K Wirtz
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 5167 |
|---|---|
| NOME | K Wirtz |
| PRENOMES | K |
| SOBRENOME | Wirtz |
| ASSINATURA | WIRTZ K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Western Michigan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7342-4619 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 241 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2004 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Afterlives, Remains, and Traces
The concept of presence in Black Atlantic and African diasporic spiritual practices refers to a continuum of relations between human and nonhuman actors and between the living and the dead. This article explores aesthetic and ritual practices that work with material traces as modalities for cultivating relationships with the dead, including transfigurations that locate and activate spiritual energies in alliances with the living. Working across t…
Scaling the value of multilingualism
I examine the powerful institutional scaling project of the 2017 American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century . I analyze the scalar configurations emerging in the report’s narrative argumentation with the goal of denaturalizing its scale-making narratives in the production of a ‘common-sense’ regimentation of the value of language learning and multilingualism in the United …
Juramentos and Firmas
This essay examines narratives produced with entities in Cuban Palo traditions for the purpose of invoking copresences through the assemblage of images, words, and bodies. The dead, nkisi, tell multilayered, coded stories of strife and affliction in ways that weaponize practitioners and objects. We bring together primary sources from the Lydia Cabrera Papers, alongside ethnographic encounters in Cuba with Congo-inspired material, culture, and spi…
Asymmetrical listening practices and hegemonic aurality in a dual-language kindergarten classroom
Listening practices among kindergarteners in a two-way bilingual elementary school reveal how asymmetries between incoming "English speakers" and "Spanish speakers" shape children's emerging language attitudes. My ethnographic study of a US Midwestern public school (2013-2017) shows that objectifying the two languages was a central project of the school that children embraced. This metapragmatic understanding is most evident in their listening, a…
Subversive Spirits and Ostentatious Materials
Practitioners of Afro-Cuban spiritual modalities work with spirits of the dead, including “mocking” and “perturbing” spirits whose afflictions force a reckoning with histories of violence—what Toni Morrison calls “rememory.” Rememory recognizes the irrepressible power of the abject being, who struggles against non-being. In the wake of the violent erasures and denials of humanity imposed by colonialism, slavery, and the ongoing climate of anti-bl…
Voices in a Sea of History
In celebration of the 15th anniversary of this journal's name change, I situate recent linguistic anthropological scholarship in the Caribbean in a broader, interdisciplinary context. Caribbean ways of speaking-and especially contact languages such as creoles-have often been exceptionalised and subject to stereotypes. Taking Derek Walcott's "sea of history" as a key trope, I discuss the historical crosscurrents that have produced the diversity of…
Ritual and Forms of Communication
Ritual and communication have been studied both through communicative rituals and in approaches to what is communicated through ritual as a key domain of social action. First, some of the defining debates about what ritual is are described, including what ritual means and what it does , and how these issues can be approached semiotically. Then approaches to ritual in communication, and particular to interaction rituals, are reviewed. Interaction …
Passages and Afterworlds
Materializations of oricha voice through divinations in Cuban Santería
In this essay I explore how oricha (deities') voice is produced in and through Cuban Santería practices that render oricha speech audible, meaningful, and quotable. In the semiotic order governing Cuban popular religious practice, human bodies and other objects can be 'activated' as instruments of oricha speech. Divination objects such as cowry shells are understood to be the 'tongue' of the oricha, through which the deities and spirits of the de…
“With Unity We Will Be Victorious!”
