Abiodun, Rowland. Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107239074.

This source was found using JSTOR, a database of digital articles, books, and primary sources centered around academia. The key words “Yoruba” and “art” were used to distinguish the source among others on the database. A specific chapter of the book titled “Ase” was targeted because objects in Yoruba art culture are accepted to be synthesizing the concept of Ase. An excerpt from the chapter details a staff that is strikingly similar to the Opa Osun; the Opa Orere. The staff is a tool of an Ifa priest, held in the right hand vertically and used during professional gatherings to establish Ase in the context of a ceremony. The staff is also noted to have the ability to solve one’s problems by literally and metaphorically implementing Ifa’s orders. It is also mentioned that Ase is transferable to successive staffs that mark the start of a new reign. Upon reading this article, it is learned that staffs in Yoruba culture are potent with Ase.

Professor Abiodun was born in a Nigerian region known as Yorubaland, so Yoruba culture is very personal by his account. A well-studied art historian, his goals in the work are to educate readers on the significance of various sacred objects sourced from Yoruba civilization. His careful consideration of all viewpoints and traditions allows for an accurate description of evidence for information provided in his book. In turn, the source can be regarded as highly relevant.

Drewal, Margaret Thompson, and Henry John Drewal. “An Ifa Diviner’s Shrine in Ijebuland.” African Arts 16, no. 2 (1983): 61-100. doi:10.2307/3335852.

This source was found using CAT Quest, a database containing a collection of UVM library content as well as digital articles and other peer-reviewed resources. For this source, the name of the object itself was used as a search tool. In this journal article, an alternative use of the Opa Osun staff is presented. It is stated that a tale involving Orunmila and the sacrifice of a cock is a centerpiece of the staff’s function. During a particular formal ceremony known as the Itefa ceremony, the babalawo will face osun by sacrificing a cock and placing the individual parts of it on the Osun staff. By mounting parts of the cock on the staff, death is “satisfied” and osun benefits from the nourishment of the cock’s blood. This use of the Opa Osun staff is astonishing because the staff is likened to a weapon of a babalawo to conquer death.

Professor Drewal is well accustomed to West African art, as he apprenticed a sculptor in Nigeria during his time spent there. With an interdisciplinary specialization in African art history, Drewal’s perspective can be seen as accurate due to the fact that he has primary exposure to the topics he discusses, not just a view from afar. Professor Thompson, a ritual performance ethnographer, has also studied ritual performances of West Africa in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Both professors seem to write with the goal of informing those who are foreign to specific objects and symbols found in an Ifa Diviner’s shrine. The objects found in the shrine are representative of universal concepts in Yoruba art.

Okediji, Moyo. “Art of the Yoruba.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 165-98. doi:10.2307/4104382.

The source was found using JSTOR, a database of digital articles, books, and primary sources. The key words “art” and “Yoruba” were used to pinpoint the source. In this article, the historical context of art in Yorubaland is explained using a time scale that starts with Kingdom flourishment in Western Africa. The abstract and realist characteristics of Yoruba art are explicitly outlined in the article, and the writing style caters to individuals who are unfamiliar with orisha tradition. This source acts as a term bank for research, as many of the concepts explored in the work such as the bird motif are relevant to the Opa Osun.

Professor Okediji studied fine arts of the University of Ife, as well as the University of Benin. He has shadowed several African artists working in the creation of sacred Yoruba sculpture and design. These accolades partnered with his teaching experience in Nigeria make his work appropriate to apply to research findings. He acknowledges that the audience he is writing to is relatively new to the concept of Yoruba art, so he is careful with his use of terminology without proper explanation. Direct contact with the content he describes creates an insightful article for readers to learn about the complexity of West African art.

Jamie Bottino

McCarthy Brown, Karen. “Ezili.” In Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, 219-58. University of California Press, 2010.

