Passages & afterworlds : anthropological perspectives on death in the Caribbean / Maarit Forde & Yanique Hume, editors.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Forde, Maarit, 1973- editor.

Hume, Yanique, editor.

Series:

Religious cultures of African and African diaspora people

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Funeral rites and ceremonies--Caribbean Area--History.

Funeral rites and ceremonies.

Death--Political aspects.

Death.

Death--Social aspects.

History.

Caribbean Area--Religious life and customs.

Caribbean Area.

Death--Religious aspects.

Death--Social aspects--Caribbean Area.

Death--Political aspects--Caribbean Area.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

x, 297 pages ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Passages and afterworlds

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2018.

Summary:

The contributors to this book explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean.

Contents:

Introduction / Maarit Forde

Chapter 1. "The dead don't come back like the migrant comes back" : many returns in the Garifuna dügü / Paul Christopher Johnson

Chapter 2. Of vital spirit and precarious bodies in Amerindian socialities / George Mentore

Chapter 3. The making of ancestors in a Surinamese Maroon society / Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering and Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen

Chapter 4. Death and the construction of social space : land, kinship, and identity in the Jamaican mortuary cycle / Yanique Hume

Chapter 5. Mortuary rites and social dramas in Léogâne, Haiti / K aren Richman

6. From Zonbi to Samdi : late transformations in Haitian eschatology / Donald Cosentino

7. Governing death in Trinidad and Tobago / Maarit Forde

Chapter 8. Death and the problem of orthopraxy in Caribbean Hinduism : reconsidering the politics and poetics of Indo-Trinidadian mortuary ritual / Keith E. McNeal

Chapter 9. Chasing death's left hand : personal encounters with death and its rituals in the Caribbean / Richard Price

Aftermath: Life and postlife in Caribbean religions / Aisha Khan.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Passages and afterworlds.

ISBN:

9781478000310

1478000317

9781478000143

1478000147

OCLC:

1039210511