This chapter investigates the relationship between monologue and dialogue in Cuban revolutionary discourse. It proposes to attend to the “mono-logic”—the semiotic and ideological forces designed to compel alignments toward unity, coherence, and continuity, that are, asymptotically, never quite reached. Cuba’s political leaders have for decades insisted that citizens undergo a continual process of conscientization in which inner selves and outer d…
Electric Santería
Book Review| January 01 2017 Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. By Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. Kristina Wirtz Kristina Wirtz Western Michigan University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2017) 130 (515): 120–122. https://doi.org/10.5…
Mobilizations of Race, Place, and History in Santiago de Cuba's Carnivalesque
I offer a model of racialization, the ongoing process of making race meaningful, by proposing the concept of micro-mobilities: people's movements through immediate lived space. I examine how qualities of movement in an annual carnival procession normalize racialized bodies and places. In Santiago de Cuba's carnival, neighborhood-basedcongasocieties participate in official competitive displays and grassroots neighborhood activities. The grassroots…
Hacia una historia de la Santería Santiaguera y otras consideraciones, written by Abelardo Larduet Luaces
Abelardo Larduet Luaces's wide-ranging study of the origins and recent history of Santería and related folk religious practices in his natal city of Santiago de Cuba presents a refreshingly grounded approach to the field Cuban scholars designate as "popular religion."The heart of the book is his meticulously researched oral history of the way western-Cuban lineages of Ocha and Palo were introduced and established in this eastern Cuban city, the a…
The living, the dead, and the immanent
Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, or "time-space," contributes to a theoretically robust anthropology of history by highlighting how our experience and thus subjective feel for history and place emerge through semiotic processes that can generate different kinds of historicity. In rendering Bakhtin's suggestive concept of chronotope more precise, I apply his more widely known concept of dialogicality to argue that the historical imagination em…
Reality effects
Comment on Palmié, Stephan. 2013. The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Performing Afro-Cuba
The Semiotics of Religion
The Spirits and the Law
[...]chapter 4 takes up the folklorization of what were now recodified as superstitious practices in post-occupation haiti. ramsey traces the tension between ongoing efforts to eradicate Vodou by the church and successive haitian administrations versus the growing cultural nationalist sentiments championed by such seminal figures as Jean Price-mars and members of the elite haitian indigenisme move- ment. important American anthropologists, such a…
A 'Brutology' of Bozal
In tracing a discourse history for the emergence and enregisterment of Bozal, a Cuban speech style that robustly indexes the historical persona of the African slave, this paper proposes that such discourse 'genealogies' are more accurately reconstructed not through a linear, teleological metaphor of 'speech chains' but through a more reticulated, multiply stranded web of interdiscursive connections. Bozal, in contemporary Cuba, characterizes the …
Sorcery and history in the Black Atlantic
Apter, A.H. and Denby, L.H., eds. 2011. Activating the Past: History and Memory in the Black Atlantic World. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pares, L.N. and Sansi, R., eds. 2011
Venceremos
Cuban Performances of Blackness as the Timeless Past Still Among Us
Congo" spirits, "black witches," African slaves, and maroons are ubiquitous historical figures in religious and folklore performances of eastern Cuba, where they are represented through collocations of Bozal speech register, stereotypical "African" vocal and bodily mannerisms and dance forms, and distinctive uses of deictics that present first-person, historical-present accounts of past events. I trace an interdiscursive web across which these ra…
Racializing Discourses
Crying Shame
Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament J. Wilce . Chichester : Wiley-Blackwell , 2009 . xv + 274 pp., notes, figures, bibliog., index . ISBN 978-1405169929 . Price $120 (Hc .) Crying Shame is James Wilce’s second book on lament, and it is an important book for its wide-reaching, comparative study of lament worldwide, as it exists in traditional and more recent genres of performance and as it has become both a tr…
Spirits and Letters
The living, the dead, and the immanent
Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, or "time-space," contributes to a theoretically robust anthropology of history by highlighting how our experience and thus subjective feel for history and place emerge through semiotic processes that can generate different kinds of historicity. In rendering Bakhtin's suggestive concept of chronotope more precise, I apply his more widely known concept of dialogicality to argue that the historical imagination em…
Racializing Discourses
Hazardous waste