This book was found through articles on JSTOR. The title was mentioned in many of the articles I found on Ezili Dantò. I read the chapter on the three Ezilis, focusing on the section about Ezili Dantò. The main idea of the section on Ezili Dantò was that above all else she is a mother. She is a healer, a protector, and a warrior. The chapter had stories about what the Vodou priestess Mama Lola and her family have experienced with Ezili Dantò. Altars for the goddess usually have money, clothes, and dolls on them and none of the items are ever used by anyone in the family. The chapter gave background on the goddess and what she stands for. Ezili Dantò fought in the Haitian slave revolution alongside her children (the Haitian slaves) and during the revolution she was wounded ending up with two parallel, vertical scars on one of her cheeks. Ezili Dantò also cannot speak because during the revolution her people believed that she wouldn’t keep their secrets so they cut out her tongue. The chapter stressed the fact that Ezili Dantò is a mother, she is always depicted with a child and she will drop everything to help her children in times of trouble. These characteristics are extremely helpful in teaching me about who Ezili Dantò is and what represents her.

The author herself does not show much bias in her writing. The book is more of a first person narrative about the experiences she had with Mama Lola and what she learned from her. McCarthy Brown’s purpose in her writing is to educate through the voices of those who practice Vodou. She doesn’t actually argue anything due to the writing style but the emphasis on Ezili Dantò being a mother above all else is clear.

Daniels, Kyrah Malika. “The Undressing of Two Sacred Healing Bundles: Curative Arts in the Black Atlantic in Haiti and Ancient Kongo.”Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 3(2013):416-429.

I found this source while looking through articles on JSTOR. I found the name Kyrah Malika Daniels repeated and looked her up and found a research paper she did on Haitian pakèt kongos on Project Muse. In this article she talks about how pakèt kongos are used for healing and how problems like a broken leg aren’t just treated as physical, but as spiritual too. There is a belief that whatever ails the patient is both a physical or mental and spiritual problem and the patient may have fallen out of sync or that there is an imbalance in the cosmos. A pakèt kongo follows a basic shape with an orb at the bottom and a stem coming out of the orb. The orb contains soil from a graveyard, essentially trapping a disembodied spirit within it. The fabric wrappings on a pakèt kongo are not just to keep the soil from getting out but also to keep the spirit in so that the pakèt kongo will work for ritual healing.

The author’s goal with this article is to educate on the pakèt kongo and how it is used in Haitian Vodou. She talks about her own experience with it but also about research she did on it. There is no bias in this article, mostly because it is not an opinion piece and mostly consists of facts and research. The author is a practitioner of Haitian Vodou so may be biased in terms of how she talks about the pakèt kongo but it is not very prevalent in the article. The information in the article is extremely relevant to me and will help a lot with my analysis of the object.

McCarthy Brown, Karen. “Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Haitian Case Study.” In Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, 1-25.

This article was one of the class readings. The author talks about the basic beliefs in Haitian Vodou. She goes into detail about their ideas and beliefs on healing and personhood. She talks about spirit possession and goes over some of the details of Haitian cosmology.

The goal of this article is to go over the basics of Haitian Vodou while not leaving out any of the most important details. There is no central focus on one idea in Vodou, it’s more of an overview of the religion. This article is helpful to me because it gives a lot of information on personhood, healing, and other aspects of Vodou that I need to know about in order to write my object analysis.

Ayorinde, Christine. 2004. “Santería in Cuba: Tradition and Transformation.” In The Yoruba 

Diaspora in the Atlantic World edited by Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, pp. 209-225.

Indiana University Press, 2004.

This source was suggested to me by Professor Brennan after reviewing what I had so far. The chapter is split into sections discussing different aspects of the Santeria religion in Cuba. It starts with an introduction into who is worshipped and basically how the religion works. Then Ayorinde goes into more detail into how the practitioners show their worship and what objects and songs come from/resemble certain gods. This section was very useful in determining the purpose and symbolism of the Thunderstone. The author then goes into topics like: communication with the gods, Yoruba subgroups, how slave trade affected the religion, and how the religion is passed down through the generations.

