Paul Christopher Johnson
Biographic Data
| ID | 113399 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Christopher Johnson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Johnson |
| SIGNATURE | JOHNSON P C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7048-2389 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 225 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Kwayâtisiwin (“We Prepare): Understanding the Methods of Preparation for Evaluating Nêhiyawak-based Research
The evaluation of Indigenous research practices overlooks the cultural protocols, traditions, and ceremonies that are critical to conducting research with Indigenous communities. To illustrate, the authors share how practices of Kwayâtisiwin (defined as “We Prepare” in the Nêhiyawêwin, Plains Cree language) attune people’s minds, bodies, and intentions to the Nêhiyawak (Plains Cree) tradition well before formally recognized research begins. This …
Possession
This chapter explores the issues surrounding spirit possession within Caribbean religions. It cites how the notion of possession questioned the idea of the autonomous, rational, free agent. While slavery was the Caribbean’s foundational institution and system of exchange, spirit possession provided a key category that helped affix the great ontological and social divide that separated those capable of ownership from those who could by right be ow…
The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy
Islam is in many ways a very open religion, but secrecy still played a role in early Islam and in Islam’s canonical texts. Secrecy is important for Sufis, who believe that the mystical experience should be kept secret, as should some forms of knowledge, and that some Sufis have access to the secrets of the unseen. These forms of secrecy have both protected Sufis from other Muslims who do not share their beliefs and bolstered the authority of Sufi…
Hilma af Klint’s Temple for the Paintings
Through Af Klint’s journal entries and sketches, we can shift analyses of sacred space from the guise of transcendent force that simply “appears,” in the phenomenological nomenclature, and instead approach it as technique
Designing Risk, Accumulating Failure: Purgatory, the Planned, and Primitive Accumulation
In Fall 2020, Paul Johnson, Emily Floyd, and Kati Curts met on Zoom. In this edit of their extended conversation, the authors question “planned sacred space,” the role of design in creating religious experience, and the category of the “relic.”
Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy
Banning Black Gods: Law and Religions of the African Diaspora. By Danielle N. Boaz
Translating Spirits: Medical-Ritual Healing and Law in Brazil and the Broader Afro-Atlantic World
This essay takes up questions related to the medical and legal legacies of the trans-atlantic slave trade by examining, within newly sovereign states, the fortunes of ritual experts conversant in matters of health. It asks how these ritual actors in Brazil—where 40 percent of all slaves were sent—framed illness, and compares their frameworks to the legal terms such states used to circumscribe their activities, and what the social consequences wer…
Formas E Temperamentos Da "Escrava Anastácia", Santa Afro-Brasileira
A agência ativada por meio de trocas com os santos não está simplesmente presente ou ausente, mas se manifesta de acordo com a forma das configurações materiais e sociais dos santos e do estado de ânimo evocado pela manifestação de determinado santo. Neste ensaio, retomo a história de uma santa afro-brasileira, conhecida como Escrava Anastácia, e a forma como diferentes grupos étnico-raciais a representam, de acordo com diferentes efeitos sociais…
Automatic Religion: Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France
Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion, by Robert A. Yelle
To the yelping chorus of social scientists informing us of the health benefits of religious life—from length-of-life to greater happiness to lower blood pressure—Robert A. Yelle offers a devastating demurral. Religion, he argues, is not best seen as something rational, but rather as something wild, a set of “exit signs” from the rational economies that appear to structure much of human life. Religions posits laws but, more importantly, offer an e…
Photographie, esprit, photographie spirite: Un cas d’enchevêtrement sémiotique au Brésil, 1871
Dans le Candomblé brésilien comme partout ailleurs dans les Amériques africaines, les photographies ont des caractéristiques non seulement visuelles, mais aussi haptiques, voire même olfactives. Parce qu'elles sont des choses autant que des images, les photographies permettent une médiation entre, d'une part, un outre-lieu et un autre temps - une scène ou une personne située dans un lieu et un temps différents de celui dans lequel la photographie…
The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil
Possession's Native Land
Let me offer a few opening premises in consideration of these essays on 'possession'. First, comparison is basic to thought, constant and inevitable. Second, comparison arranges likeness and differ
Estudios afrolatinoamericanos: Una Introducción
Título original: Afro-Latin American Studies. 1a ed.: Cambridge : Cambridege Uhiversity Press, 2018. Este libro tiene el objetivo de introducir al lector en un campo dinámico y en expansión como es el de los estudios afrolatinoamericanos. Definimos este campo, en primer lugar, como un estudio de la población de ascendencia africana en América Latina y, en segundo lugar, como el estudio de las sociedades en las que vive dicha población. En relació…
