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Diaspora Conversions

University of California Press

Contents

List of Illustrations........................................................................ixAcknowledgments..............................................................................xiIntroduction.................................................................................11. What Is Diasporic Religion?...............................................................302. "These Sons of Freedom": Black Caribs across Three Diasporic Horizons.....................603. Shamans at Work in the Villages...........................................................994. Shamans at Work in New York...............................................................1255. Ritual in the Homeland; Or, Making the Land "Home" in Ritual..............................1466. Ritual in the Bronx.......................................................................1867. Finding Africa in New York................................................................205Conclusion...................................................................................227Appendix. Trajectory of a Moving Object, the Caldero.........................................247Notes........................................................................................251Glossary.....................................................................................287Bibliography.................................................................................291Index........................................................................................319

Chapter One

We can also say of every religion that it reproduces in more or less symbolic forms the history of migrations and fusions of race and tribes, of great events, wars, establishments, discoveries, and reforms. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory

We are not a diaspora, we are just trapped. Emeline Michel, Haitian singer

This chapter lays out the parameters for the central theoretical issues of the book, moving from the widest to the narrowest distinctions. I examine, in turn, diaspora, diasporic religion, African Diaspora, and African diasporic religions, the latter specifically in New York City. The attempt to establish a solid theoretical footing for the starring phrase among these, diasporic religion, may appear a fool's errand, since both diaspora and religion are highly conflicted terms. How can we cheerfully head for the mountains with only these two frayed ropes in our packs? I wager that the two ropes can be sufficiently rewoven, and woven together, to hold the needed weight.

That Shared Something: Defining Diaspora Analytically

The notion of diaspora has been progressively widened over the last century to include not only the dispersions of the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian populations but also diasporas as disparate as those of Calvinists (Weber 2002: 7), the Portuguese (Klimt and Lubkemann 2002), the Mormons (Smith and White 2004), and the New Orleans victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Gross 2006). The term has even been applied to the dispersion of individuals from a position of social valuation to one where little is accorded them, as in "the sexual diaspora of older women" (Merkin 2006: 18)-the experience of being sexually "in exile." Suddenly, it appears, everyone is in diaspora. Well, why not? We all came from somewhere else and are at least dimly enough aware of it to be able to call up sentiments about our origins. Ethnic revivals are at least in part a reactive move, a standard means of vying for a fair share of the socioeconomic pie (Barth 1969; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Rumbaut and Portes 2001: 5; Baumann 2000; Berking 2003), and diaspora has become their reliable vehicle. The practical, colloquial use of the word suggests affiliations by virtue of biological descent, which allegedly transmit blood continuity across space: The Jewish diaspora, from this perspective, is the set of people whose families were from, but then were exiled or otherwise departed from, Israel during dispersions under Babylonia, Rome, or other conquerors. The Irish diaspora is built of the descendants of the families that left Ireland during the potato famines of the nineteenth century, and so on.

This concept inspires groups and galvanizes political mobilizations, but for analytical and comparative purposes it falls short on at least two counts. First, in this view, there exist natural groupings of humans who, through emigration, inevitably become diasporas. But there are no such natural groups and, it follows, no natural diasporas, either. The second obvious problem with the everyday uses of diaspora is that the category is overly broad. It is true that if we go back far enough, all human beings have their origins in East Africa (Palmer 1998); but the assertion that we are all members of an East African diaspora is not useful. Although we all have ancestors from that region, that memory is not part of our conscious experience; nor is it constitutive, so far as we know, of our bodily habitus; nor is each of us seen by others as a member of that category. Folk invocations of diaspora fail to specify its cultural particularity: it depends not merely on having a family tree that sprouted in another place but also on having a double consciousness in relation to place. For members of a diaspora, that awareness is central, even actively conjured in their lived experience. They feel a gap between here and there, where they are "really from." They may even value that gap, seeing it not as a deficiency but as a resource or mark of distinction, and actively cultivate a sense of it (Malkki 1997: 62).

The prevalence of these confusing folk usages, not to mention the mixed approaches of analytical meanings-as social form, as type of consciousness, as mode of cultural production (Vertovec 2000: 142)-suggests that we need to spend some time giving boundaries to the notions of diaspora and diasporic religion.

DEFINITION BY ETYMOLOGY

The ascent of diaspora as an analytical term has taken several routes. One of these is the route of roots, the tracing of its etymology as a way to delimit its semantic range (e.g., Tllyan 1996; R. Cohen 1997; Baumann 2000; Sheffer 2003).

Diaspora comes from the Greek verb speirein (to sow, or scatter, as in seed) and the preposition dia (over); thus, "to scatter over." The same Indo-European root, sp-, appears in words like "spore," "spread," and "sperm." Diaspora was first used by Greeks to describe the colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean world, and it probably connoted a sacrificial loss of the homeland for the cause of Greek expansion; hence irretrievable separation though not necessarily forced migration or enslavement (Tllyan 1996; Baumann 2000).

The word took on a different valence when applied to the Jewish experience, as a translation of the Hebrew term galut in the Greek version of Hebrew scripture, connoting severance and exile (Deuteronomy 28: 25, 58-68) and the Jewish dispersions (732 B.C.E., after conquest by Assyria; 586 B.C.E., after conquest by Babylonia; 70 C.E., after conquest by Rome). Yet, at least in the later context of rabbinic teaching, the notion also carried the promise of ultimate return (Cohen 1997;...