The authors perspective in this chapter seems to be very impartial, and only informative. The goal seems to be to teach people about the transformation of the Yoruba religion through the years. I don’t see any real bias throughout the reading, all the information seems to be from the perspective of a very devout practitioner.

Castillo, Daisy R., and Mederos, Aníbal A. 2007. “Lo femenino y lo masculino en la Regla

Congo o Palo Monte”. In Afro-Hispanic Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, African Religions in the New World, pp. 151-157. William Luis, 2007. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23055254.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A4746fbd7dea826834c3b56455f085daa.

I found this citation on JSTOR using the keywords “Regla de Ocha” and “Chango”. The general purpose of this article is to talk about the masculinity and femininity in the religious expression of the Regla Congo(hence the title). More specifically it discusses this in terms of the slave trade and how both masculinity and femininity has changed through it. In talking about this change, the article goes into beliefs and practices of the Regla Congo. This section gets to the heart of what gender means to the religion, and how gender is dependent on what the object means to the religion. Although this does not directly relate to the Thunderstone that I am studying, gender plays a major part in both the Diasporic religions, and in Chango.

Because the text is in Spanish, and I can translate it, but not fluently read, the tone and perspective of the author is a little unclear. With this, I found the perspective of the author to be similar to other works we have read. Their goals seem to be solely to inform people about the Regla Congo. For talking about sex a lot, there seemed to be little bias in this article. It did not seem to favor men or women over each other, and got the information across.  

Lawuyi, Olatunde B. 1988. “Ogun: Diffusion across Boundaries and Identity Constructions.”

African Studies Review Vol. 31, No. 2 (Sep., 1988):pp.127-139, http://www.jstor.org/stable/524422?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=((thunderstone)&searchText=AND&searchText=(shango))&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%2528%2528thunderstone%2529%2BAND%2B%2528shango%2529%2529&refreqid=search%3A8cc1dc2eadc54a0d174b8cc014501bfb&seq=10#page_scan_tab_contents.

I found this article on JSTOR by searching “Shango” and “Thunderstone”. This article is focused on Ogun’s role in the Yoruba Religion, and how the god is a structure in the religion. He does this by discussing the idea of Ogun and what realities his conceptions deal with. It then discusses how all the different variations Yoruba religion all connect to the idea of Ogun. Also, who worshipped Ogun along with where those people worshipped him connected back to the main idea of the structure of Ogun to the Yoruba religion. Throughout the article, it compared Ogun with Chango, which includes the symbolism of both Chango and the Thunderstone.

This article seems very scholarly because it explains the purpose of the journal before talking about anything else. The perspective seems to that of most articles I have found, and that means that I do not see much bias. The information seems to be from an inside perspective of the religion which talks more about what the religion means to the people rather than what the religion is made up of. Even though the intended audience is unclear to me, it seems to present the information in similar ways as previous articles.

Griffith, Paul. “Chapter 4.” Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora; Archetypes of Transition, books.google.com/books?id=2vSeDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA120&lpg=PA120&dq=nana+dancing+ritual&source=bl&ots=xltfBHktua&sig=DeIgzk2bSVpcwNpYwo5z_66sv24&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiio7iM5oTXAhXEYiYKHRNKD4YQ6AEINjAF#v=onepage&q=nana%20dancing%20ritual&f=false.

Art and Ritual in the Black Diaspora; Archetypes of Transition
Paul Griffith

I found this source on google professor, using the keywords Nanã and Ritual Practices
The author of this book discusses in Chapter 4; Page 120 of the ritualistic style of the dance practiced in the worship of Nana, as Tidlectics, styles of dances having to do with the ocean, or swaying motions parallel to the actions of the waves of the ocean. Also, the author describes the dance as having a “sweeping motion” to it, which enforces the use of the Ibiri wand, the specific tool to the Orisha Nanã, as it is considered amongst many as a broom of sorts, used to sweep away pestilence, and disease.