“The Dead Don’t Come Back Like the Migrant Comes Back”: Many Returns in the Garifuna Dügü
Modes and moods of 'Slave Anastácia,' Afro-Brazilian saint
Agency activated through exchanges with saints is not simply present or absent. Rather it is emergent, depending on the mode of saints' material and social configurations, and the mood evoked by a specific saint's manifestation. In this essay I consider the history of an Afro-Brazilian saint called Slave Anastácia, as she signifies with varying social effects for different groups of ethno-racial users. I consider how saints become manifest in a g…
Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State
Among the Garifuna: Family Tales and Ethnography from the Caribbean Coast, written by Marilyn McKillop Wells
Syncretism and Hybridization
There exists a wide range of terms of religious mixture, featuring syncretism and hybridization most prominently, but also creolization, transculturation, and métissage. These competing terms of mixture possess different genealogies and impinge on 'religion' differently, such that they should not be simply interchanged or arbitrarily applied. Second, terms of religious mixture have been unevenly used. Brazil and Japan, for example, have often bee…
Spirited Things: The Work of "Possession" in Afro-Atlantic Religions
The word 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. In Spirited Things, Paul Christopher Johnson gathers together essays by leading anthropologists in the Americas to explore the fascinating nexus found at the heart of the idea of being possessed. The result is a book that marries one of anthropology's fo…
Religion and Diaspora
Diaspora, and with it 'diasporic religion', has exploded as an area of research in the field of Religion, opening important paths of inquiry and analysis. This article traces the itineraries and intersections of Diaspora and Religion over the last two decades, especially vis-à-vis groups that activate multiple diasporic horizons. It then evaluates the risks of the overdispersion of Diaspora. To counter this, the article recommends more narrowly c…
Bodies and things in the forest of symbols
Taking Manuel Vásquez's book as its point of departure, this essay explores what a truly materialist history of materiality for the study of religion might look like, in contradistinction to idealist histories of materiality. It then mounts a defense of Clifford Geertz as a pioneering scholar of material and embodied religion, against the positions taken by Vásquez and, earlier, by Talal Asad, applying a critique that has by now become overly ent…
An Atlantic Genealogy of 'Spirit Possession
Not all spirits have retreated to metaphor, even in the very public sphere of U.S. electoral politics. As we learned during the last presidential campaign, Governor Sarah Palin enlisted the help of Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee during his 2005 visit to Alaska to cast out the spirits that hindered her career. TheNew York Timeselaborated, 'Ms. Palin has long associations with religious leaders who practice a ... brand of Pentecostalism known as 'spir…
On Leaving And Joining Africanness Through Religion: The ‘Black Caribs’ Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons
Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé
This book is about secrecy in religion and the process by which traditionally secretive religions become public, taking as its case the Afro‐Brazilian religion of Candomblé. The book argues that Candomblé's entrance to the national public sphere of Brazil entails a two‐part process: (1) Practitioners become active participants in the dissemination of knowledge about the religion, including protected knowledge or secrets, and thus choose to enter …
Spirited Things: The Work of "Possession" in Afro-Atlantic Religions
The word 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. In Spirited Things, Paul Christopher Johnson gathers together essays by leading anthropologists in the Americas to explore the fascinating nexus found at the heart of the idea of being possessed. The result is a book that marries one of anthropology's fo…
Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé
In this wide-ranging book Paul C Johnson explores the changing, hidden face of the Afro-Brazilian indigenous religion of Candomble. Despite its inportance in Brazilian Society, Candomble has received far less attention than its sister religions Vodou and Santeria. Johnson seeks to fill this void by offering a comprehensive look at the development, beliefs, and practices of Candomble and exploring its transformation from a secret society of slaves…
An Atlantic Genealogy of 'Spirit Possession
Not all spirits have retreated to metaphor, even in the very public sphere of U.S. electoral politics. As we learned during the last presidential campaign, Governor Sarah Palin enlisted the help of Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee during his 2005 visit to Alaska to cast out the spirits that hindered her career. TheNew York Timeselaborated, 'Ms. Palin has long associations with religious leaders who practice a ... brand of Pentecostalism known as 'spir…
Secretism and the Apotheosis of Duvalier
