The Sacred Language Of The Abakuá

Author : Lydia Cabrera
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 463 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2020-12-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781496829474

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The Sacred Language of the Abakuá by Lydia Cabrera Pdf

In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.

Author : Lydia Cabrera
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 693 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2020-12-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781496829450

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The Sacred Language of the Abakuá by Lydia Cabrera Pdf

In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.

Author : Maria Oggun Gbemi
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781300405559

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The Anagó Language of Cuba by Maria Oggun Gbemi Pdf

An examination of the Anagó language of Cuba. Based on over 25 years of field research in Cuba, Venezuela and the United States. The Anagó language is used in Lucumí religious ceremonies and celebrations in Cuba and throughout the diaspora. Includes a historical and linguistic overview along with examples of Anagó from academic, folkloric and religious context.

Author : David H. Brown
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 467 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2019-08-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000008180

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The Light Inside by David H. Brown Pdf

Originally published in 2003, The Light Inside is a ground-breaking study of an Afro-Cuban secret society, its sacred arts, and their role in modern Cuban cultural history. Enslaved Africans and creoles developed the Abakuá Society, a system of men’s fraternal lodges, in urban Cuba beginnings in 1836. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the country, the book’s novel approach builds on close readings of dazzling Abakuá altars, chalk-drawn signs, and hooded masquerades. It looks at the art history of Abakuá altars, not only tracing changing styles but also how they evolve through cycles of tradition and renovation. The Light Inside reflects the essence of the artists’ creativity and experience: through adornment, altars project the powerful spirituality of Abakuá practice, an aesthetic strategy. The book also traces a biography of Abakuá objects – their shifting forms and meanings – as they participated in successive periods of Cuban cultural history. The book constructs close rhetorical and visual analyses of changing representations of the Abakuá, spanning nineteenth-century arts and letters, modern ethnographic texts, museum displays, paintings, and late twentieth century commercial kitsch. This interdisciplinary work combines art history, African Diaspora, cultural studies and cultural anthropology with Latin American.

Author : Brian Willson
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2021-07-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781496834478

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In Search of Ancient Kings by Brian Willson Pdf

The Egúngún society is one of the least-studied and written-about aspects of African diasporic spiritual traditions. It is the society of the ancestors, the society of the dead. Its primary function is to facilitate all aspects of ancestor veneration. Though it is fundamental to Yorùbá culture and the Ifá/Òrìṣà tradition of the Yorùbá, it did not survive intact in Cuba or the US during the forced migration of the Yorùbá in the Middle Passage. Taking hold only in Brazil, the Egúngún cult has thrived since the early 1800s on the small island of Itaparica, across the Bay of All Saints from Salvador, Bahia. Existing almost exclusively on this tiny island until the 1970s (migrating to Rio de Janeiro and, eventually, Recife), this ancient cult was preserved by a handful of families and flourished in a strict, orthodox manner. Brian Willson spent ten years in close contact with this lineage at the Candomble temple Xango Cá Te Espero in Rio de Janeiro and was eventually initiated as a priest of Egúngún. Representing the culmination of his personal involvement, interviews, research, and numerous visits to Brazil, this book relates the story of Egúngún from an insider’s view. Very little has been written about the cult of Egúngún, and almost exclusively what is written in English is based on research conducted in Africa and falls into the category of descriptive and historical observations. Part personal journal, part metaphysical mystery, part scholarly work, and part field research, In Search of Ancient Kings illuminates the nature of Egúngún as it is practiced in Brazil.

Author : Katrin Hansing
Publisher : LIT Verlag Münster
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : History
ISBN : 3825896005

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Rasta, Race and Revolution by Katrin Hansing Pdf

Decades after its birth and subsequent tour du monde, Rastafari has more recently also appeared in revolutionary Cuba. How the movement has been globalized and subsequentially localized in a socialist and Spanish-speaking context are the main foci of this book. In particular it examines how Cubans have adopted and adapted the movement to their own socio-political and cultural context. Particular attention is paid to Rastafari's development in the context of Cuba's current economic crisis and re-appearance of more overt racism. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba, the study shows how Rastafari's growth and presence on the island have influenced and contributed to the formation and expression of new cultural identities and discourses with regard to what it means to be young, black, and Cuban. Katrin Hansing is a social anthropologist who has worked on numerous Cuba-related issues. Her main areas of interests and expertise include: migration, race/ethnicity, and identity. She is currently the director of a German Research Council funded research project on Cuba's social collaboration ties in Africa.