Using a semiotic framework to examine different categorizations of ritually produced 'hazardous waste' in Cuban popular religions, I argue that the ways in which waste is produced and treated generate its social indexical value and its potential to act on people. I suggest a focus on the interactions between the materiality of ritual waste and its circulation as an object of discourse. In this view, subjectification and objectification processes …
Enregistered memory and Afro-Cuban historicity in Santería's ritual speech
Cuban Performances of Blackness as the Timeless Past Still Among Us
Congo" spirits, "black witches," African slaves, and maroons are ubiquitous historical figures in religious and folklore performances of eastern Cuba, where they are represented through collocations of Bozal speech register, stereotypical "African" vocal and bodily mannerisms and dance forms, and distinctive uses of deictics that present first-person, historical-present accounts of past events. I trace an interdiscursive web across which these ra…
How diasporic religious communities remember
In this article, I probe the relationship between historical consciousness and cultural transmission. In contrast to scholars' focus on language loss in African-language ritual registers in the Americas, I examine how Cuban Santería's ritual register, called "Lucumí," is actively regimented through the ways in which Santería's practitioners learn, use, and interpret it. I discuss two specific interpretive strategies that santeros use: The "etymol…
Where obscurity is a virtue
Mobilizations of Race, Place, and History in Santiago de Cuba's Carnivalesque
I offer a model of racialization, the ongoing process of making race meaningful, by proposing the concept of micro-mobilities: people's movements through immediate lived space. I examine how qualities of movement in an annual carnival procession normalize racialized bodies and places. In Santiago de Cuba's carnival, neighborhood-basedcongasocieties participate in official competitive displays and grassroots neighborhood activities. The grassroots…
Introduction
Making sense of unintelligible messages in divine communication
A high level of unintelligibility in ritual utterances would seem to inhibit their meaningfulness to participants, but I argue that the opposite is the case when deities called oricha descend to possess and speak to humans in Santería ceremonies. My analysis of how an oricha's message to a ritual participant is delivered, interpreted, and received illustrates how the oricha's ambiguous and semantically opaque utterances are rendered into a specif…
Divining the Past
I examine the assumptions underlying scholars' use of etymological reconstruction to connect ritual registers in African diasporic religions with African 'sources', and to thereby reclaim African diasporic history by recovering 'lost' or hidden meanings. I compare these efforts to the interpretive practices of practitioners of Cuban Santería, who engage in textual and performative 'divinations' of hidden or lost meanings in Lucumí and in ritual m…
A 'Brutology' of Bozal
In tracing a discourse history for the emergence and enregisterment of Bozal, a Cuban speech style that robustly indexes the historical persona of the African slave, this paper proposes that such discourse 'genealogies' are more accurately reconstructed not through a linear, teleological metaphor of 'speech chains' but through a more reticulated, multiply stranded web of interdiscursive connections. Bozal, in contemporary Cuba, characterizes the …
Asymmetrical listening practices and hegemonic aurality in a dual-language kindergarten classroom
Listening practices among kindergarteners in a two-way bilingual elementary school reveal how asymmetries between incoming "English speakers" and "Spanish speakers" shape children's emerging language attitudes. My ethnographic study of a US Midwestern public school (2013-2017) shows that objectifying the two languages was a central project of the school that children embraced. This metapragmatic understanding is most evident in their listening, a…
Materializations of oricha voice through divinations in Cuban Santería
In this essay I explore how oricha (deities') voice is produced in and through Cuban Santería practices that render oricha speech audible, meaningful, and quotable. In the semiotic order governing Cuban popular religious practice, human bodies and other objects can be 'activated' as instruments of oricha speech. Divination objects such as cowry shells are understood to be the 'tongue' of the oricha, through which the deities and spirits of the de…
Scaling the value of multilingualism
I examine the powerful institutional scaling project of the 2017 American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century . I analyze the scalar configurations emerging in the report’s narrative argumentation with the goal of denaturalizing its scale-making narratives in the production of a ‘common-sense’ regimentation of the value of language learning and multilingualism in the United …
Reality effects
Comment on Palmié, Stephan. 2013. The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Santeria in Cuban National Consciousness
Este ensayo describe como en la Cuba contemporánea, la religión llamada Santería, ha sido constituida como resultado de la interacción de multiples conceptos, como una práctica sacra, una forma del folklore, o una superstición. Estas interpretaciones opues tas surgen de distintas posiciones metaculturales o evaluaciones que se basan en concep tos distintos de la cubanidad y que corresponden a diferentes opiniones sobre el papel de las expresiones…