Journal Article Secretism and the Apotheosis of Duvalier Get access Paul Christopher Johnson Paul Christopher Johnson Paul Christopher Johnson is an Associate Professor at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, 505 S. State St., Haven Hall, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 74, Issue 2, June 2006, Pages 420-445, https://d…
Law, Religion, and "Public Health" in the Republic of Brazil
The essay evaluates the general problem that, while most modern republican constitutions follow the U.S. and French models in declaring religious freedom, absolute religious freedom is impossible and undesirable. How are religious freedoms constrained, and how much should they be? The essay evaluates the strategies by which limitations on freedoms of religion are constructed and imposed, especially the powerful isomorphism of law and science desc…
Religion and Diaspora
Diaspora, and with it 'diasporic religion', has exploded as an area of research in the field of Religion, opening important paths of inquiry and analysis. This article traces the itineraries and intersections of Diaspora and Religion over the last two decades, especially vis-à-vis groups that activate multiple diasporic horizons. It then evaluates the risks of the overdispersion of Diaspora. To counter this, the article recommends more narrowly c…
Migrating Bodies, Circulating Signs: Brazilian Candomblé, the Garifuna of the Caribbean, and the Category of Indigenous Religions
On Leaving and Joining Africanness Through Religion: The 'Black Caribs' Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons
Garifuna religion is derived from a confluence of Amerindian, African and European antecedents. For the Garifuna in Central America, the spatial focus of authentic religious practice has for over two centuries been that of their former homeland and site of ethnogenesis, the island of St Vincent. It is from St Vincent that the ancestors return, through spirit possession, to join with their living descendants in ritual events. During the last gener…
Three Paths to Legal Legitimacy: African Diaspora Religions and the State
What are the routes by which African diaspora religious groups gain legal legitimacy in modern nation-states of the Americas? African diaspora religions, once prohibited under slave laws, remain predisposed to conflict with the ‘culture of legality’ that is constitutive of the contemporary modern world-system. In negotiating this conflict, different legitimating tactics are called upon in different nation-states, depending on the type of national…
Bodies and things in the forest of symbols
Taking Manuel Vásquez's book as its point of departure, this essay explores what a truly materialist history of materiality for the study of religion might look like, in contradistinction to idealist histories of materiality. It then mounts a defense of Clifford Geertz as a pioneering scholar of material and embodied religion, against the positions taken by Vásquez and, earlier, by Talal Asad, applying a critique that has by now become overly ent…
Savage Civil Religion
The essay considers the question of how organic civil religion was hijacked by instrumental civil religion: how the relatively inclusive material practices of altar-building typical of the first civil religious expression were incorporated into the exclusive us/them discourse of instrumental civil religion as momentum for war gathered
Formas E Temperamentos Da "Escrava Anastácia", Santa Afro-Brasileira
A agência ativada por meio de trocas com os santos não está simplesmente presente ou ausente, mas se manifesta de acordo com a forma das configurações materiais e sociais dos santos e do estado de ânimo evocado pela manifestação de determinado santo. Neste ensaio, retomo a história de uma santa afro-brasileira, conhecida como Escrava Anastácia, e a forma como diferentes grupos étnico-raciais a representam, de acordo com diferentes efeitos sociais…
Modes and moods of 'Slave Anastácia,' Afro-Brazilian saint
Agency activated through exchanges with saints is not simply present or absent. Rather it is emergent, depending on the mode of saints' material and social configurations, and the mood evoked by a specific saint's manifestation. In this essay I consider the history of an Afro-Brazilian saint called Slave Anastácia, as she signifies with varying social effects for different groups of ethno-racial users. I consider how saints become manifest in a g…
Syncretism and Hybridization
There exists a wide range of terms of religious mixture, featuring syncretism and hybridization most prominently, but also creolization, transculturation, and métissage. These competing terms of mixture possess different genealogies and impinge on 'religion' differently, such that they should not be simply interchanged or arbitrarily applied. Second, terms of religious mixture have been unevenly used. Brazil and Japan, for example, have often bee…
The Work Of Possession(s)
We are delighted to introduce these papers under the rubric of ‘The Work of Possessions’, which names a fault line where two tectonic plates of twenty-first-century thought collide. Identifying two major meanings for the word possession in the English language—on the one hand an owned, held or otherwise controlled item, and on the other hand the overcoming of a person by a spirit; on the one hand the work of ‘possessions’ in capital acquisition, …
