Research Interests for J. Lorand Matory

J. Lorand Matory is the Director of the Center for African and African American Research and Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He conducts field research in Brazil, Nigeria, Benin Republic, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica and the US. Choice magazine named his Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion an Outstanding Book of the Year in 1994, and his Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé received the Herskovits Prize for the best book of 2005 from the African Studies Association. His forthcoming research on ethnic diversity at historically black Howard University was the subject of the 2008 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures and will be published by the University of Chicago Press as Stigma and Culture: Global Migrations and the Crisis of Identity in Black America. In 2013, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, a lifetime achievement award that is one of Europe's highest academic distinctions.

Keywords:

African Americans, African immigrants, anthropology, Anthropology, Art, African, Brazil, Candomble, Caribbean Americans, Caribbean immigrants, Cuba, Emigration and Immigration, ethnicity, Ethnicity, Freedom, Geechees, gender, Gender, Gullahs, Haiti, Immigrants, immigration, Latin Americans, Louisiana Creoles of color, Memory, Nigeria, ocha, oricha, orisa, orisha, Orisha religion, religion, Religion, Sacrifice, Santeria, Slavery, Spirit possession, Sweden, Transnationalism, Vodou

Current projects:

Of the Race but above the Race: Stigma and the Schooling of Ethnic Identity in the "Mecca" of Black Education

Areas of Interest:

spirit possession
African religions
African-diaspora religions
Afro-Atlantic religions
gender
transnationalism
African culture in the Americas
religion and politics

Recent Publications

1. Matory, JL, ‘On the backs of Blacks’: the fetish and how socially inferior Europeans put down Africans to prove their equality with their own oppressors, History of European Ideas, vol. 50 no. 4 (May, 2024), pp. 666-669, Informa UK Limited [doi]
2. Matory, JL, 基于白-黑肤色差异的族裔间不平等及其生成逻辑 (The Light-Dark Hierarchy of Human Worth), Journal of Chinese National Community Studies (中华民族共同体研究）, vol. 2023 (1) no. 1 (January, 2023), pp. 143-176, Minzu University of Beijing (translated by Liu, D.)
3. Matory, L, "Was Marx a Fetishist?", Extrablatt, vol. 2022 no. 19 (February, 2022) [abs]
4. Matory, L, "The Fetish Revisited" with J. Lorand Matory Interview with Kristian Petersen, edited by Petersen, K, Religious Studies News (July, 2020), Journal of Ameriacan Academy of Religion
5. Matory, JL, O navio de volta para casa: Tropos analíticos como mapas da e para a história cultural da diáspora africana, Contemporânea - Revista de Sociologia da UFSCar, vol. 10 no. 3 (2020), pp. 969-993, Universidade Federal de São Carlos [doi]