Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization

Hollywood, Amy

doi:10.1086/463699

Cited by 93 publications

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“…Although Butler bases her analysis of subject-formation on linguistic performance, Amy Hollywood (2006) has shown that it may be extended to encompass the bodily production of ritualized action, and her interpretation undergirds my argument here. In Ilé Laroye as in other Lucumí communities, it has been through the 'sedimented effect' of doing women's workthe formation and reformation of 'wifely' dispositions in the kitchenthat individuals have been converted into 'wives' for the spirits (Asad 1993: 131;Butler 1993: 10).…”

Section: Ritual Labor and Pedagogymentioning

confidence: 87%

Cooking for the gods: sensuous ethnography, sensory knowledge, and the kitchen in Lucumí tradition

Pérez

2011

Religion

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This article considers the ways "sensuous ethnography" can illuminate the dynamism of embodied religious perception and behavior. It discusses the author's ethnographic research in an African-American community of Lucumí/Santería practitioners on the South Side of Chicago, and explores the sensorily attentive methodological approach adopted to engage with this house of worship, Ilé Laroye. The kitchen of Ilé Laroye became the author's main fieldwork site, and this article historicizes the kitchen in Lucumí tradition as a woman-centered space that has privileged complex forms of labor defined as generative of virtue and ritual competence. It is argued that post-sacrificial food preparation in particular has served to prepare the uninitiated for the rigors of Lucumí priesthood, and proven necessary for the internalization of dispositions and sensibilities that lead to initiation. The author contends that kitchen work has played a key role in transmitting somatic knowledge indispensable for the practice of this Afro-Cuban tradition.KEY WORDS anthropology; ethnography/fieldwork; ritual/performance; current situation of religious studies; material culture (architecture, artefacts etc.); method and methodology; gender; Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean religionsThe good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.-Marc Bloch 1 2 Bourdieu (1977:93-94) writes: 'Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking'; this definition exists in fruitful tension with such analyses as Starrett (1995). 3 The standard for analysis of Lucumí from the perspective of the experiencing subject, as opposed to the convert, has been set by Mason (2002), whose scholarship has contributed significantly to the ethnographic literature on religious identity and the embodiment of cosmology in ritual contexts, particularly with reference to virtuosicin the Weberian sense of the term -Yorùbá-based theological discourse. 4 See, most notably, Stoller (1989). E. PérezDownloaded by [York University Libraries] at 01:39 03 January 2015 5 My terminology throughout is derived largely from Asad (2003), writing on 'moral potentialities' as inculcated through bodily training, and the treatment of 'virtue' in Mahmood (2005). 6 Nilaja Campbell is a pseudonym. I have also changed the name of her ilé, and the names of its members, for reasons of confidentiality. 7 If the rituals were of an expiatory nature, sacrificed animals were usually deposited somewhere prescribed in advance by divination, such as near a railroad track, in the forest, or beside the river. In Latino communities, ashés are often called ashéses, although some elders believe this should be discouraged because the correct term is iñalés. 8 In fact, practitioners are somewhat divided on the question of whether aché is immanent within blood in a particularly concentrated form, or if it is sacrif...

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Section: Ritual Labor and Pedagogymentioning

confidence: 87%

Cooking for the gods: sensuous ethnography, sensory knowledge, and the kitchen in Lucumí tradition

Pérez

2011

Religion

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“…36 What this example highlights is that borders and migration are not primarily performed through the linguistic citation of norms, but first and foremost through 'practical or bodily citations' and in 'the bodily subject's encounters with other bodies in the world.' 37 The countless dialogues of actions between people willing to move and those charged with controlling their mobility are then performative, because they constitute that to which they refer, among others: borders and migration.…”

Section: Studying Embodied Encounters: Acknowledging the Performativimentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying embodied encounters: autonomy of migration beyond its romanticization

Scheel¹

2013

Postcolonial Studies

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Abstract:This article forms part of the attempt to develop the concept of autonomy of migration as an approach that is no longer prone to critique of implicating a romanticisation of migration. Drawing on the example of biometric rebordering, it shows in the first part, that it becomes pertinent to address the two allegations that drive this major critique, as their warranty increases due to the technologisation of border controls. It then introduces a reading of autonomy, which emphasises that moments of uncontrollability and excess of migratory practices cannot be thought in isolation of the conditions, in which they emerge. The second part introduces the notion of the embodied encounter as a transmission channel that mediates between the investigation of the situated practices of individual migrants and the assertion of an abstract autonomy of migration, thereby efficiently dissolving the two criticisms that have been raised against the concept of autonomy of migration. What the adoption of this analytical focus affords to acknowledge is, however, that neither migration, nor borders exist as such, but are brought into being in the innumerable encounters between people on the move and the actors, means and methods of mobility control. Keywords Autonomy of migration, borders, militant research, situated knowledge, performativityThis article forms part of the attempt to develop the concept of autonomy of migration (CAM) as an approach, which is no longer prone to the critique of implicating a romanticisation of migration. As its name suggests, the CAM asserts moments of autonomy of migratory practices in regards to any attempt to control or regulate them.1 This claim has stirred ongoing debates within the antiracist movement. On the one hand, the CAM has been promoted as a valuable alternative to the misleading image of the fortress that has dominated antiracist campaigns since the 1990s. Instead of representing borders as impenetrable walls, the CAM emphasises migrants' capacity to render borders porous as well as the related productivity of border controls that are not geared towards the exclusion, but the differential inclusion of migrants. 2 On the other hand, critics accuse the CAM, first, of not sufficiently considering the varying conditions, under which migration occurs, and second, of downplaying the repressive This is a pre-edited version of an article which appeared in Postcolonial Studies. You will find the final of the article here:

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“…However, we need to understand how texts have their own interventional affective force such that they become part of the patterning of a spiritual life enacted in ritual: texts become less about something else, less representational and symbolic, and more concerned with presentation and achieving all sorts of affectively toned motivations, sensations, and thoughts (Asad 1993 ;Hollywood 2002Hollywood , 2004. In other words, they become part of the relations and techniques of ritual that bring about spirituality.…”

Section: The Performance and Intensive Relations Of The Spiritual Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Spiritual Life

Holloway

2011

A Companion to Social Geography

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Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization

Cited by 93 publications

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Cooking for the gods: sensuous ethnography, sensory knowledge, and the kitchen in Lucumí tradition

Cooking for the gods: sensuous ethnography, sensory knowledge, and the kitchen in Lucumí tradition

Studying embodied encounters: autonomy of migration beyond its romanticization

Spiritual Life

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