J Lorand Matory
Biographic Data
| ID | 84033 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Lorand Matory |
| GIVEN NAMES | J Lorand |
| FAMILY NAME | Matory |
| SIGNATURE | MATORY J L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
On the backs of Blacks’: The fetish and how socially inferior Europeans put down Africans to prove their equality with their own oppressors
Notes1 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994); David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).2 William Pietz, The Problem of the Fetish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 1–2. Subsequent citations are to this edition, in parentheses, in the text.3 Joana Bahia, ‘“De Mig…
O navio de volta para casa: Tropos analíticos como mapas da e para a história cultural da diáspora africana
O foco do debate são as várias metáforas paradigmáticas que, de acordo com o autor, têm orientado as análises sobre a vida e cultura dos afrodescendentes nas Américas e sobre suas relações com a África. Ao debater as perspectivas abertas por metáforas-chave, como sobrevivências, crioulização e memória coletiva, o autor desenvolve suas próprias reflexões teóricas, propondo o “diálogo” como alternativa para tratar o tema
The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make
Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term "fetishism" chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the s…
Oduduwa’s chain: Locations of culture in the Yoruba-Atlantic
The Communal Stakes of Scholarly Debate: A Retrospective on the Critical Reception of Black Atlantic Religion (2005)
Critical reaction to Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (2005) has recapitulated and, in some cases, generated several central debates in the comparative study of diasporic cultures and their ostensible homelands. Together, this historical ethnography and these critical responses offer an important case study in how scholars' personal experiences and social positionality can shape …
Marx, Freud, E Os Deuses Que Os Negros Fazem: A Teoria Social Europeia E O Fetiche Da Vida Real
Desde o encontro entre os comerciantes africanos e europeus na Costa da Guiné no início da modernidade, o termo “fetiche” faz analogia entre supostos distúrbios do pensamento europeu e deuses africanos. Estes deuses, porém, têm uma lógica própria que dispõe de tanta razão – dada a posição de seus seguidores na economia do Atlântico – quanto as teorias de Marx e Freud, diferentes em certos aspectos mas igualmente influenciados pelo posicionamento …
Collecting and exhibiting at the crossroads: In Honor of Eshu
Variants of the following story are told in virtually every locale where the Yoruba-Atlantic oriṣa (Nigerian Yoruba), orixa (Brazilian Portuguese), or oricha (Cuban Spanish) gods are worshiped.Two
In-Depth Review: The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil, by Luis Nicolau Parés
The Atlantic slave trade extracted kidnapped populations from the entirety of the western African coast between what are now Senegal and Angola, as well as parts of the east African coast in what is now Mozambique. Western slave traders and buyers regularly classified their human merchandise in terms of the African region, coastal town, or commercial fortress from which they had embarked, or in terms of an ethnic group that presumably derived fro…
From "Survival" to "Dialogue": Analytic Tropes in the Study of African-Diaspora Cultural History
Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble
List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The English Professors of Brazil On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation 38 Chapter Two: The Trans-Atlantic Nation Rethinking Nations and Transnationalism 73 Chapter Three: Purity and Transnationalism On the Transformation of Ritual in the Yoruba-Atlantic Diaspora 115 Chapter Four: Candomble's Newest Nation: Brazil 149 Chapter Five: Para Ingles Ver Sex, Secrecy, and Scholarship in the Yoru…
Elliot Percival Skinner (1924-2007)
Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions
Scholars tend to regard enslavement as a form of disability inflicted upon the enslaved. This paper confronts the irony that not all black Atlantic peoples and religions conceive of slavery as an equally deficient condition or as the opposite of freedom and other rights that are due to respected human beings. Indeed, the religions of enslaved Afro-Latin Americans and their descendants-including Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban and Cuban-diaspora Ocha (…
The Illusion of Isolation: The Gullah/Geechees and the Political Economy of African Culture in the Americas
