24662: VISHNUSURF (reply) re: 24660: Pichard re: 24659: VISHNUSURF re: 24656: jolierosey ...

[sak-pase@bimini.ws]

VISHNUSURF@aol.com


I do realize that some people use this list for academic purposes 
-- namey minor queries, however, rather than argumentation, debate, or 
serious analytical inquiry.  But I would hardly consider this anything 
like H-Net, or any other online academic forum whose contributors are 
generally all scholars debating scholarly topics. Then again, perhaps I 
have not been paying close enough attention, so if I am mistaken, then I 
apologize. Please do not misunderstand me here, for I greatly appreciate 
this list and have found much helpful information and insight scattered 
among all of the journalism (of wildly varying degrees of quality) and 
the demagoguery, along with all the tid bits of cool stuff Haitian food, 
music, soccer, etc...

Be that as it may, because I have been taken to task (twice now!), and 
although I already sited one source yesterday, though evidently not to 
Ms. Pichard's satisfaction or lofty standards, here are two other 
sources worthy of consideration regarding the questionability of some of 
the claims made by Afrocentricity:

Wilson Moses, _Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History_ 
(Cambridge, 1998).  

Stephen Howe, _Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes_ (Verso, 
1998)
And at the risk of sounding academic (heaven forbid!), those are two of 
the finest scholarly presses in the world.  Read them for yourself and 
draw your own conclusions, if you like. My original point was really 
just to question a claim that Vodou is somehow an Egyptian religion.  I 
do not find that the leading scholars of Vodou would accept this claim 
(Metraux, Desmangles, Brown, Hurbon, etc...). And where such claims are 
made, it is clearly as mythopoetics or comparative mythology, and /not/ 
as historiography.