The author gave me a unique, fresh perspective on the style of dancing used to honor the Orisha, as the Tidalectic style of dancing, was foreign at first, but became sensible considering Nanã is associated heavily with the ocean, and having a swaying, almost sweeping motion used during her ritualistic dances.

Sansi, Roger. “4.” Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Berghahn, 2010.
Roger Roca-Sansi: Fetishes and Monuments: Afro Brazilian Art and

Professor Brennan recommended this book to me; during our initial object analysis
The Author of this book, Roger Sansi, discusses in Chapter 4, the transition in Candomble and other Afro-Brazilian religions, from the perspective of religious objects as weapons, to Crown Jewels of museums. This is another fresh perspective on religious and museological objects, having a malicious aspect to them, when used in their appropriate cultural mythology and legends.The Ibiri, the object most identified with the Orisha Nanã Buruku, was also perceived as a dangerous weapon when used against men, and people whom the Orisha had ill intent towards. This source provides an additional aspect to view the Ibiri, not just as an object used in rituals to further align oneself with Nanã Buruku, but also potentially used by individuals with an intent that isn’t so loving nd nurturing, as the Orisha herself is often seen as.

Thompson, Robert Farris. “Chapter 1: Black Saints Go Marching in .” Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, Random House, 1983, pp. 68–72.

Robert Farris Thompson

This source was ultimately found in our textbook, as Nanã Buruku has a section devoted to her history, life on Earth, and the history, use and life of the Ibiri wand, the object I will be researching within this project.
Our textbook, discusses the history of the Ibiri, explaining that Nanã has possessed the wand from the beginning of her life, and after Nanã was born, the staff was cut from the placenta, and put inside the Earth. As Nanã grew in size and age, the staff did as well, beneath the Earth. Nanã, went to war with the Teju-ade, and her son dug up the staff, and thus the staff became the highly worshipped object contained in the essence of the Orisha herself, essentially. This is an extremely valuable source, as it offers the most in depth and specific history of the Ibiri I have found thus far. Also, it offers the lives of both the Orisha, and the object as they both grew from birth, into maturity, and ultimately, into the legends told about Nanã Buruku and the Ibiri in Afro-Brazilian mythology.

Michael Sofio

Epstein, R. A. (1992, Dec 23). Rule of law: Testing the boundary between church and state. Wall Street Journal

I found this article on CATQuest while using the keywords “animal sacrifice” and “supreme court.” The article highlights the 1987 supreme court ruling in favor of the Santeria practitioners.

The Author compares the case to two other supreme court rulings that are related to a religious body’s legal rights. The first of those cases was that in California and was about a deaf student receiving tax dollars and that spending them on a religious institution was illegal and that decision was eventually overturned. The second case was about a school in New York showing a religious movie after school being shown and the school being a government entity establishing a religion by showing the movie. The case was also overturned. These cases that are of similar type to the case regarding animal cruelty shows the logic behind the law and why case decisions were made.

Cruz, R. Ted Winter 1994 article 17.1 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy Animal Sacrifice and Equal Protection Free Exercise: Church of the Lukumi Babaluaye

I found this article on Academic Search Premier while searching with the keywords “animal sacrifice” and “supreme court ruling.” The article drew my attention because it was in English, on the topic of animal sacrifice, and the author had a familiar name. the article was about the 1987 Supreme Court ruling. The artlicle breaks down the arguments on both sides and shows the evidence both posses. the article also possesses transcripts from the actual courtroom.

The Author doesn’t speak about his opinion on the ruling. However, Ted Cruz does generally take the side of any religious group especially if they are facing legal scrutiny. However, Senator Ted Cruz is a very conservative individual who is very Christian which generally would make me think he my not have a lot of knowledge of the Diasporic religions. However, Ted Cruz has Cuba heritage which makes me think he may know more about the religions that the class is studying than most people or is at least familiar with the concepts at hand in the court case.