Models of "The Body" in the Ethnographic Field: Garífuna and Candomblé Case Studies
The body" and "embodiment" are now firmly entrenched in the working vocabulary of the study of religion, yet there is little consensus on what such terms mean. This essay reviews the widely varying uses, focusing on main trajectories of the "lived body", the "semiotic body", and the "productive and produced body". Since "the body" must always be set in a particular narrative strategy in any given ethnography, complications arise when the various,…
Possession's Native Land
Let me offer a few opening premises in consideration of these essays on 'possession'. First, comparison is basic to thought, constant and inevitable. Second, comparison arranges likeness and differ
Rural Residential Landscapes of Douglas County, Oregon
Reverse migration has contributed to the proliferation of rural residential development in many parts of nonmetropolitan America. In Douglas County, Oregon, distinctive rural residential landscapes have emerged that reflect a number of popular altitudes toward the treatment of landscape. These landscapes contrast with those of suburbia and represent an idiosyncratic synthesis of urban and rural elements
Spirits and Scientists: Ideology, Spiritism and Brazilian Culture . David J. Hess
Sacred Void: Spatial Images of Work and Ritual among the Giriama of Kenya. David Parkin
Ecology and Change in the Agricultural System of the Kaonde of Northwestern Zambia
The Kaonde inhabit the savanna woodland plateaus of the Northwestern Province of Zambia. Primarily subsistence farmers, they have developed an agricultural system that consists of a chitemene form of long fallow cultivation and various forms of continuous cultivation. The different cultivation systems involve the exploitation of different environmental locations, where they are characterised by different agricultural practices and crop assemblage…
The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal . Thomas M. Cohen
Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil. John Burdick
Law, Religion, and "Public Health" in the Republic of Brazil
The essay evaluates the general problem that, while most modern republican constitutions follow the U.S. and French models in declaring religious freedom, absolute religious freedom is impossible and undesirable. How are religious freedoms constrained, and how much should they be? The essay evaluates the strategies by which limitations on freedoms of religion are constructed and imposed, especially the powerful isomorphism of law and science desc…
From Tumor to Trophy: The Nation‐State and Candomblé
Describes the sociopolitical context of the new republican public order of Brazil between 1889 and 1930 that uncovered a third historical layer of the practice of secrecy, now as resistance to the republic. The problem of the classification of Candomblé in the Brazilian public sphere began in 1888 with abolition. It is precisely at this juncture that the relation of Afro‐Brazilians and their religions to Brazilian national identity became a press…
Signifying the Street in Outbound Rites
Presents descriptions and interpretations of three ritual performances that share in common their reliance upon the space of the street. The first two are yearly terreiro‐based rituals in which the move to the street is secretive and the community's audience is itself alone, while the third is a public demonstration in the city's central plaza and seeks the attention of the public in general. The objective of viewing the three as a set is to show…
Conclusion
Explains the rise of secretism by summarizing three related arguments: First, Candomblé had no option to remain silent about the religion, only to either be represented or to take part in the control and production of those representations. Here, secretism follows the pattern of the incitement to discourse theorized by Foucault, as part and parcel of the creation and required administration of the public sphere. Second, claims to secrets are now …
What Is Candomblé
Here, the religion of Candomblé is described. Candomblé is presented as a relatively stable system of meanings and practices. Johnson maps out the contour lines along which variations occur, the semiotic system linking historically disparate groups of practice. The key vectors of signification described include: (1) the orixás (orishas) and the digestive metaphor of exchange, (2) Africa, “Africa” and Afro‐Brazil, (3) gender and spirit possession,…
Secret Sits in the Middle
Presents a point of departure for the study of secrecy through a close examination of Georg Simmel's seminal 1906 essay and offers a preliminary examination of secrets and secretism in Candomblé discourse. The chapter explores the meaning of the assertion that “a secret religion becomes public.” The chapter suggests that though there are no consensual secrets uniting the religion of Candomblé as a whole, there are “local secrets” that mark grades…
Public Candomblé
Candomblé's expansion beyond ethnic markers and beyond the bounds of the traditional sites of ritual practice is described and analyzed under the rubric of public Candomblé. The chapter interprets the shift from the traditional form of secrecy, the initiation of contained bodies within the inner chamber, to secretism, the circulation of discourse on the street about secrets. Public Candomblé is under construction through bureaucratic institutiona…
Slaves and Secrets
