J. Lorand Matory is Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project at Duke University. He is the author of
Commodities and Gods
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Published:October 2018
The materials used to create the altars and the insignia of the Afro-Atlantic religions reflect their roots in West African polities intensely embedded in interregional commerce, including a half millennium of commercial exchange with Europe and the Americas. The ritual assembly of these materials reflects and engineers a conception of transcorporeal personhood well suited to the political interests of merchant monarchs, diasporic communities that rely on clientelism, and, more generally, to the cosmopolitan context of these religions' genesis.
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