The Gullah/Geechee people are the locus classicus for the study of 'African survivals' in North American culture. As such, they have been saddled with the duty to generate universal principles for the explanation of Africans' acculturation, adaptation, and cultural resistance in the Western hemisphere, and they provide the main North American test case for explanatory principles generated elsewhere in the Americas. Yet, the well-studied Gullah/Ge…
Tradition, Transnationalism, and Gender in the Afro–Brazilian Candomblé
Tradition, Transnationalism, and Gender in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé
Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion
Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep about Yorùbá‐Atlantic Religion
Whereas scholars have often described the material interests served by any given social group's selective narration of history, this article catches scholars in the act of selectively narrating Yorùbá‐Atlantic cultural history in the service of their own faraway activist projects. Anthropologist Ruth Landes' re‐casting of the Afro‐Brazilian Candomblá religion as an instance of primitive matriarchy not only encouraged feminists abroad but also led…
The "Cult of Nations" and the Ritualization of Their Purity
Research Article| January 01 2001 The “Cult of Nations” and the Ritualization of Their Purity J. Lorand Matory J. Lorand Matory Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2001) 100 (1): 171–214. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-100-1-171 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation J. Lorand Matory; The “Cult of Nations” and the Ritualization of Their P…
Contradiction and Forgetting in Yewéssey Culture
Anthropologists are now inescapably aware of conflict, contradiction, and negotiation in even the most seemingly "traditional" socio-cultural orders. The literature on "memory" is particularly rich in illustrations of how contradictory evocations of the past undergird conflicting performances and assertions of interest in the present. This study of the traditionally nomadic Yewéssey people documents a genre of performance seldom discussed in the …
Surpassing “Survival: On the Urbanity of “Traditional Religion” in the Afro-Atlantic World
2000). Surpassing “Survival”: On the Urbanity of “Traditional Religion” in the Afro-Atlantic World. The Black Scholar: Vol. 30, Transcending Traditions, pp. 36-43
Jeje: Repensando Nações E Transnacionalismo
Teóricos e observadores do transnacionalismo, ou globalização, tendem a perceber o fenômeno como sendo novo e antagônico à nação territorial. Este ensaio pretende demonstrar a célebre, porém pouco compreendida, natureza transnacional e histórica de uma "nação" africana no Brasil. Busca mostrar também que as identidades negras transnacionais evoluíram em um diálogo mutuamente transformativo com a nação territorial. Portanto, longe de prognosticar …
The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation
Melville J. Herskovits (e.g., 1966, 1941) argued that African Americans in virtually every American nation “retained” some greater or lesser cultural “memory” of the African past. Assuming that the cultures of the West African Fon, Yorùbá, and Ashanti (as reconstructed in the “ethnographic present”) represented the extant “base line,” or starting point, of African-American cultural history, Herskovits' “ethnohistorical” method posited that less-a…
Yoruba Sacred Kingship: A Power like That of the Gods
Yoruba Sacred Kingship: A Power Like That of the Gods. JOHN PEMBERTON III and FUNSO S. AFQLAYAN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996; 252 pp. Yoruba sacred kingship is a vivid and detailed account of contemporary ritual life in the town of Ila, southwestern Nigeria. It focuses particularly on the annual cycle of rites for ancestors and gods (dri,sd) that undergirds the authority of the town's king, known as the Orangun, but it also…
Yorubá: As Rotas E as Raízes Da Nação Transatlântica, 1830-1950
Tenho estudado as religiões na África Ocidental e religiões afro-latinas como o
Sex and the Empire that is no More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion
The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation
Melville J. Herskovits (e.g., 1966, 1941) argued that African Americans in virtually every American nation “retained” some greater or lesser cultural “memory” of the African past. Assuming that the cultures of the West African Fon, Yorùbá, and Ashanti (as reconstructed in the “ethnographic present”) represented the extant “base line,” or starting point, of African-American cultural history, Herskovits' “ethnohistorical” method posited that less-a…
