The Center for Religion in Contemporary Society (CRCS) and Race, Religion, and Secularism Network at uu77 Nijmegen present:
Stuart Earle Strange
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Yale-NUS College and National University of Singapore
University of Oslo, Norway
Abstract
The plantation is an institution that forces persons and places into transparency by subtracting everything that falls outside of monetary value for faraway markets. Against these demands, Caribbean ritual traditions have embraced the opacity of occult practices and texts to create persons irreducible to the economic purposes and ideologies of the plantation. As enacted in everyday Caribbean sociality and ritual life, opacity provides a resiliently communal rebuke to the diminishment of persons to others’ purposes. This paper describes how communities whose ancestors were subjected to the plantation in Suriname, Haiti, Guyana, and Trinidad continue to use occult practices to ritually engage the opacity intrinsic to social awareness to create distinctive modes of personhood.
With responses from:
Marie Keulen, PhD candidate in History (RU)
Dr. Martijn de Koning, Associate Professor in Islam, Politics, and Society (RU)
Registration
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