A01=Christopher Fennell
African Diaspora
Author_Christopher Fennell
BaKongo
Category=JBSL
Category=JHM
Category=JHMC
Category=NKD
creolization
cultural retention
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
European immigrants
material culture
Native Americans
religious ritual
trans-Atlantic diasporas
Yoruba
Product details
- ISBN 9780813031415
- Weight: 418g
- Dimensions: 160 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 14 Oct 2007
- Publisher: University Press of Florida
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Christopher Fennell offers a fresh perspective on ways that the earliest enslaved Africans preserved vital aspects of their traditions and identities in the New World. He also explores similar developments among European immigrants and the interactions of both groups with Native Americans. Focusing on extant artifacts left by displaced Africans, Fennell finds that material culture and religious ritual contributed to a variety of modes of survival in mainland North America as well as in the Caribbean and Brazil. Over time, new symbols of culture led to further changes in individual customs and beliefs as well as the creation of new social groups and new expressions of identity. Presenting insights from archaeology, history, and symbolic anthropology, this book traces the dynamic legacy of the trans-Atlantic diasporas over four centuries, and it challenges existing concepts of creolization and cultural retention. In the process, it examines some of the major cultural belief systems of west and west central Africa, specific symbols of the BaKongo and Yoruba cosmologies, development of prominent African-American religious expressions in the Americas, and the Christian and non-Christian spiritual traditions of German-speaking immigrants from central Europe.
Christopher C. Fennell, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has contributed to The Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora.
