عنوان

Religion, Diaspora, and Cultural Identity:

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Religion, Diaspora, and Cultural Identity:

[Article]

Maurer, WM

A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean by John W. Pulis

This volume brings together the work of fourteen scholars of West Indianreligious beliefs and practices. It will be a handy guide for future research,especially since the chapters, taken together, usefully summarize the literatureto date on religion in the Caribbean and in Caribbean diasporic communities.The editor is to be commended for providing a sense of coherence tothe very disparate case studies presented here. The analytical focus of thebook is the formation of West Indian religiosity in the diaspora- and, indeed,as Aisha Khan puts it forcefully in her contribution, of the very idea of religionitself, constructed as a cultural and an analytical domain separate fromother domains of social life. Refusing to view Caribbean religion as eithermade up of timeless traditions or as cut from whole cloth, and resisting temptationsto see diaspora as a unidirectional flow from the Caribbean to immigrantcommunities in North America or to view cultural hegemony as aprocess emanating from North America southwards, the volume's contributorssee diaspora itself destabilizing the traditional/modern dichotomy.Several contributors reveal the utter embeddedness of rational secularism andmodernity, with their narratives of progress and development, in dominantWestern religious cosmologies, and Caribbean religions' implicatedness inthe constitution of specifically West Indian modernities at home and abroad.

2000

UC Irvine

[Article]

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