Research & Scholarship

This paper examines how sacred knowledge is preserved and transmitted in Afro-diasporic religious communities, framing the archive not as a static repository but as a system of sacred infrastructure governed by spiritual stewardship, cosmological rhythm, and ethical restraint. Drawing on the anthropology of religion, archival theory, and Afro-Atlantic ethnography, it centers forms of memory that resist exposure and challenge the dominance of transparency as a scholarly and institutional ideal. The methodology is grounded in proximity, apprenticeship, and ritual accountability rather than extractive fieldwork.

The paper argues that preservation in sacred contexts is shaped by cycles of activation, selective silence, and inherited responsibility rather than institutional protocols or public access. In proposing a theory of sacred infrastructure, it calls for an archival ethics grounded in fidelity, humility, and cosmological consent. The most enduring archives may not be those housed in national institutions, but those carried through lineage, protected by silence, and activated through spiritual relationship. The archive, in this context, is not simply a record. It is a covenant.

This paper argues that ethnobotanical syncretism in the Afro-Caribbean basin was a structurally layered process operating simultaneously at inter-African, intra-African, and Afro-European levels -- a complexity that existing scholarship has acknowledged piecemeal but never fully theorized as a unified phenomenon. Drawing on ecological anthropology, the anthropology of syncretism, and plant translocation theory, the paper develops a tripartite framework for understanding how African communities transported, adapted, and regenerated medicinal botanical knowledge under conditions of forced diaspora, plantation slavery, and colonial encounter in the Caribbean.

The paper makes three interconnected arguments. First, it contends that the dominant historiography of Afro-Caribbean ethnobotany has over-indexed on Afro-European syncretism -- the meeting of African and Catholic or Iberian botanical traditions -- while systematically undertheorizing the prior and concurrent processes by which distinct African ethnic and regional traditions merged with one another in the Caribbean context. The cabildos, the barracoons, and the plantation quarters were not simply sites of African-European contact; they were also sites of intra-African contact among Yoruba, Fon, Kongo, Mande, and other traditions that had never previously coexisted at the density the Atlantic slave trade imposed. What emerged from that contact was not simply a diluted African tradition grafted onto European forms, but a genuinely syncretic African pharmacopeia that preceded and shaped subsequent Afro-European blending.

The paper argues that plant translocation was not merely a botanical phenomenon but a knowledge infrastructure -- that the movement of plant material across the Atlantic and within the Caribbean was inseparable from the movement of the cosmological and ethnomedical frameworks that gave those plants meaning. A plant without its protocol is pharmacologically inert within a tradition. The paper uses the Voeks and Volpato fieldwork data to demonstrate how communities negotiated botanical substitution not randomly but according to underlying principles of sympathetic correspondence, functional equivalence, and ritual efficacy -- evidence of active intellectual work, not passive adaptation.

The paper intervenes in the syncretism debate itself, engaging Palmié's critique of Africanist essentialism and Shaw and Stewart's antisyncretism framework, to argue that the ethnobotanical evidence complicates both the retention model and the creolization model. What the fieldwork data shows is neither pure retention nor wholesale transformation but something more precise: strategic conservation of functional knowledge systems within forms that were legible to new social environments. That is a theoretical contribution that neither model fully captures.

The paper concludes by arguing that the stakes of this question extend beyond ethnobotany into the broader politics of cultural heritage, intellectual property, and community sovereignty over sacred knowledge -- a set of concerns that connects the historical material to contemporary debates about who owns traditional ecological knowledge and on what terms it may be documented, archived, or commercialized..

This study examines how practitioners of Afro-Caribbean religious traditions frame the factors that inhibit or enable recognition of their traditions as world religions. Drawing on diagnostic framing theory, the study analyzes open-ended survey responses from 71 self-identified practitioners of three traditions: Òrìşà-based practice, Vodun traditions of the Lwa, and Palo Mayombe traditions of the Nkisi, gathered through criterion sampling across Facebook community groups. Content analysis of respondent statements yields five cross-tradition meta-categories that practitioners consistently identify as barriers to world religion recognition: mainstream media representation, institutional disorganization, the tension between secrecy and visibility, the absence of centralized authority, and the legacy of racial and colonial stigma.

The paper argues that diagnostic framing among Afro-Caribbean practitioners reflects a sophisticated awareness of the structural conditions that govern religious legitimacy in Western public discourse, and that the quest for world religion status is itself a site of internal debate about the costs of visibility and standardization. Following the 1993 Supreme Court decision in Church of Lukumi v. City of Hialeah, these traditions entered a new phase of public exposure that sharpened both the demand for recognition and the risks it carries. The findings support the need for further empirical investigation into practitioner-led frameworks for religious legitimacy across the Afro-Atlantic world.

This paper examines the herbarium as an archival institution through the lens of Afro-Cuban religious practice, using the Tulane University Herbarium as a case study. Drawing on direct access to the collection facilitated by curator Anne Bradburn, the paper cross-references fifteen randomly selected specimens against Dalia Quiros-Moran’s Guide to Afro-Cuban Herbalism to assess coverage of plants used in Lucumí religio-magical practice. Of fifteen plants queried, ten were present in the collection; five had Cuban provenance, including a type specimen collected by Charles Wright in 1860. In no case did Herbarium records document religio-magical attribution, traditional Yoruba or Kongo nomenclature, or sacred use.

