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Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a \"survival,\" or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world.

Human populations confront three distinct climate challenges: (1) seasonal climate fluctuations, (2) sporadic climate crises, and (3) long term climate change. Religious systems often attribute climate crises to the behavior of invisible spirits. They devise rituals to influence the spirits, and do so under the guidance of religious specialists. They devise two types of problem-solving rituals: anticipatory climate maintenance rituals, to request adequate rainfall in the forthcoming planting season, and climate crisis rituals for drought or inundations. The paper compares rainfall rituals in three different settings: Israel (Judaism), Northwest China (ethnic village religion), and Haiti (Vodou). Each author has done anthropological fieldwork in one or more of these settings. In terms of the guiding conceptual paradigm, the analysis applies three sequentially organized analytic operations common in anthropology: (1) detailed description of individual ethnographic systems; (2) comparison and contrast of specific elements in different systems; and (3) attempts at explanation of causal forces shaping similarities and differences. Judaism has paradoxically maintained obligatory daily prayers for rain in Israel during centuries when most Jews lived as urban minorities in the diaspora, before the founding of Israel in 1948. The Tu of Northwest China maintain separate ethnic temples for rainfall rituals not available in the Buddhist temples that all attend. The slave ancestors of Haiti, who incorporated West African rituals into Vodou, nonetheless excluded African rainfall rituals. We attribute this exclusion to slavery itself; slaves have little interest in performing rituals for the fertility of the fields of their masters. At the end of the paper, we identify the causal factors that propelled each systems into a climate-management trajectory different from that of the others. We conclude by identifying a common causal factor that exerts a power over religion in general and that has specifically influenced the climate responses of all three religious systems.

In the concluding chapter, Geller identifies the volume’s key themes. Shared concerns indicate how investigations of ontologies impel a disciplinary paradigm shift. She also seeks to extend bioarchaeology’s deliberations about ontology by linking the concept to ethics and epistemology. To this end, she turns to Karen Barad’s writings about “ethico-onto-epistemology,” a concept that weaves together doing right, being, and knowing. Many chapters in this volume demonstrate ethnography as one such mode of ethico-onto-epistemology and the emic/etic split it ameliorates. To situate Barad’s abstract ideas, Geller discusses her encounters with the agentive dead and living communities in two different contexts. Repatriation activities were the backdrop for the first set of encounters that involved her, Odawa and Seminole decedents in the Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection, and their living descendants and descendant community. Her second set of encounters with agentive human remains occurred while conducting ethnographic work on Haitian Vodou in Milot, Haiti. These encounters demonstrate the need for a flexible ethico-onto-epistemology informed by a critical historicism of bioarchaeological methods, the cultural specifics of a case study, and researchers’ positionality.

Although Duvalier used Vodou to legitimize his brutal dictatorship, the religion has traditionally empowered Haitians, particularly people from the poorest segments of the population. Historically, at Bois Caïman, Vodou inspired Haitians to rebel against the French for their freedom, and more recently Vodou priests and priestesses have served as healers, counselors, and mediators between rival families. In a highly patriarchal society, Vodou empowers women by allowing them to bring female issues into the \"public eye.\" Yet in the past three decades Christian missionaries from various Protestant churches have been swarming to Haiti, and unlike the Haitian Catholic church, which tolerates the presence of Vodou in society, they condemn the Afro-Haitian belief system, labeling it a satanic cult. The tragic earthquake has created new opportunities for the Christian missionaries. Seeking new recruits, the missionaries blame the devastation on Vodou practitioners, who, at times, question the integrity of their belief. Moreover, the Protestants control a substantial portion of foreign aid, schools, orphanages, and medical centers, which lures Haitians away from their indigenous religion. Although the Protestants provide relief, their constant attack on Vodou reconfigures gender relations, disempowers poor women, and generates sentiment of self-hate among Haitians who are misled into believing that their faith is the source of their plight.

This article explores processes of religious change within Haitian Vodou from the perspective of \"reafricanization\" and \"desyncretism.\" As a case in point serve attempts to introduce Olowoum as the Vodou Godhead, thus replacing the Christian Bondye, or Lord. While the introduction of new elements, such as Olowoum, into Vodou seems fraught with little opposition from practitioners, the same can not be said regarding attempts to exclude religious elements (such as Catholic saints) from Vodou. A guiding reflection is also that reafricanization and desyncretization are best understood as contemporary expressions of Vodou's long-standing tradition of religious adaptability.

The earthquake of January 12, 2010, was not the first, nor will it be the last, to hit Haiti, a volcanic land traumatized by natural and man-made disasters from its beginning as a colony and sovereign nation. In the throes of reinventing itself politically, socially, and culturally since the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship, 1957-1986, Haiti now has to reinvent itself physically. Are there bounds to the Haitians' vaunted resilience? The author proposes to examine the aftermath of the \"Goudougoudou,\" as Haitians now call the event, relating it to other events that have taxed Haitian resolve over the course of two centuries.

In an interview, Vodou flagmaker Clotaire Bazile discusses how his development as a healer and ritual specialist is linked to his artistic and entrepreneurial gifts as a flagmaker.

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, significant numbers of Haitian immigrants began to arrive and settle in Miami. Overcoming some of the most foreboding obstacles ever to face immigrants in America, they, their children, and now their grandchildren, as well as more recently arriving immigrants from Haiti, have diversified socioeconomically. Together, they have made South Florida home to the largest population of native-born Haitians and diasporic Haitians outside of the Caribbean and one of the most significant Caribbean immigrant communities in the world. Religion has played a central role in making all of this happen. Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith is a historical and ethnographic study of Haitian religion in immigrant communities, based on fieldwork in both Miami and Haiti, as well as extensive archival research. Where many studies of Haitian religion limit themselves to one faith, Rey and Stepick explore Catholicism, Protestantism, and Vodou in conversation with one another, suggesting that despite the differences between these practices, the three faiths ultimately create a sense of unity, fulfillment, and self-worth in Haitian communities. This meticulously researched and vibrantly written book contributes to the growing body of literature on religion among new immigrants, as well as providing a rich exploration of Haitian faith communities.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s first book, Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti [Stirring the Pot of Haitian History] (1977), exposes the foundational role of Haitian Vodou and the Kreyòl language in Haiti’s Revolution (1791-1804). This essay analyzes selected passages from Ti difé boulé that explicitly incorporate Vodou songs, prayers, and terminology to illustrate how Trouillot provocatively deploys oral sources of historical narrative and memory in his groundbreaking work. The young activist, writing in Haitian Kreyòl from New York City during the Duvalier régime, powerfully contests official versions of Haitian history by emphasizing the agency of the Haitian people. Vodou and Kreyòl, born out of struggle within a repressive colonial framework, are the cohesive forces underlying Haitian resistance. Ti difé boulé examines neocolonial patterns of oppression emerging during the nineteenth century and reassesses revolutionary icon Toussaint Louverture. The government that Louverture established harnessed Vodou to continue systematically subjugating the Haitian people; these class interest-based patterns evolved into Haiti’s deep-rooted predatory State. Trouillot’s innovative yet understudied masterpiece offers contemporary readers “new narratives” of Haiti, recentering its people, spiritual practices, and native language. Vodou and Kreyòl, as twin pillars of Haitian resistance and cultural identity, remain a vital and vibrant part of the American heritage. They merit more nuanced understandings within a cultural and political context where they have increasingly come under siege, inside and outside of Haiti.