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Social and Cultural Anthropology

Selected Works

Haiti

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Color Of Christ In Haiti, Elizabeth Mcalister Dec 2013

The Color Of Christ In Haiti, Elizabeth Mcalister

Elizabeth McAlister

Haiti is an officially Roman Catholic country, and the popular religion
of Vodou incorporates many Catholic elements. Why, then, is Jesus
Christ relatively deemphasized in both traditions, while Mary and
the countless saints and spirits have a greater presence in the religious
lives of most Haitians? This article delves into the Roman Catholic
and Kongolese Catholic history of Haiti to explore why Jesus Christ
is a relatively remote figure and why he is represented as white in a
Black-majority country.

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Police-Building And The Responsibility To Protect: Civil Society, Gender And Human Rights Culture In Oceania, Charles Hawksley, Nichole Georgeou Dec 2013

Police-Building And The Responsibility To Protect: Civil Society, Gender And Human Rights Culture In Oceania, Charles Hawksley, Nichole Georgeou

Nichole Georgeou

Forthcoming: This book examines how the United Nations and states provide assistance for the police services of developing states to help them meet their human rights obligations to their citizens, under the responsibility to protect (R2P) provisions. It examines police-capacity building ("police-building") by international donors in Timor-Leste, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG). All three states have been described as "fragile states" and "states of concern", and all have witnessed significant social tensions and violence in the past decades. The authors argue that globally police-building forms part of an attempt to make states "safe" so that they can adhere …

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Slaves, Cannibals, And Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race And Religion Of Zombies, Elizabeth Mcalister Dec 2011

Slaves, Cannibals, And Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race And Religion Of Zombies, Elizabeth Mcalister

Elizabeth McAlister

The first decade of the new millennium saw renewed interest in popular culture featuring zombies. This essay shows that a comparative analysis of nightmares can be a productive method for analyzing salient themes in the imaginative products and practices of cultures in close contact. It is argued that zombies, as the first modern monster, are embedded in a set of deeply symbolic structures that are a matter of religious thought. The author draws from her ethnographic work in Haiti to argue that the zonbi is at once part of the mystical arts that developed there since the colonial period, and …

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Listening For Geographies: Music As Sonic Compass Pointing Towards African And Christian Diasporic Horizons In The Caribbean, Elizabeth Mcalister Jan 2011

Listening For Geographies: Music As Sonic Compass Pointing Towards African And Christian Diasporic Horizons In The Caribbean, Elizabeth Mcalister

Elizabeth McAlister

Can musical sounds reveal history, or collective identity, or new notions of geography, in different ways than texts or migrating people themselves? This essay offers the idea that the sounds of music, with their capacity to index memories and associations, become sonic points on a cognitive compass that orients diasporic people in time and space. Whereas researchers often focus on the national diasporas produced through the recent shifts and flows of globalization, I illustrate some of the limits of the concept of national and ethnic diaspora to understand how Caribbean groups form networks and imagine themselves to be situated. This …

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Food Fight: From Haiti To Laos, People Are Starving – But They Refuse To Do It Quietly, Michael I. Niman Ph.D. May 2008

Food Fight: From Haiti To Laos, People Are Starving – But They Refuse To Do It Quietly, Michael I. Niman Ph.D.

Michael I Niman Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

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