Santeria in Cuban National Consciousness
Where obscurity is a virtue
Introduction
Making sense of unintelligible messages in divine communication
A high level of unintelligibility in ritual utterances would seem to inhibit their meaningfulness to participants, but I argue that the opposite is the case when deities called oricha descend to possess and speak to humans in Santería ceremonies. My analysis of how an oricha's message to a ritual participant is delivered, interpreted, and received illustrates how the oricha's ambiguous and semantically opaque utterances are rendered into a specif…
Enregistered memory and Afro-Cuban historicity in Santería's ritual speech
Divining the Past
I examine the assumptions underlying scholars' use of etymological reconstruction to connect ritual registers in African diasporic religions with African 'sources', and to thereby reclaim African diasporic history by recovering 'lost' or hidden meanings. I compare these efforts to the interpretive practices of practitioners of Cuban Santería, who engage in textual and performative 'divinations' of hidden or lost meanings in Lucumí and in ritual m…
How diasporic religious communities remember
In this article, I probe the relationship between historical consciousness and cultural transmission. In contrast to scholars' focus on language loss in African-language ritual registers in the Americas, I examine how Cuban Santería's ritual register, called "Lucumí," is actively regimented through the ways in which Santería's practitioners learn, use, and interpret it. I discuss two specific interpretive strategies that santeros use: The "etymol…
Divining The Past
A Community-Wide Collaboration
Crossing the Water
Governing Spirits
Hazardous waste
Using a semiotic framework to examine different categorizations of ritually produced 'hazardous waste' in Cuban popular religions, I argue that the ways in which waste is produced and treated generate its social indexical value and its potential to act on people. I suggest a focus on the interactions between the materiality of ritual waste and its circulation as an object of discourse. In this view, subjectification and objectification processes …
Crying Shame
Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament J. Wilce . Chichester : Wiley-Blackwell , 2009 . xv + 274 pp., notes, figures, bibliog., index . ISBN 978-1405169929 . Price $120 (Hc .) Crying Shame is James Wilce’s second book on lament, and it is an important book for its wide-reaching, comparative study of lament worldwide, as it exists in traditional and more recent genres of performance and as it has become both a tr…
Spirits and Letters
Cuban Performances of Blackness as the Timeless Past Still Among Us
Congo" spirits, "black witches," African slaves, and maroons are ubiquitous historical figures in religious and folklore performances of eastern Cuba, where they are represented through collocations of Bozal speech register, stereotypical "African" vocal and bodily mannerisms and dance forms, and distinctive uses of deictics that present first-person, historical-present accounts of past events. I trace an interdiscursive web across which these ra…
Racializing Discourses
Sorcery and history in the Black Atlantic
Apter, A.H. and Denby, L.H., eds. 2011. Activating the Past: History and Memory in the Black Atlantic World. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pares, L.N. and Sansi, R., eds. 2011
Venceremos
A 'Brutology' of Bozal
In tracing a discourse history for the emergence and enregisterment of Bozal, a Cuban speech style that robustly indexes the historical persona of the African slave, this paper proposes that such discourse 'genealogies' are more accurately reconstructed not through a linear, teleological metaphor of 'speech chains' but through a more reticulated, multiply stranded web of interdiscursive connections. Bozal, in contemporary Cuba, characterizes the …
Performing Afro-Cuba
The Semiotics of Religion
The Spirits and the Law
[...]chapter 4 takes up the folklorization of what were now recodified as superstitious practices in post-occupation haiti. ramsey traces the tension between ongoing efforts to eradicate Vodou by the church and successive haitian administrations versus the growing cultural nationalist sentiments championed by such seminal figures as Jean Price-mars and members of the elite haitian indigenisme move- ment. important American anthropologists, such a…
Reality effects
Comment on Palmié, Stephan. 2013. The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Hacia una historia de la Santería Santiaguera y otras consideraciones, written by Abelardo Larduet Luaces
Abelardo Larduet Luaces's wide-ranging study of the origins and recent history of Santería and related folk religious practices in his natal city of Santiago de Cuba presents a refreshingly grounded approach to the field Cuban scholars designate as "popular religion."The heart of the book is his meticulously researched oral history of the way western-Cuban lineages of Ocha and Palo were introduced and established in this eastern Cuban city, the a…
Sociology (25 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · History (19 obras) · Art (17 obras) · Cuban History and Society (15 obras) · Epistemology (14 obras) · Linguistics (11 obras) · Literature (11 obras) · Political science (11 obras) · Anthropology (10 obras)