Böcker av Paul Christopher Johnson

A Trios volume that addresses the question of church and state in three different contexts: nineteenth-century Brazil, early Canada, and contemporary American courtrooms.

The word "possession" is trickier than we often think, especially in the context of the Black Atlantic and its religions and economy. Here possession can refer to spirits, material goods, and, indeed, people. This book features essays by anthropologists in the Americas to explore the nexus found at the heart of the idea of being possessed.

By joining a diaspora, a society may begin to change its religious, ethnic, and even racial identifications by rethinking its "e;pasts."e; This pioneering multisite ethnography explores how this phenomenon is affecting the remarkable religion of the Garifuna, historically known as the Black Caribs, from the Central American coast of the Caribbean. It is estimated that one-third of the Garifuna have migrated to New York City over the past fifty years. Paul Christopher Johnson compares Garifuna spirit possession rituals performed in Honduran villages with those conducted in New York, and what emerges is a compelling picture of how the Garifuna engage ancestral spirits across multiple diasporic horizons. His study sheds new light on the ways diasporic religions around the world creatively plot itineraries of spatial memory that at once recover and remold their histories.