Author : Lydia Cabrera
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 606 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2023-04-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478023340

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El Monte by Lydia Cabrera Pdf

First published in Cuba in 1954 and appearing here in English for the first time, Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte is a foundational and iconic study of Afro-Cuban religious and cultural traditions. Drawing on conversations with elderly Afro-Cuban priests who were one or two generations away from the transatlantic slave trade, Cabrera combines ethnography, history, folklore, literature, and botany to provide a panoramic account of the multifaceted influence of Afro-Atlantic cultures in Cuba. Cabrera details the natural and spiritual landscape of the Cuban monte (forest, wilderness) and discusses hundreds of herbs and the constellations of deities, sacred rites, and knowledge that envelop them. The result is a complex spiritual and medicinal architecture of Afro-Cuban cultures. This new edition of what is often referred to as “the Santería bible” includes a new foreword, introduction, and translator notes. As a seminal work in the study of the African diaspora that has profoundly impacted numerous fields, Cabrera’s magnum opus is essential for scholars, activists, and religious devotees of Afro-Cuban traditions alike.

Author : Lydia Cabrera
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780803264380

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Afro-Cuban Tales by Lydia Cabrera Pdf

As much a storyteller as an ethnographer, Lydia Cabrera was captivated by a strange and magical new world revealed to her by her Afro-Cuban friends in early twentieth-century Havana. In Afro-Cuban Tales this world comes to teeming life, introducing English-speaking readers to a realm of tenuous boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, deities and mortals, the spiritual and the seemingly inanimate. Here readers will find a vibrant, imaginative record of African culture transplanted to Cuba and transformed over time, a passionate and subversive alternative to the dominant Western culture of the Americas. In this charmed realm of myth and legend, imaginative flights, and hard realities, Cabrera shows us a world turned upside down. In this domain guinea hens can make dour Asturians and the king of Spain dance; little fat cooking pots might prepare their own meals; the pope can send encyclicals about pumpkins; and officials can be defeated by the shrewdness of turtles. The first English translation of one of the most important writers on African culture in the Americas, the collection provides a fascinating view of how African traditions, myths, stories, and religions traveled to the New World?of how, in their tales, Africans in the Americas created a New World all their own.

Author : Eugenio Matibag
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2018-02-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781947372610

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Afro-Cuban Religious Experience by Eugenio Matibag Pdf

The books in the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series demonstrate the University Press of Florida’s long history of publishing Latin American and Caribbean studies titles that connect in and through Florida, highlighting the connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. Books in this series show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers, both foreign and domestic. They examine topics critical to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, and tourism. They look at the growth of Florida and the Caribbean and the attendant pressures on the environment, culture, urban development, and the movement of peoples, both forced and voluntary. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series gathers the rich data available in these architectural, archaeological, cultural, and historical works, as well as the travelogues and naturalists’ sketches of the area in prior to the twentieth century, making it accessible for scholars and the general public alike. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program.

Author : Benjamin Hebblethwaite,Silke Jansen
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 459 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2023
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781496236463

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Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas by Benjamin Hebblethwaite,Silke Jansen Pdf

Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas explores spirit-based religious traditions across vast geographical and cultural expanses, including Canada, the United States, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. Using interdisciplinary research methods, this collection of original perspectives breaks new ground by examining these traditions as typologically and historically related. This curated selection of the traditions allows readers to compare and highlight convergences, while the description and comparison of the traditions challenges colonial erasures and expands knowledge about endangered cultures. The inclusion of spirit-based traditions from a broad geographical area emphasizes the typology of religion over ethnic compartmentalization. The individuals and communities studied in this collection serve spirits through rituals, song, instruments, initiation, embodiment via possession or trance, veneration of nature, and, among some Indigenous people, the consumption of ritual psychoactive entheogens. Indigenous and African diaspora practices focused on service to ancestors and spirits reflect ancient substrates of religiosity. The rationale to separate them on disciplinary, ethnic, linguistic, geographical, or historical grounds evaporates in our interconnected world. Shared cultural, historical, and structural features of American indigenous and African diaspora spirit-based traditions mutually deserve our attention since the analyses and dialogues give way to discoveries about deep commonalities and divergences among religions and philosophies. Still struggling against the effects of colonialism, enslavement, and extinction, the practitioners of these spirit-based religious traditions hold on to important but vulnerable parts of humanity's cultural heritage. These readings make possible journeys of recognition as well as discovery.

