Subjectivity
Offerings from African Diasporic Religious Ethnography
Keywords:
Subjectivity/subjectivities, inter-subjectivity/inter-subjectivities, African Diasporic religion, ethnography, Trinidad, Yoruba religion, orisha, OshunAbstract
This article focuses on subjectivity in the ethnography of religion by considering the multiplicity of subjectivity and their relationalities, drawing from the author’s ethnographic encounter with the orisha Oshun in Trinidad. This reflection on the implications of taking seriously the spectral or spirit, in their many forms and aspects, as active agents involves the expansion of subjectivity and the relational aspects of inter-subjectivity from the singular to the multiple. Written from a purposefully provocative compound subject position of “I/we”, this article asks that ethnographers of religion grapple with the offerings of ontologies outside the Western “normative” intellectual tradition. I/we offer that this shift will impact our engagements with the people and communities that we work with, expanding our capacity to share multiple worlds and our ability to engage numerous theorizations.
References
Alexander, M. Jacqui 2006 Pedagogies of Crossing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Allen, Jafari S., and Ryan C. Jobson 2016 The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties. Current Anthropology 57(2): 129–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/685502
Bejarano, Carolina A., Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García and Daniel M. Goldstein 2019 Decolonizing Ethnography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Blanes, Ruy, and Diana E. Santo (eds) 2014 The Social Life of Spirits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226081809.001.0001
Boddy, Janice 1994 Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality. Annual Review of Anthropology 23(1): 407–434. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.23.100194.002203
Burnett, Diana 2016 Illuminating the Legacy of Zora Neale Hurston: Visionary, Architect, and Anthropologist of Africana Religious Subjectivities. Journal of Africana Religions 4(2): 253–66. https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.4.2.0253
Castor, N. Fadeke 2017 Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372585
Spiritual Ethnicity: Our Collective Ancestors in Ifá and Orisha Devotion across the Americas. In Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas, 70–96. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013112-005
Christian, Barbara 1988 The Race to Theory. Feminist Studies 14(1): 67–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177999
Covington-Ward, Yolanda, and Jeanette S. Jouili (eds) 2021 Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478013112
Crosson, J. Brent 2019a What Possessed You? Spirits, Property, and Political Sovereignty at the Limits of ‘Possession’. Ethnos 84(4): 546–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2017.1401704
b Catching Power: Problems with Possession, Sovereignty, and African Religions in Trinidad. Ethnos 84(4): 588–614. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2017.1412339
Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226705514.001.0001
Csordas, Thomas J. 2008 Intersubjectivity and Intercorporeality. Subjectivity 22(1): 110–21. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.5
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison 2007 Objectivity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Furey, Constance M. 2012 Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(1): 7–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfr088
Harrison, Faye 2010 Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
Jobson, Ryan C. 2020 The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019. American Anthropologist 122(2): 259–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13398
Johnson, Paul C. 2011 An Atlantic Genealogy of “Spirit Possession”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(2): 393–425. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417511000107
Johnson, Paul C. (ed.) 2014 Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226122939.001.0001
King, Tiffany Lethabo, Jewell Navarro and Andrea Smith (eds) 2020 Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012023
Lorde, Audre 2012 Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.
McClaurin, Irma (ed.) 2001 Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Ochoa, Todd R. 2007 Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 22(4): 473–500. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2007.22.4.473
Otero, Solimar 2020 Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/oter19432
Pels, Peter 2014 After Objectivity: An Historical Approach to the Intersubjective in Ethnography. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 211–36.
Pérez, Elizabeth https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.009 2013 Portable Portals: Transnational Rituals for the Head across Globalizing Orisha Traditions. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16(4): 35–62. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2013.16.4.35
Strongman, Roberto 2019 Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478003458
Teish, Luisah 1985 Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. New York: Harper & Row.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 1991 Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox, 17–44. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
The Otherwise Modern. In Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, edited by Bruce Knauft, 220–37. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
North Atlantic Fictions: Global Transformations, 1492–1945. In Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, 29–46. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04144-9_3
Further Reading
Biehl, João, Byron Good and Arthur Kleinman 2007 Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. Berkeley: University of California Press.
