29077: Bellegarde-Smith (BOOK REVIEW/) Journal of American Academy of Religion (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: P D Bellegarde-Smith <pbs@csd.uwm.edu>



Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Advance Access originally published online on
July 18, 2006
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2006
74(3):784-787; doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfj103

Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New
World. Edited by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith.
University of Illinois Press, 2005. 262 pages.
$20.00.

This collection of writings on African religions
in the "New World" is an avant-garde anthology
that takes seriously the contemporary substance
of African religions in the Americas and the
Caribbean. The collection of twelve essays ranges
from analytical descriptions of beliefs and
practices to sociological themes concerning
African religions and postcolonial contexts.
The editor himself contributes two essays to this
work, one introductory and the other examining
"Religious Thought and Social/Historical Memory."
Bellegarde-Smith explains his selection of the
volume's title based on the iconic significance
of bones as scattered pieces of armor, structural
remains that can be used to reconstruct histories
and that can be reassembled to make meaning in
the present. He proceeds to identify the major
methodological concerns of this project, which
include the overwhelming practice of labeling
African religions as products of syncretism. He
notes that this taxonomic maneuver is never
applied to Western world religions.

Bellegarde-Smith also takes issue with the
sentiment that academics in religious studies who
are also practitioners of African religions are
unfit to produce scholarly work on these
religions.

Another important point persuasively demonstrated
by these essays is that Africans in the New World
maintained ethnically specific rituals and
worldviews. To counter common portrayals of
enslaved Africans as hopelessly mixed with rival
ethnic peoples and thus unable to maintain their
individual national stories, rituals, and
coherent worldviews, Osei-Mensah Aborampah
(124-142) and Kean Gibson (208-223) examine
Jamaican histories of the Akan and Guyanese Comfa
religion, respectively, explaining that enslaved
Africans taken to these regions were typically
from specific nations of West Africa. Aborampah
produces a fascinating comparative study of Akan
religion in West Africa and religion among the
predominantly Akan in Jamaica, showing the
genealogical continuities in worldviews and
ritual. These writers do not romanticize Africa,
nor do they sacrifice the complexity of identity
and international interaction among African
national groups. They demonstrate, rather, that
continuities, innovation, and New World responses
produced distinctly African religious forms in
the Americas and Caribbean.

This is by no means a far-fetched argument.
Southern Baptists, for example, are never
presented as an example of how un-Christian
American religion is. Rather, American
Protestantism (and Catholicism, for that matter)
is widely recognized as demonstrative of
Christian formations in America-this despite the
fact of immense changes and important differences
between American contexts and those of European
Christianity. And herein lies one of the major
points that Bellegarde-Smith has intentioned
through assembling such a collection of essays.
That the old bromides of African survivals-or-not
represented in the classic studies by Melville
Herskovits and E. Franklin Frazier are inadequate
and poorly cast is a thesis ably borne out in
this anthology.

T. J. Desch-Obi (70-89) examines martial arts
traditions in the instance of capoeira in Brazil,
ladya in Martinique, and knocking and kicking in
North America (particularly the ring shout
attested in South Carolina). Desch-Obi makes
intelligible the relationship between military
training and spirituality that inheres in these
traditions, explaining the historical contexts
that shaped these religious forms of dance-West
African warriors learned complex moves to avoid
enemy attacks in close-contact fighting and
employed dancing as a means of perfecting their
execution of this fighting art.

