Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition: Tracing Power, Slavery, and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Portuguese Atlantic

Fromont, Cécile

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfaa020

Cited by 27 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…However, there is also evidence that the majority were ignorant of the basic principles of Catholicism, and many of them were merging their ancestral religions with the new faith, creating a spirituality of complex beliefs and ideas. In this spiritual ferment, they often transformed "religious objects" into instruments of power (Fromont 2020(Fromont , 2022.…”

Section: The Validity Of the Pact Of Confederationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Confederation between the Kingdoms of Portugal and Kongo, 1511–1665

Gouveia

2023

Religions

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In this study I propose rethinking the nature, purposes, and impacts of relations between the kingdoms of Portugal and Kongo in the period between 1511 and 1665. My main argument is that the Pact of Confederation formed by these two kingdoms was decisive, exceptional, and unprecedented. While covert attempts by the Portuguese to gain control of the Kingdom of Kongo were common during this period, the relations spelled out by the pact nevertheless endured for over a century and would have global repercussions. From the vantage point of historiography, the pact presents modern historians with serious difficulties, largely because it spells out modes of interaction that do not fit readily into recognized systems of European colonialism. Central to these modes of interaction is the significant role that religion played in defining Portuguese imperialist policies in Central Africa. In the end, the Pact of Confederation between the kingdoms of Portugal and Kongo forces historians to rethink Portuguese imperial dynamics and the modalities of their presence in Africa and beyond.

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Section: The Validity Of the Pact Of Confederationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Confederation between the Kingdoms of Portugal and Kongo, 1511–1665

Gouveia

2023

Religions

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“…This Afro-Christian contact is where one finds both Scott's (2004) African Atlantic originality and Patterson's (1982) permanent Reformation. This may have been an innovation in sixteenth-century Africa as Thornton (2013) and Fromont (2020) show. However, when transported to the New World, it led to the eventual founding of whole new languages, cuisines, healing practices, and religions.…”

Section: The Spirit(s): African and Christianmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Problem

Leone¹

2020

Current Anthropology

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A spirit bundle from Wye House, Talbot County, Maryland, is described and interpreted as a function of the Afro-Christianity created during and after the Atlantic slave trade. The bundle is made up mostly of worn shoes and boots; it dates to after Emancipation and was discovered in the 1990s. This interpretation attempts to use the Slave Narratives of the 1930s to understand the meaning of the bundle. The imminence of the supernatural in the bundle and the simultaneous structure of the nearby Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal churches is tied to the early Christian debates of the third and fourth centuries of the immediacy and individuality of access to God in contrast to the hierarchical structure of the church.

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Beyond Babel

Brewer-García

2020

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During an ocean voyage from Panama to Lima in December 1618, young Jesuit student Gerónymo Pallas's party reached shore at the port of San Mateo, on the coast of contemporary Ecuador, after surviving a menacing storm. According to his account, upon arrival in San Mateo, Pallas and his weary fellow travelers encountered a community of indios mulatos inhabiting the area. By speaking to one who knew Spanish, the Jesuit pilgrims learned the history of the community. According to the informant, more than a generation earlier, African survivors of a shipwrecked slave ship founded the community after swimming ashore and fighting against the men of the indigenous community inhabiting the coast at the time. The new community consisted of the children born to the indigenous women of the area and the African castaways: "Los hijos pues destos negros conquistadores y de aquellas indias son los que hasta oy duran y se llaman indios mulatos" [The children of these black conquistadors and those indigenous women who live there today and are called indios mulatos]. 1 Throughout the rest of his description of the inhabitants of the area near San Mateo, Pallas variably refers to the members of this community as negros, mulatos, and indios mulatos. 2 Algunos ay que saben hablar en lengua española porque van y vienen a la ciudad de Quito, que dista pocas leguas, y destos era uno el que habló con los padres en la plaia. Los otros hablarán un lenguage que no avrá calepino que lo interprete, porque será mesclado y corrompido de una lengua india y de treynta differencias de Guineo, porque cuantas castas vienen de negros tantas son las diversidades de lenguas que ay entre ellos, y por esto se dize todos somos negros y no nos entendemos.[There are some who know how to speak the Spanish language, because they come and go from the City of Quito, which is only a few days' travel away. And one of those spoke with the fathers on the beach. The others spoke a language that no dictionary could interpret, as it is a mixture and corruption of one indigenous tongue and thirty different kinds of Guinean, because there are as many different languages among blacks as there are castas among them. And that is why it is said: we are all blacks, and we do not understand each other.] 3By invoking the adage "todos somos negros y no nos entendemos" [we are all blacks, and we do not understand each other], Pallas associates blackness with diverse, corrupt, and incomprehensible speech and implies that all black men and women are bozales. 4 First used in the mid-fifteenth century as a term for an undomesticated horse, bozal emerged soon afterward as a label for black men or women

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Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition: Tracing Power, Slavery, and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Portuguese Atlantic

Cited by 27 publications

References 20 publications

The Confederation between the Kingdoms of Portugal and Kongo, 1511–1665

The Confederation between the Kingdoms of Portugal and Kongo, 1511–1665

The Problem

Beyond Babel

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