based in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a Masters in Public Service from DePaul University and will complete her thesis in May toward an MFA in Choreography and Interdisciplinary Studies from Wilson College. 

Errin has taught, been in residency, and sat on panels regarding sacred dance rooted in the Gospel tradition and Africanist dance forms extensively. Through her work, she has created the Emerging Black Choreographers Incubator, hosted countless workshops and festivals, and become a published author. Her choreography has been presented regionally and internationally, and has received awards and commissioned support. She has been deeply vested in wellness and the community arts where she has facilitated training sessions, free outdoor movement workshops, and a collaborative evening length work uniting professional and aspiring artists in a telling of Black American history.

Errin is certified at the M’Singha Wuti level for the Umfundalai Contemporary African Dance technique and has taught spiritual and African based dance forms extensively.  She has worked with such notable choreographers as Abdel Salaam, Jeffrey Page, Monique Haley, Ronald K. Brown, Babacar N’Diaye, and the late Baba Chuck Davis.