Jeje: Repensando Nações E Transnacionalismo
Teóricos e observadores do transnacionalismo, ou globalização, tendem a perceber o fenômeno como sendo novo e antagônico à nação territorial. Este ensaio pretende demonstrar a célebre, porém pouco compreendida, natureza transnacional e histórica de uma "nação" africana no Brasil. Busca mostrar também que as identidades negras transnacionais evoluíram em um diálogo mutuamente transformativo com a nação territorial. Portanto, longe de prognosticar …
Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble
List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The English Professors of Brazil On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation 38 Chapter Two: The Trans-Atlantic Nation Rethinking Nations and Transnationalism 73 Chapter Three: Purity and Transnationalism On the Transformation of Ritual in the Yoruba-Atlantic Diaspora 115 Chapter Four: Candomble's Newest Nation: Brazil 149 Chapter Five: Para Ingles Ver Sex, Secrecy, and Scholarship in the Yoru…
Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions
Scholars tend to regard enslavement as a form of disability inflicted upon the enslaved. This paper confronts the irony that not all black Atlantic peoples and religions conceive of slavery as an equally deficient condition or as the opposite of freedom and other rights that are due to respected human beings. Indeed, the religions of enslaved Afro-Latin Americans and their descendants-including Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban and Cuban-diaspora Ocha (…
Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep about Yorùbá‐Atlantic Religion
Whereas scholars have often described the material interests served by any given social group's selective narration of history, this article catches scholars in the act of selectively narrating Yorùbá‐Atlantic cultural history in the service of their own faraway activist projects. Anthropologist Ruth Landes' re‐casting of the Afro‐Brazilian Candomblá religion as an instance of primitive matriarchy not only encouraged feminists abroad but also led…
Yorubá: As Rotas E as Raízes Da Nação Transatlântica, 1830-1950
Tenho estudado as religiões na África Ocidental e religiões afro-latinas como o
Rival Empires: Islam and the religions of spirit possession among the Òyóo-Yorùbá
Possession religions have frequently been treated as women's means to redress their subordination. Like many other religions so discussed, the Òyóo-Yorùbá worship of Sàngó and Yem⊙ja endures in a predominantly Muslim region. The following discussion will illustrate that such religions, though highly gendered in their symbolism and personnel, need not redress the interests of women or of the deprived alone. For the weak and the strong, they may dr…
Surpassing “Survival: On the Urbanity of “Traditional Religion” in the Afro-Atlantic World
2000). Surpassing “Survival”: On the Urbanity of “Traditional Religion” in the Afro-Atlantic World. The Black Scholar: Vol. 30, Transcending Traditions, pp. 36-43
The "Cult of Nations" and the Ritualization of Their Purity
Research Article| January 01 2001 The “Cult of Nations” and the Ritualization of Their Purity J. Lorand Matory J. Lorand Matory Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2001) 100 (1): 171–214. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-100-1-171 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation J. Lorand Matory; The “Cult of Nations” and the Ritualization of Their P…
The Illusion of Isolation: The Gullah/Geechees and the Political Economy of African Culture in the Americas
The Gullah/Geechee people are the locus classicus for the study of 'African survivals' in North American culture. As such, they have been saddled with the duty to generate universal principles for the explanation of Africans' acculturation, adaptation, and cultural resistance in the Western hemisphere, and they provide the main North American test case for explanatory principles generated elsewhere in the Americas. Yet, the well-studied Gullah/Ge…
O navio de volta para casa: Tropos analíticos como mapas da e para a história cultural da diáspora africana
O foco do debate são as várias metáforas paradigmáticas que, de acordo com o autor, têm orientado as análises sobre a vida e cultura dos afrodescendentes nas Américas e sobre suas relações com a África. Ao debater as perspectivas abertas por metáforas-chave, como sobrevivências, crioulização e memória coletiva, o autor desenvolve suas próprias reflexões teóricas, propondo o “diálogo” como alternativa para tratar o tema
