Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Religion, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis will explore and discuss the religion and rituals (ancestral cult) of Afro-Caribbean societies, people of African and indigenous heritage. This thesis will also seek to answer the question of extent to which Americans have become tolerant of other people's culture and what influence, if any, have transmitted from the Afro-Caribbean people to other North American societies. The religion and rituals of four Afro-Caribbean groups will be discussed in this study.

The Medium and the Message investigates the incorporation of Afro-Cuban trance techniques in Western theatrical performance. Through art practice and research, I am asking two questions: how do performers, trained in Western theatrical contexts, articulate their experience with Afro-Cuban trance techniques? And how can my research methodologies illuminate the inherent intercultural tensions in ways that are productive for performance practitioners and theorists? To answer these questions, I created four new works of theatrical performance where I developed a method for performers, utilizing Afro-Cuban rituals adapted for non-practitioners. Working toward a phenomenological understanding of what is happening when a performer incorporates a character, I drew on the ritual knowledge of trance possession in Lukumí and Palo Monte in order to examine how ontologies might speak to each other in artistic practice. I also served as advisor for the creation of a fifth work in order to test the method outside of my studio. I constructed a studio practice methodology, called kanga (from the Bantu for tying and untying), using three methods based on aspects of Afro-Cuban ritual, and modified for performance contexts: spell, charm, and trance. This methodology enacts and complicates distinctions between performance and ritual, serving as a contribution to respectful and responsible intercultural performance practices. My research-led practice includes autobiographical writing and auto-ethnography under a phenomenological research methodology that uses three methods for data collection: formal recorded interviews, video footage of the studio work, and regular rehearsal debriefings. The overall methodology, bridging theory and practice, is bricoleur, drawing from ethnography, psychoanalytic theory, and phenomenology. Both research and studio work led to the articulation of a state of consciousness in performance that I call hauntological. This borrows from Derrida (1994: 10) but is redefined to refer to a state of being where reality is co-constituted by the living and the dead, where ancestral spirits are invoked to do the work once reserved for characters. Finally, this led to the construction of a creative artifact called The Ghost Lounge, an art work that evokes a hauntological state of consciousness in the viewer.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-09-27T12:27:03Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Claudinei Espirito Santo.pdf: 655863 bytes, checksum: b2fddc58a46e369a8108826c08dc367a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-09-27T12:27:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Claudinei Espirito Santo.pdf: 655863 bytes, checksum: b2fddc58a46e369a8108826c08dc367a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-08-31 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This text presents as search object evangelic communities located in Carapicuiba, with the aim to find elements among them that represents, manifest or rebuild African native religion matrix religiosity. To achieve this goal observational and active engagement on meetings and interviews with two Christian religious leaders and Candomble obedentiary were performed. Historical and religious texts were also employed. In this research the African native religion matrix influence was confirmed, not only, as initially supposed by the Candomble touch points, but also with Afro-catholic traditions, as of mystical prayers like "benzimento" (blessing), and popular belives on "simpatias" (spells). Also noticed, the creation and development of these churches, teology and peculiar cosmovision from Reformed as from Pentecostals tends to answer africanbrazilian from diaspora religious yearnings, which re-create, in the middle of oppression, their ancestral culture. The presented text opens up a window to understand how afro-brazilian religiosity has been developing around the growing Christian traditions in Brazil; how the black people from diaspora search, in a certain way, to belong to the captive land, even after 130 years later from abolition. Keywords: Teology; Religiosity; Black people / Esta dissertação tem como objeto de pesquisa as comunidades evangélicas localizadas em Carapicuíba, com a finalidade de nelas encontrar elementos que representem, manifestem ou recriem a religiosidade encontrada nas religiões de matriz africana. Para alcançar esse objetivo, nos servimos da observação com participação ativa em reuniões e realizamos entrevistas com dois líderes religiosos cristãos das igrejas escolhidas e com sacerdotes de Candomblé. Também fizemos uso de textos históricos e religiosos. Nessa pesquisa, ficou comprovada a influência da matriz cultural africana não somente, como supomos inicialmente, por meio do contato com o Candomblé, mas também das tradições afro-católicas, como rezas místicas ("benzimento") e simpatias originárias das crenças populares. Foi notado também que a criação e o desenvolvimento dessas igrejas e de uma teologia e cosmovisão peculiares, que se distanciam das conhecidas Reformadas e Pentecostais, e se inclinam a atender aos anseios religiosos inerentes ao negro da diáspora, tendendo a recriar, em meio à opressão, a cultura de seus ancestrais. A presente dissertação nos abre, nesse sentido, mais uma janela para compreender como a religiosidade afro-brasileira tem se desenvolvido em meio ao crescimento de tradições cristãs no Brasil e como o negro da diáspora ainda busca, de alguma maneira, pertencer à terra do cativeiro, mesmo 130 anos após a abolição

Even though the West, or Global North, initiates extensive development policymaking and project activity on the African continent, this study argues that one source of major frustration between different parties entrusted to do the work arises from cognitive differences in their worldviews. These differences affect people's actions and have theological ramifications involving how we all understand meaning and reality. The study employs a case method analyzed through the lens of Alfred Schutz's sociology of knowledge theories and augmented by insights from African scholars to look at basic perceptual differences between Zambians and expatriates working on the Copperbelt Province's mines. After exploring how participants in the study interpreted various experiences, this study concludes that Zambians and expatriates were essentially living in "parallel universes" of meaning regardless of their apparently shared activities and objectives. The study further argues that viewpoints expressed by Zambian participants can be extrapolated into powerful lessons for members of civil society who are concerned about international development and the environment. Such teaching elements could especially help reshape how Americans and other Westerners understand ourselves in relation to physical creation and the cosmos as well as to those from radically different cultures. Lessons learned from the Zambian perspective could also help reinvigorate Western theological thinking, providing much needed critiques of discourses that currently dominate international development policymaking and planning and that determine value principally according to economic strategies and fulfillment of efficient, measurable objectives. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007.

This thesis seeks to offer new perspectives on the role of women in African-American Christian denominations in the United States in the period between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century. It situates the changes in the roles available to black women in their churches in the context of ecclesiastical politics. By offering explanations of the growth of black denominations in the South after the Civil War and the political alignments in the leadership of the churches, it seeks to offer more powerful explanations of differences in the treatment of women in distict denominations. It explores the distinct worship practices of African-American Christianity and reflects on their relationship to denominational structure and character, and gender issues. Education was central to the participation of women in African-American Christianity in the late nineteenth century, so the thesis discusses the growth of black colleges under the auspices of the black churches. Finally it also explores the complex relationship between domestic ideology, the politics of respectability, and female participation in the black churches.