Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Association of Black Anthropologists

Primary Theme: Race

Secondary Theme: Resilience

(5-0865) Social Death and Vital Relations in African American Religions

The violence and suffering that have marked many aspects of the African American experience have long spurred what critical race scholar Ashon Crawley calls “otherwise” modes of envisioning the real and the good. This panel brings together ethnographic perspectives on how practitioners of African American religious traditions have countered the forms of social death and alienations to which they have been subjected with efforts to sustain vital relations of kinship. Whether the relatedness constructed by black religious practitioners is constructed through notions of ancestry, care, discourse, performative actions or other grammars, this panel interrogates how kinship becomes a channel of otherwise envisioning. Our key questions include how the relationships between vitality and death are framed through religious practice; emic ethics and theologies of relationship; how connections to divinities intersect with or are seen to oppose ties among kin; and how concerns about vitality and social death shape religious practitioners’ knowledge of self and other.

Organizer(s)

• Todne Thomas

  Harvard Divinity School

Chair(s)

• Todne Thomas

  Harvard Divinity School

Presenter(s)

• Todne Thomas

  Harvard Divinity School

Organizer(s)

• Fred Klaits

  SUNY Buffalo

Chair(s)

• Fred Klaits

  SUNY Buffalo

Presenter(s)

• Fred Klaits

  SUNY Buffalo

• Onaje Woodbine

  American University

• Aisha Beliso-De Jesus

  Professor
  Princeton University

• Elizabeth Pérez

  Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
  University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant(s)

• Nicole Fadeke Castor

Presentations:

• 2:00 PM - 2:15 PM

  Beyond Racial and Social Death: Black Evangelicals and an “Elsewhere” of Kinship
  Todne Thomas – Harvard Divinity School
• 2:15 PM - 2:30 PM

  “God’s Timing”: Black Pentecostal Vitality and Discernment
  Fred Klaits – SUNY Buffalo
• 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM

  Ritualized Grief in Street Basketball
  Onaje X.O. Woodbine – American University
• 2:45 PM - 3:00 PM

  Shifting Vibrations: Black Lukumi Conjuring Against Police Violence
  Aisha Beliso-De Jesus – Princeton University
• 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM

  Gut Feelings: Commensality, Sacrificial Cuisine, and Next of Kin in Afro-Diasporic Religions
  Elizabeth Pérez – University of California, Santa Barbara
• 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM

  Discussion
  Nicole Fadeke Castor