The Communal Stakes of Scholarly Debate: A Retrospective on the Critical Reception of Black Atlantic Religion (2005)
Critical reaction to Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (2005) has recapitulated and, in some cases, generated several central debates in the comparative study of diasporic cultures and their ostensible homelands. Together, this historical ethnography and these critical responses offer an important case study in how scholars' personal experiences and social positionality can shape …
Marx, Freud, E Os Deuses Que Os Negros Fazem: A Teoria Social Europeia E O Fetiche Da Vida Real
Desde o encontro entre os comerciantes africanos e europeus na Costa da Guiné no início da modernidade, o termo “fetiche” faz analogia entre supostos distúrbios do pensamento europeu e deuses africanos. Estes deuses, porém, têm uma lógica própria que dispõe de tanta razão – dada a posição de seus seguidores na economia do Atlântico – quanto as teorias de Marx e Freud, diferentes em certos aspectos mas igualmente influenciados pelo posicionamento …
In-Depth Review: The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil, by Luis Nicolau Parés
The Atlantic slave trade extracted kidnapped populations from the entirety of the western African coast between what are now Senegal and Angola, as well as parts of the east African coast in what is now Mozambique. Western slave traders and buyers regularly classified their human merchandise in terms of the African region, coastal town, or commercial fortress from which they had embarked, or in terms of an ethnic group that presumably derived fro…
Elliot Percival Skinner (1924-2007)
Sex and the Empire that is no More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion
General/Theoretical Anthropology: Africanisms in American Culture . Joseph E. Holloway
Creativity of Power: Essays on Cosmology and Action in African Societies
Rival Empires: Islam and the religions of spirit possession among the Òyóo-Yorùbá
Possession religions have frequently been treated as women's means to redress their subordination. Like many other religions so discussed, the Òyóo-Yorùbá worship of Sàngó and Yem⊙ja endures in a predominantly Muslim region. The following discussion will illustrate that such religions, though highly gendered in their symbolism and personnel, need not redress the interests of women or of the deprived alone. For the weak and the strong, they may dr…
Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion
Sex and the Empire that is no More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion
Yoruba Sacred Kingship: A Power like That of the Gods
Yoruba Sacred Kingship: A Power Like That of the Gods. JOHN PEMBERTON III and FUNSO S. AFQLAYAN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996; 252 pp. Yoruba sacred kingship is a vivid and detailed account of contemporary ritual life in the town of Ila, southwestern Nigeria. It focuses particularly on the annual cycle of rites for ancestors and gods (dri,sd) that undergirds the authority of the town's king, known as the Orangun, but it also…
Yorubá: As Rotas E as Raízes Da Nação Transatlântica, 1830-1950
Tenho estudado as religiões na África Ocidental e religiões afro-latinas como o
Jeje: Repensando Nações E Transnacionalismo
Teóricos e observadores do transnacionalismo, ou globalização, tendem a perceber o fenômeno como sendo novo e antagônico à nação territorial. Este ensaio pretende demonstrar a célebre, porém pouco compreendida, natureza transnacional e histórica de uma "nação" africana no Brasil. Busca mostrar também que as identidades negras transnacionais evoluíram em um diálogo mutuamente transformativo com a nação territorial. Portanto, longe de prognosticar …
The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation
Melville J. Herskovits (e.g., 1966, 1941) argued that African Americans in virtually every American nation “retained” some greater or lesser cultural “memory” of the African past. Assuming that the cultures of the West African Fon, Yorùbá, and Ashanti (as reconstructed in the “ethnographic present”) represented the extant “base line,” or starting point, of African-American cultural history, Herskovits' “ethnohistorical” method posited that less-a…
Surpassing “Survival: On the Urbanity of “Traditional Religion” in the Afro-Atlantic World
2000). Surpassing “Survival”: On the Urbanity of “Traditional Religion” in the Afro-Atlantic World. The Black Scholar: Vol. 30, Transcending Traditions, pp. 36-43
The "Cult of Nations" and the Ritualization of Their Purity
