"Bound by the Ancestors: Black and Indigenous Garifuna Peoplehood after Land Dispossession in the Central American Caribbean"

CLAS Speaker Series

Please register to attend. Lunch will be provided.

Marcela Perdomo is a cultural anthropologist of religion and Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and holds both an MA and BA from the Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is a member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (EHESS/CNRS/Collège de France), where she was affiliated during her doctoral research and received support for ethnographic fieldwork. Her research draws on long-term ethnographic and historical research with Garifuna communities in Honduras and examines spirit possession, historical memory, ethnogenesis, race, and the intersections of African diasporic and Carib-Amazonian religious worlds. Her current book project, Chosen by the Ancestors: A Binding Gift. Spirit Possession and Historical Memory in the Garifuna Dugu of Honduras, examines Dugu as a historical-initiatory possession complex through which relationships among ancestors, spirits, kin, and the living transmit histories of displacement, belonging, and Garifuna peoplehood across generations.