Another major theme that runs consistent
throughout the various essays is the role that
African religions have played in formations of
resistance against colonization, alienation,
disease, and political powerlessness.
Bellegarde-Smith's essay on social/historical
memory, for instance, critically assesses the
popular embrace of Vodou in Haiti and the
religion's historical role in advancing
anti-colonial freedom struggles that culminated
in Haiti's independence. This lies in
juxtaposition to Vodou's disparagement by
cultural and national elites in Haiti (52-69).
African religion in that nation has been
invigorating and life affirming. The postcolonial
task of establishing a commensurate, humanizing
visage of Vodou remains to be fulfilled.
Readers will find especially informative Randy P.
Conner's (143-166) analysis of gender and sexual
diversity in Vodou, Candomble, and other African
religions. Conner discerns flexible notions of
gender and sexual identity latent in African
assumptions of spirit possession and explicit
strategies of inclusion of sexual "difference"
evident from the fact that gay or lesbian priests
abound in Vodou and are routinely respected as
cultic leaders. He notes that Ezili Freda, for
instance, one of the loas ("spirits") recognized
in Vodou, is commonly associated with queer or
gay identity (146). Conner also identifies
patterns of ambivalence or open hostility toward
queer practitioners.

Ina Johanna Fandrich (187-207) assesses the
increased suppression and harassment of Vodou
queens in New Orleans shortly before the Civil
War. Fandrich's assessment of primary source
material from the era sheds new light on the
perceptions of Vodou by different racial groups
in New Orleans. It is evident, for instance, that
colored women who were priests of Vodou described
their religion as an African one, were
politically and legally astute, benefited from
classism and colorism, and generated broad
support from multiple demographics (193, 195).
This essay provides fascinating insights into
multiracial dynamics that characterized the city
and politico-legal strategies of defining
legitimate religion during the era.

Roberto Nodal and Miguel "Willie" Ramos (167-186)
employ phenomenological approaches to the study
of sacrifice (ebó) in Lukumí Orisha worship
(a.k.a. Santería). They explain the concept of
ritual sacrifice and ashé (energy or power)
insofar as both are integral to achieving
healing. Nodal and Ramos also discuss the view
that spirits both protect and punish devotees
based on behavior and veneration.

Nodal and Ramos also note that Lukumí worship has
experienced vigorous growth since the 1960s to
have numerous adherents not only in the Caribbean
and the United States but also globally. They are
right to identify it as a "universal faith" (171)
that functions independently of ethnicity or
nationalism. These authors consciously avoid
equating Lukumí with the African religion of
Yoruba (thus their use of the term Lukumí).
Lukumí is far more widely known as "Yoruba,"
however, throughout the United States and abroad.
The taxonomic preference of Nodal and Ramos
sharpens the conundrum that is raised in
Bellegarde-Smith's introduction. One might ask,
for instance, whether these authors would
classify putative Catholicism in Cuba as
veritably Catholic, given the influences of
African and indigenous forces over the centuries
on Cuban Christianity.

It is striking that few of the essays included in
this volume provide even a mild critique of
problems that inhere to African religions (e.g.,
the ageist distribution of cultic power or the
characteristic equation of illness or calamity
with guilt). African religions, clearly, have
survived genocidal policies of coercive
conversions, legal censure, and elaborate schema
of vilification (African religions are routinely
equated with the monotheistic mythological
character Satan or with the demonic) that
continue today to determine popular attitudes
toward religions of Africa. Insofar as
scholarship on such religions becomes a means of
recovery, it is to be expected that sympathetic
approaches inform the project of study. But the
sociology of African religions also demands
asking difficult questions of these worldviews
and paradigms embedded in ritual frameworks.
With Fragments of Bone, the editor and
contributors have succeeded brilliantly in
producing a text that advances keen scholarship
on African religions. Readers will appreciate the
prudent selection of articles that are
international in scope and interdisciplinary in
method. The revisionist analytics and
methodological shifts embedded in the essays of
Fragments of Bone merit serious attention from
scholars of religion.

I would strongly recommend this volume for use as
a classroom text for both undergraduate and
graduate courses. The individual essays are well
researched and provide analytically sophisticated
approaches to describing and theorizing the
frameworks and sociality of African religions in
the Americas and Caribbean. I would also
recommend this text as an invaluable reader in a
methods course, particularly where the category
of religion and the problem of classification are
of key interest.

Sylvester A. Johnson
Indiana University Bloomington



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