Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas - by Benjamin Hebblethwaite & Silke Jansen (Paperback)

About the Book

Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas offers an introduction and nine original perspectives on religious and cultural traditions emanating from communities in several regions across the Americas.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"[Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas] is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on Indigenous and African diaspora religions and a groundbreaking meditation on the commonalities and divergences among them."--Kelly E. Hayes, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions


"One of the benefits of this book is the contributors' use of a wide range of methodologies and approaches. There are few existing studies in comparative religion that offer such an intellectual feast to nourish the religious and critical mind. This is an excellent and well-researched book that is desperately needed in contemporary scholarship in religion and comparative religion."--Celucien L. Joseph, author of Theologizing in Black: On Africana Theological Ethics and Anthropology

About the Author

Benjamin Hebblethwaite is an associate professor in Haitian Creole, Haitian, and Francophone studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou and coeditor of Stirring the Pot of Haitian History. Silke Jansen is a professor of Romance linguistics at Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. She is the author of several publications on language and culture contacts in the Caribbean.