Underground Cultures – serie

Creating Culture, Performing Community explores the ways in which the people of Santo Santiago de Angahuan, a P'urhépecha community in the state of Michoacán, México, create and curate their cultural practices and how, by doing so, they perform what it means to be an active member of the P'urhépecha community. Through a deep ethnographic account of ritual practices, author Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera focuses on the tembuchakua, or wedding rituals, analyzing their creation, performance, and transformation within the P'urhépecha community. By proposing alternative approaches to understanding indigeneity, Martínez-Rivera showcases how people carefully transform their cultural practices and rearticulate and perform their identities.Thus Creating Culture, Performing Community has three main aims: to analyze how people create their own culture; to showcase how cultural practices are performed to reflect particular ideas of what it means to be a member of a community; and to move beyond limited understandings of indigenous identity and cultural practices.

Creating Culture, Performing Community explores the ways in which the people of Santo Santiago de Angahuan, a P'urhépecha community in the state of Michoacán, México, create and curate their cultural practices and how, by doing so, they perform what it means to be an active member of the P'urhépecha community. Through a deep ethnographic account of ritual practices, author Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera focuses on the tembuchakua, or wedding rituals, analyzing their creation, performance, and transformation within the P'urhépecha community. By proposing alternative approaches to understanding indigeneity, Martínez-Rivera showcases how people carefully transform their cultural practices and rearticulate and perform their identities.Thus Creating Culture, Performing Community has three main aims: to analyze how people create their own culture; to showcase how cultural practices are performed to reflect particular ideas of what it means to be a member of a community; and to move beyond limited understandings of indigenous identity and cultural practices.

How does an oracle become a church? In Nigeria in the early 1930s, the African Church of Ifa was founded by Adebanjo Olorunfunmi Osiga, who combined the doctrinal, moral, and ritual foundations of Anglican Christianity, which he converted to in his youth, with precolonial Yoruba beliefs and the medieval practice of divination through geomancy to create a new form of worship.The Oracle and the Temple traces the unexpected journey of these ideas and practices across centuries and continents. Drawing on years of fieldwork in Benin and a remarkable collection of primary sources (including eight by Osiga), author Erwan Dianteill reveals how a system of divination became a structured religion with its own clergy, liturgy, and moral code. In addition to Sunday services in a temple, diviners claiming to speak for the god of Destiny (Fa or Ifa) deliver oracles to guide the faithful in their private lives. These practices, while combining to form a whole religion, remain distinct in terms of time and space, with temple and oracle functioning parallel to each other.Rigorous yet accessible, The Oracle and the Temple illustrates how African diviners engaged with Christianity, writing, and institutions to transform inherited practices without abandoning their cosmological foundations. The result is a compelling account of religious creativity, where tradition is not preserved without change, but reworked into new, enduring forms.