Jualynne E. Dodson - Böcker

Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora explores the ways in which religious ideas and beliefs continue to play a crucial role in the lives of people of African descent. The chapters in this volume use historical and contemporary examples to show how people of African descent develop and engage with spiritual rituals, organizations and practices to make sense of their lives, challenge injustices and creatively express their spiritual imaginings. This book poses and answers the following critical questions: To what extent are ideas of spirituality emanating from Africa and the diaspora still influenced by an African aesthetic? What impact has globalisation had on spiritual and cultural identities of peoples on African descendant peoples? And what is the utility of the practices and social organizations that house African spiritual expression in tackling social, political cultural and economic inequities? The essays in this volume reveal how spirituality weaves and intersects with issues of gender, class, sexuality and race across Africa and the diaspora. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students interested in the study of African religions, race and religion, sociology of religion and anthropology.

Spaces set apart by religious practitioners to represent their understanding of the sacredness of their world provide useful windows into the collective history and the expression of ideas of a religion and its followers. Jualynne Dodson explores sacred spaces constructed between 1998 and 2007 by contemporary practitioners of four popular religions in Cuba's eastern Oriente region. Three of these religions, Palo Mayombe, Vodu, and Muertera Bembe de Sao, are Africa-based traditions while the fourth, Espiritismo, is indigenous to Cuba and Oriente, though it evolved from traditions of the U.S. and Europe. While the religions vary in historical development, in material artifact, and ritual activities that comprise their content, images in this book reflect inherited and shared cosmic orientation of the traditions.The investigation of Dodson and the African Atlantic Research team offers an interconnected examination of the history and embedded understandings of these four religions while simultaneously offering a panoramic view of religious development in Cuba and practitioners' struggle for a self-defined, Africa-based nature for their religious activities on the island.

Engendering Church explores the power, processes, and circumstances that brought about the new gender relations in the African Methodist Church—one of the largest African American denominations in the U.S. Dodson tells the heroic stories of women like Sara Hatcher who rose from behind the scenes to confront the hierarchy of male clergy. Dodson's historical account of the church and its many changes show that unless women hold church positions, they are overlooked as proactive agents of organizational power. She also links the church to broader social change. When women began to function in key leadership roles in African American churches, they also contributed to more rapid improvement in the living conditions for blacks in the United States.