Call for papers 20
Afro-american cultures: syncretism, transculturation and popular traditions
Coordinators:
Giovanna Campani, Inaury Portuondo and Alberto Granado Duque
Start Date: May 6, 2024
Closing Date: November 28, 2024
Published Date: March, 2025
Presentation of the monograph
The journal is an open access electronic publication, published twice a year, as part of the activities of a network of European and Latin American universities. From a comparative perspective, the journal aims to open up debate and the dissemination of information, knowledge and the results of research in the field of cultural studies between Europe and Latin America. The interdisciplinary dimension includes cultural and social anthropology, history, sociology, political science, political economy, communication and others. The study of cultural phenomena in different societies pays particular attention to issues of cultural diversity, multiculturalism, migration, ethnicity, gender and social class.
This issue treats Afro-America as a plural territory of authentic cultures. Dialectical analysis invites us to affirm culture as a form of social consciousness. Within this, religion has been a common thread and a platform for other cultural expressions that have made Latin America a distinctive territory.
The symbiosis of the indigenous peoples with other cultures from the process of conquest and colonisation went beyond the economic needs of the Spanish overseas empire and became an indispensable unit for the human and cultural survival of the civilisations that inhabited both coasts of the Atlantic, which in turn were seasoned by people from other areas. Syncretism and transculturation continue to be unfinished processes, reinterpreted in each era and context of the continent. The concept of Afro-American outlined in the Brazilian context today has homologous processes in the Andes, Uruguay, Ecuador and Central America, to name a few examples, but geographically the coexistence of Afro and indigenous peoples on the Pacific coast of the Americas leads us to an inter-oceanic analysis of the ethno-cultural phenomena of this lineage. In this sense, new academic and dialogical lights are needed from the cultural bearers, considering that in this cosmovision, the Caribbean is like the eye of the cultural hurricane that also mobilises many back and forth processes. It is therefore necessary to visualise and socialise the centuries-old processes of cultural resistance that have taken place in the Americas and that constitute the region's heritage.
Questions to be answered
- How has syncretism and transculturation developed in Afro-America from its original cultural diversity, colonising groups and countries, and expressions of resistance?
- What are the origins of the ritual festivals studied, and what are the conditions and contexts of their survival and transmission?
- To what extent is ethnobotanical knowledge received, reproduced and transmitted in society?
- What is the origin of such knowledge, and is its current practice the result of cross-cultural processes?
- What elements of ancestral orality survive in everyday language?
- What are the identities, genders, groups, associations and leaders that dominate contemporary ancestral practice?
- How do mobilities, migrations and intercultural synergies influence cultural practice and spatial recontextualisation?
- How do the media influence the perception of the diversity of cultural practices and their bearers?
- What are the audiovisual symbols, codes and referents that govern the social perception of cultural practices?
- What are the most appropriate methodological approaches in the social sciences to study the diversity of cultural practices in Afro-America?
Descriptors
- Festivals and Rituals
- Ethnobotany
- Relational languages and orality
- Identities, gender, groups, associations and leadership
- Mobility, migration and intercultural synergy
- Other perspectives that intersect and contribute to the central axis.
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