The paper argues that the herbarium’s taxonomic and biomedical descriptive framework structurally excludes the categories of knowledge most relevant to Afro-Atlantic sacred traditions, and that the Babaláwo-ethnobotanist occupies a unique archival position, simultaneously inside the knowledge system the herbarium cannot describe and trained to translate between sacred and scientific registers. Pierre Verger’s Ewé: The Use of Plants in Yoruba Society is examined as a partial model for bridging this gap, with attention to the access questions his initiation raises for practitioner-scholars. The paper concludes that a community-governed sacred herbarium, with metadata reflecting Yoruba, Kongo, and Lucumí classificatory systems alongside Latin taxonomy, represents both a scholarly and institutional need.

This paper examines Yorùbá personal naming conventions and the Esentaye naming ceremony as practiced within African-American Lucumí communities, arguing that the act of naming a child in diaspora conditions is simultaneously a liturgical, archival, and political act. Drawing on Orie’s analysis of Yorùbá name structure, Johnson’s historical documentation of naming rituals, and Fatunmbi’s Oriki Esentaye, the sole available Western text on the Ifá-based naming ceremony, the paper maps the four components of traditional Yorùbá nomenclature and the divinatory process through which a Babaláwo determines a child’s names.

The paper grounds this analysis in a case study of unusual access: the author’s performance of the Esentaye ceremony for his own daughter, Oṣólàńké Ifáfúnwá Odíduro, in 2014. As both the officiating Babaláwo and the father, the author occupies a dual positionality that illuminates the practical negotiations required when reclaiming tradition outside its original linguistic and cultural context, including the reliance on contested sources, the absence of fluent Yorùbá, and the adaptation of ceremonial elements to diaspora conditions. The paper concludes that diaspora naming practice constitutes an understudied site of cultural sovereignty, and that the scarcity of practitioner-authored scholarship on the Esentaye represents a significant gap in both religious studies and Afro-Atlantic scholarship.

This student note argues that International Foreign Aid Programs (IFAPs), principally the IMF and World Bank, structurally contribute to the corruption they claim to combat. Drawing on moral hazard theory and a typology of corruption encompassing embezzlement, bribery, ineptitude, and cronyism, the note demonstrates that IFAP funding functions as “soft funds”: discretionary capital accessible to corrupt political actors that entrenches them in power, masks the effects of mismanagement, and insulates governments from accountability.

The note identifies three mechanisms through which IFAPs enable corruption: by directing funds to governments already under corrupt leadership; by making headline anti-corruption pronouncements that accelerate exploitation of the loopholes targeted for closure; and by offering debt relief packages that create a classic moral hazard, rewarding mismanagement with continued access to international capital. Case studies drawn from Russia and East Asia during the late 1990s financial crises illustrate each mechanism. The note concludes that meaningful anti-corruption reform requires structural redesign of IFAP conditionality rather than rhetorical commitment to good governance principles.

Conceptual study examining how ritual communities coordinate authority and obligation under conditions of non-state sovereignty, with implications for archival stewardship, secrecy, and ethical description.

Esta presentación propone un marco ético y comunitario para la preservación de archivos sagrados afrocaribeños, a partir de las etapas iniciales de un esfuerzo de digitalización de la biblioteca personal del Babaláwo Irete Obara, sacerdote y erudito lucumí en La Habana. Su colección abarca más de cinco décadas e incluye textos rituales, Odù Ifá anotados, correspondencia espiritual y registros de adivinación — materiales frágiles y sagrados cuya preservación exige un orden de cuidado distinto al institucional.

Dirigido por la Sociedad Histórica Iroko y construido desde el inicio con mayores y miembros de la comunidad, el proyecto parte de preguntas sobre protocolo espiritual, consentimiento cultural y responsabilidad colectiva antes de abordar plataformas, equipos o repositorios. La presentación explora cómo principios afrodiaspóricos — autoridad oral, responsabilidad ritual, custodia intergeneracional — pueden orientar estrategias de preservación en contextos con infraestructura limitada, y plantea un desafío directo a instituciones mayores para que reconsideren las dinámicas de poder en torno a custodia, acceso y clasificación.

Explores sacred archives as tools of resistance and spiritual activism. Drawing from a private Afro-Cuban library, the presentation highlights how ancestral knowledge challenges colonial memory and sustains cultural survival.

This presentation introduces a community-led digitization initiative centered on the sacred library of Babaláwo Irete Obara, a Cuban spiritual elder whose private collection spans more than fifty years of ritual texts, annotated Odù Ifá, and spiritual correspondence across multiple lineages. The materials hold rare linguistic, historical, and ceremonial knowledge that remains largely undocumented and at risk of deterioration.

Led by the Iroko Historical Society, the project develops archival methods grounded in Afro-diasporic sovereignty, spiritual ethics, and intergenerational consent rather than institutional convention. Collaborative scanning practices, community-shaped metadata, and tiered access protocols affirm these records as documents of ceremony, migration, and ancestral presence rather than folklore or ephemera. The presentation offers early lessons for LIS practitioners, archivists, and community leaders working to protect sacred materials without erasing their context.