Journal of Africana Religions
January 1, 2022
Marcela Perdomo
4 citations
The Garifuna, an Afro-Amerindian group forcibly displaced from Saint Vincent to Central America in 1797, practice Dugu, a religion in which traumatic collective memory is embodied. Ancestors appear in dreams and hallucinatory visions, causing misfortune, and spirits possess living descendants. Through initiation, individuals move from being afflicted patients to living bearers of historical legacy.
Anthropology of Consciousness
January 12, 2025
Marcela Perdomo
1 citation
Collective spirit possession, as seen in the case of Dolores in North Honduras, acts as a paroxysmic idiom that protects and revitalizes ancestor worship rather than eroding it. Based on ethnographic research since 2009, entropic forces like resistance, modernity, and impiety reinforce the religion's foundations. Possession idioms and events such as contagion, abduction, dramatization, illness, and death illustrate the resilience of this possession-based religion as a self-sustaining total social system rooted in tradition but shaped by historical, cultural, and personal experiences. Spirit possession is multifaceted, ambiguous, and underdetermined, operating as a social theater where critique, irony, impiety, historical consciousness, and the carnivalesque intersect, challenging views that it is merely a weapon of the weak.