Research Article| January 01 2001 The “Cult of Nations” and the Ritualization of Their Purity J. Lorand Matory J. Lorand Matory Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2001) 100 (1): 171–214. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-100-1-171 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation J. Lorand Matory; The “Cult of Nations” and the Ritualization of Their P…
Contradiction and Forgetting in Yewéssey Culture
Anthropologists are now inescapably aware of conflict, contradiction, and negotiation in even the most seemingly "traditional" socio-cultural orders. The literature on "memory" is particularly rich in illustrations of how contradictory evocations of the past undergird conflicting performances and assertions of interest in the present. This study of the traditionally nomadic Yewéssey people documents a genre of performance seldom discussed in the …
Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep about Yorùbá‐Atlantic Religion
Whereas scholars have often described the material interests served by any given social group's selective narration of history, this article catches scholars in the act of selectively narrating Yorùbá‐Atlantic cultural history in the service of their own faraway activist projects. Anthropologist Ruth Landes' re‐casting of the Afro‐Brazilian Candomblá religion as an instance of primitive matriarchy not only encouraged feminists abroad but also led…
Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion
Tradition, Transnationalism, and Gender in the Afro–Brazilian Candomblé
Tradition, Transnationalism, and Gender in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé
Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions
Scholars tend to regard enslavement as a form of disability inflicted upon the enslaved. This paper confronts the irony that not all black Atlantic peoples and religions conceive of slavery as an equally deficient condition or as the opposite of freedom and other rights that are due to respected human beings. Indeed, the religions of enslaved Afro-Latin Americans and their descendants-including Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban and Cuban-diaspora Ocha (…
The Illusion of Isolation: The Gullah/Geechees and the Political Economy of African Culture in the Americas
The Gullah/Geechee people are the locus classicus for the study of 'African survivals' in North American culture. As such, they have been saddled with the duty to generate universal principles for the explanation of Africans' acculturation, adaptation, and cultural resistance in the Western hemisphere, and they provide the main North American test case for explanatory principles generated elsewhere in the Americas. Yet, the well-studied Gullah/Ge…
Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble
List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The English Professors of Brazil On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation 38 Chapter Two: The Trans-Atlantic Nation Rethinking Nations and Transnationalism 73 Chapter Three: Purity and Transnationalism On the Transformation of Ritual in the Yoruba-Atlantic Diaspora 115 Chapter Four: Candomble's Newest Nation: Brazil 149 Chapter Five: Para Ingles Ver Sex, Secrecy, and Scholarship in the Yoru…
Elliot Percival Skinner (1924-2007)
From "Survival" to "Dialogue": Analytic Tropes in the Study of African-Diaspora Cultural History
In-Depth Review: The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil, by Luis Nicolau Parés
The Atlantic slave trade extracted kidnapped populations from the entirety of the western African coast between what are now Senegal and Angola, as well as parts of the east African coast in what is now Mozambique. Western slave traders and buyers regularly classified their human merchandise in terms of the African region, coastal town, or commercial fortress from which they had embarked, or in terms of an ethnic group that presumably derived fro…
Collecting and exhibiting at the crossroads: In Honor of Eshu
Variants of the following story are told in virtually every locale where the Yoruba-Atlantic oriṣa (Nigerian Yoruba), orixa (Brazilian Portuguese), or oricha (Cuban Spanish) gods are worshiped.Two
The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make
Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term "fetishism" chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the s…
Oduduwa’s chain: Locations of culture in the Yoruba-Atlantic
Sociology (21 works) · History (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Anthropology (15 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Ancient history (10 works) · History (10 works) · Art (9 works)