3 Eyes For The Journey

Description
Studies of African-derived religious traditions have generally focused on their retention of easily traceable African elements. This emphasis, says Dianne Stewart, slights the ways in which communities in the African diaspora have created and formed religious meaning. In this fieldwork-based study Stewart shows that African people have been agents of their own religious, ritual, and theological formation. Looking at the African-derived and African-centered traditions in historical and contemporary Jamaica (Myal, Obeah, Native Baptist, Revival/Zion, Kumina, and Rastafari), Stewart develops three central themes. First, she contends that anti-African and Afrophobic sentiments adversely affected African-derived religious cultures in early Jamaica. Second, she argues that African-derived religions in Jamaica are systematic traditions worthy of theological exploration and interrogation in their own right. Third, she shows that these religions have in common an African-derived emphasis on healing, well-being, and the integration and affirmation of purposeful life experience. In conclusion, Stewart draws on these rich but often despised traditions in order to forge a new womanist liberation theology for the Caribbean.