Otero, Solimar, and Toyin Falola. Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas. Boston: New West Indian Guide, 2014.

Doctor Brennan suggested this book to me. The book is a catalog of information about the goddess Yemoja. The book first started in 2002 by the two authors to produce a volume that reflects an interest in exploring the international Yoruba deity Yemoja. The book highlights Yemoja in the many different nations and the differences between them. The book also speaks about understanding the aspects of race, gender, and sexuality that come with the goddess and how it is relevant to understanding not just the religion but also the culture. The book also explains the practices of worship of Yemoja and how they are important.

The Authors of the book wrote this book as a part of a series on the other deities that are very important in Yoruba culture including Shango, Ogun, and Osun. This book differs in that it is about Yemaya.

Scarlet Shifflett

Clark  Mary, Asho Orisha (Clothing of the Orisha): Material Culture as Religious Expression in Santeria. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1999.

I found this book through google scholar when I searched “Cuban Santeria altars”. I Decided to use this source after reading the abstract and finding it relative to my topic.

This book contains many chapters, the ones I am interested in using are chapters three and four. Chapter three talks about birthday altars and how each altar is set up for the different Orisha. It also discusses why certain objects are important to an altar. Chapter four gives the significance of objects in terms of the Orisha and talks about the specific object to the Orisha it pertains. The objects present on an altar represent the Orisha’s life while also telling a story about the life of the person who created the altar.

The author has a scholarly point of view that is from someone on the outside looking in. This kind of perspective is useful when trying to learn about a broader subject, like altars, but is not very useful when trying to understand details, like Oya altars. The goal of the author is to inform the reading on the subjects of Cuban Santeria altars and the importance objects have on the altar. While this source will not help me with the details of my writing it will be useful to understand the main idea of my research, why altars are important when worshipping Orisha.

Gleason Judith, Oya in the company of saints. United States of America: Oxford University Press, 2000.

I found this article through the UVM library search. I used the key word “Oya” in the ATLA article database.  and this article was one of the first resources that was the most relevant to my topic. This article was available through a secondary source from the UVM library search database.

This article discusses the Orisha Oya, what is associated with Oya, change and storms,  along with her history, Oya was the favorite wife of Shango, another Orisha. A lot of important information about Oya is written in this text, allowing the reader to get a better understanding of why and how someone would worship the Orisha. While the altar concept is not so much talked about this article will still be useful because it allows me to learn more about the key part of the altar I am studying, Oya.

The writer’s perspective is that of someone telling a story about how they learned about a topic. The writer talks in first person and discusses how she went to Cuba to discover more on the Orisha. The writer’s goal is to inform readers of the goddess Oya and what her role is among other Orisha. I found the perspective of this article helpful in understanding the information given because it felt like I was learning at the same pace as the writer.

Mary, Clark, Orisha Worship Communities: A Reconsideration of Organisational Structure. United States of America: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011.

I found this article through the ATLA database by searching “Orisha” I had to scroll through multiple other articles before coming to this specific one. I chose this article because it was from the same author as another one of my sources that I found helpful and because it contained a section on Santeria.

This article discusses the idea behind the birthday alatar. Clark goes into detail about what a birthday altar is and how a priest would know which Orisha to honor in their altar. An important detail in this section that directly relates to my topic was tureens on an altar. Clark stated that the tureens are kept closed with objects that embody the orisha. This statement was able to answer a key question in my research statement. Other topics discussed in the article related back to the priests who have birthday altars and how they are initiated.

Clark had a scholarly perspective in this article which is the same point of view she had in the first article I used. The goal of this piece of writing is to inform the reader on how a priest gets initiated and what that has to do with their birthday altar. While my object is not directly related to this article it was helpful in answering a key question I had that I was not able to find an answer to anywhere else.