Author : Ivor L. Miller
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2010-01-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781604738148

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Voice of the Leopard by Ivor L. Miller Pdf

In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller shows how African migrants and their political fraternities played a formative role in the history of Cuba. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon's multilingual Cross River basin. Instead, each settlement had its own lodge of the initiation society called Ékpè, or “leopard,” which was the highest indigenous authority. Ékpè lodges ruled local communities while also managing regional and long-distance trade. Cross River Africans, enslaved and forcibly brought to colonial Cuba, reorganized their Ékpè clubs covertly in Havana and Matanzas into a mutual-aid society called Abakuá, which became foundational to Cuba's urban life and music. Miller's extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ékpè initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years' collaboration with Abakuá initiates in Cuba and the United States. He argues that Cuban music, art, and even politics rely on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership. Voice of the Leopard is an unprecedented tracing of an African title-society to its Caribbean incarnation, which has deeply influenced Cuba's creative energy and popular consciousness.

Author : Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert,Margarite Fernández Olmos
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2011-07-11
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780814762578

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Creole Religions of the Caribbean by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert,Margarite Fernández Olmos Pdf

A comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions developed in the Caribbean region Creolization—the coming together of diverse beliefs and practices to form new beliefs and practices—is one of the most significant phenomena in Caribbean religious history. Brought together in the crucible of the sugar plantation, Caribbean peoples drew on the variants of Christianity brought by European colonizers, as well as on African religious and healing traditions and the remnants of Amerindian practices, to fashion new systems of belief. Creole Religions of the Caribbean offers a comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions that have developed in the region. From Vodou, Santería, Regla de Palo, the Abakuá Secret Society, and Obeah to Quimbois and Espiritismo, the volume traces the historical–cultural origins of the major Creole religions, as well as the newer traditions such as Pocomania and Rastafarianism. This second edition updates the scholarship on the religions themselves and also expands the regional considerations of the Diaspora to the U. S. Latino community who are influenced by Creole spiritual practices. Fernández Olmos and Paravisini–Gebert also take into account the increased significance of material culture—art, music, literature—and healing practices influenced by Creole religions.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 44 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 1976
Category : Africans
ISBN : UIUC:30112045742951

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The Abakuá Language in Cuba by Anonim Pdf

Author : Margarite Fernández Olmos,Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2022-08-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9781479803484

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Creole Religions of the Caribbean, Third Edition by Margarite Fernández Olmos,Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert Pdf

"A comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions developed in the Caribbean region"--

Author : Flora María González Mandri
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Art
ISBN : 0813925266

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Guarding Cultural Memory by Flora María González Mandri Pdf

In Guarding Cultural Memory, Flora González Mandri examines the vibrant and uniquely illuminating post-Revolutionary creative endeavors of Afro-Cuban women. Taking on the question of how African diaspora cultures practice remembrance, she reveals the ways in which these artists restage the confrontations between modernity and tradition. González Mandri considers the work of the poet and cultural critic Nancy Morejón, the poet Excilia Saldaña, the filmmaker Gloria Rolando, and the artists María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Belkis Ayón. In their cultural representations these women conflate the artistic, the historical, and the personal to produce a transformative image of the black woman as a forger of Cuban culture. They achieve this in several ways: by redefining autobiography as a creative expression for the convergence of the domestic and the national; by countering the eroticized image of the mulatta in favor of a mythical conception of the female body as a site for the engraving of cultural and national conflicts and resolutions; and by valorizing certain aesthetic and religious traditions in relation to a postmodern artistic sensibility Placing these artists in their historical context, González Mandri shows how their accomplishments were consistently silenced in official Cuban history and culture and explores the strategies through which culturally censored memories survived--and continue to survive--in a Caribbean country purported to have integrated its Hispanic and African peoples and heritages into a Cuban identity. The picture that finally emerges is one not only of exceptional artistic achievement but also of successful redefinitions of concepts of race, gender, and nation in the face of almost insurmountable cultural odds.