Presents conceptions of secrecy West Africans brought with them to Brazil: the interpretive separation of superficial appearance from “deep knowledge,” the face presented in public (ori ode) versus the inner head (ori inu), the layered nature of knowledge, which is ultimately bottomless, and the secret society of the Ogboni earth cult among the Yoruba. Additionally, the chapter recounts the nineteenth‐century context and motivations for a second …
Public Space to Secret Place: Initiation and the Logic of Passage
Shifts attention to the contemporary ritual practice of secrecy, focusing especially on initiation as a rite of passage. The chapter addresses (1) how secrecy is communicated and expressed spatially, (2) how that concept of a space of secrecy is transmitted from the group to arriving individuals and reproduced in the “closed bodies” of individuals sealed by initiation, and (3) how the reproduction of secrecy relies upon and incorporates coordinat…
Models of "The Body" in the Ethnographic Field: Garífuna and Candomblé Case Studies
The body" and "embodiment" are now firmly entrenched in the working vocabulary of the study of religion, yet there is little consensus on what such terms mean. This essay reviews the widely varying uses, focusing on main trajectories of the "lived body", the "semiotic body", and the "productive and produced body". Since "the body" must always be set in a particular narrative strategy in any given ethnography, complications arise when the various,…
Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé
This book is about secrecy in religion and the process by which traditionally secretive religions become public, taking as its case the Afro‐Brazilian religion of Candomblé. The book argues that Candomblé's entrance to the national public sphere of Brazil entails a two‐part process: (1) Practitioners become active participants in the dissemination of knowledge about the religion, including protected knowledge or secrets, and thus choose to enter …
Migrating Bodies, Circulating Signs: Brazilian Candomblé, the Garifuna of the Caribbean, and the Category of Indigenous Religions
Three Paths to Legal Legitimacy: African Diaspora Religions and the State
What are the routes by which African diaspora religious groups gain legal legitimacy in modern nation-states of the Americas? African diaspora religions, once prohibited under slave laws, remain predisposed to conflict with the ‘culture of legality’ that is constitutive of the contemporary modern world-system. In negotiating this conflict, different legitimating tactics are called upon in different nation-states, depending on the type of national…
Savage Civil Religion
The essay considers the question of how organic civil religion was hijacked by instrumental civil religion: how the relatively inclusive material practices of altar-building typical of the first civil religious expression were incorporated into the exclusive us/them discourse of instrumental civil religion as momentum for war gathered
The Work Of Possession(s)
We are delighted to introduce these papers under the rubric of ‘The Work of Possessions’, which names a fault line where two tectonic plates of twenty-first-century thought collide. Identifying two major meanings for the word possession in the English language—on the one hand an owned, held or otherwise controlled item, and on the other hand the overcoming of a person by a spirit; on the one hand the work of ‘possessions’ in capital acquisition, …
Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé
In this wide-ranging book Paul C Johnson explores the changing, hidden face of the Afro-Brazilian indigenous religion of Candomble. Despite its inportance in Brazilian Society, Candomble has received far less attention than its sister religions Vodou and Santeria. Johnson seeks to fill this void by offering a comprehensive look at the development, beliefs, and practices of Candomble and exploring its transformation from a secret society of slaves…
Secretism and the Apotheosis of Duvalier
Journal Article Secretism and the Apotheosis of Duvalier Get access Paul Christopher Johnson Paul Christopher Johnson Paul Christopher Johnson is an Associate Professor at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, 505 S. State St., Haven Hall, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 74, Issue 2, June 2006, Pages 420-445, https://d…
Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa
By joining a diaspora, a society may begin to change its religious, ethnic, and even racial identifications by rethinking its "pasts." 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.…
On Leaving and Joining Africanness Through Religion: The 'Black Caribs' Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons
Garifuna religion is derived from a confluence of Amerindian, African and European antecedents. For the Garifuna in Central America, the spatial focus of authentic religious practice has for over two centuries been that of their former homeland and site of ethnogenesis, the island of St Vincent. It is from St Vincent that the ancestors return, through spirit possession, to join with their living descendants in ritual events. During the last gener…
Sociology (31 works) · History (22 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (21 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Art (13 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works)