An examination of how Atlantic enslavement transformed localized West African identities into diasporic ethnonyms such as Lucumí, Nagô, and Aku, driving mutual processes of re-ethnogenesis across the Black Atlantic.
Diaspora ethnonyms are collective designations such as Lucumí, Nagô, and Aku that emerged across the Atlantic world to classify captive populations originating from the Yorùbá-speaking region of West Africa . Before the late nineteenth century, inhabitants of this region did not identify as a single Yorùbá ethnic group, but rather organized their political loyalties around autonomous kingdoms and sub-groups such as Ọ̀yọ́, Ẹ̀gbá, Ìjẹ̀ṣà, Ìjẹ̀bú, Kétu, Èkìtì, and Ọ̀wọ̀ . Through the institutional crucibles of transatlantic enslavement, urban mutual aid societies, religious brotherhoods, and liberated African settlements, these disparate groups consolidated into unified diasporic "nations" . This process of re-ethnogenesis in the Americas and Sierra Leone not only established durable transnational cultural identities, but also fed back into West Africa to shape the emergence of modern Yorùbá national consciousness .
The historical trajectory of Yorùbá diaspora ethnonyms reflects shifting trade routes, political collapses in West Africa, and administrative regimes in the Americas . The earliest European references to Yorùbá-speaking groups appeared in early sixteenth-century Portuguese navigation and trade records along the Bight of Benin . Duarte Pacheco Pereira noted commercial encounters with interior peoples near the Kingdom of Benin around 1506 to 1508 . By 1627, the Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval, writing in Cartagena de Indias, recorded Lucumíes as a distinct African nation arriving in Spanish America, identifying their origins in the West African interior east of the Popo and Allada kingdoms . Olfert Dapper's 1668 compilation described the interior kingdom of Ulkami (or Ulkuma), which contemporary historians associate with early commercial networks linked to the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire or eastern Yorùbá territories .
Under the ascendancy of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century, imperial expansion redirected coastal commerce through ports such as Ouidah, Jaquin, and Apa . In French and Portuguese records of this era, the term Nagô (derived from the southwestern frontier group, the Ànàgó) began to supplant Lucumí as the primary coastal designation for Yorùbá speakers . Chevalier des Marchais recorded Nago at Ouidah in the 1720s, and French slaving reports from 1750 explicitly categorized interior captives from Ọ̀yọ́ and surrounding territories as Anago . In northern West Africa, Islamic scholarly treatises by Ahmad Bābā al-Timbuktī in 1615 and later Sultan Muhammad Bello in 1812 utilized the exonym Yariba or Yárùbá to describe the subjects of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire .
The nineteenth-century Yorùbá civil wars caused a demographic shift across the Atlantic . The Owu War (c. 1821 to 1826), the collapse of Old Ọ̀yọ́ (c. 1835 to 1836), and subsequent intra-regional conflicts generated an unprecedented captive supply . Tens of thousands of Yorùbá speakers were funneled into transatlantic slave ships destined primarily for Bahia in Brazil and western Cuba, as well as being intercepted by the British Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron and relocated to Freetown, Sierra Leone . In Freetown, British colonial authorities and Christian missionaries designated these recaptives as Aku, a name derived from their formulaic greetings .
Missionary contact in Sierra Leone catalyzed the linguistic unification of these dispersed populations . The Church Missionary Society (CMS), particularly through the intellectual work of the repatriated Egbá scholar and bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, adopted the term Yoruba (previously limited in northern usage to Ọ̀yọ́) as the standard designation for the entire language family and ethno-linguistic group . Crowther's 1843 grammar and his 1852 dictionary established an Ọ̀yọ́-based written standard that transcended local dialects .
During the nineteenth-century colonial era, transatlantic returnees known as Agudas (from Brazil and Cuba) and Saros (from Sierra Leone) repatriated to coastal cities such as Lagos, Badagry, and Ouidah . These literate, commercial, and religious actors moved between Atlantic port cities, reinforcing a unified Yorùbá identity across the ocean . In colonial Nigeria, cultural nationalist organizations such as the Ẹgbẹ́ Ọmọ Odùduwà (founded in 1945) consolidated this pan-Yorùbá political consciousness .
Following mid-twentieth-century independence movements and post-revolutionary migrations from Cuba, diaspora ethnonyms underwent a global revival . In late twentieth- and twenty-first-century religious movements, designations like Lucumí in the United States and Puerto Rico, Nagô-Ketu in Brazilian Candomblé, and Orisha worship in Trinidad have shifted from colonial administrative labels to prestigious markers of ancestral cultural legitimacy .
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ATLANTIC YORÙBÁ ETHNONYMIC LABELS
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[ REGIONAL SUB-GROUPS IN WEST AFRICA ]
(Ọ̀yọ́, Ẹ̀gbá, Ìjẹ̀ṣà, Ìjẹ̀bú, Kétu, Ànàgó, Èkìtì, Ọ̀wọ̀)
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[ CARIBBEAN / SPANISH ] [ BRAZIL / PORTUGUESE ] [ SIERRA LEONE ] [ SAHEL / HAUSA ]
Lucumí / Olukumí Nagô / Anagonu Aku Yariba / Yorùbá
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- Derived from - Derived from - Derived from - Hausa/Songhai
"olùkù mi" (my Ànàgó sub-group greeting "ẹ kú" exonym for Ọ̀yọ́
friend) or Bini via Fon exonym (salutations) - Adopted by CMS
"Olukwumi" - Consolidated in - Consolidated in to unify all
- Institutionalized Candomblé nações Freetown liberated sub-groups
in Cuban cabildos villages
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The ethnonym Lucumí (rendered historically as Olukumi, Ulkami, Olcami, or Licomin) represents the primary historical designator for Yorùbá captives in the Hispanic Caribbean, Central America, and western South America .
Linguistically, the most widely accepted etymology traces the term to the Yorùbá phrase olùkù mi, meaning "my friend" or "my confidant" . In several eastern and central Yorùbá dialects (including Ọ̀wọ̀, Ìjẹ̀ṣà, and Èkìtì), olùkù survives as a standard noun for companion or associate . European traders and coastal intermediaries frequently heard interior captives addressing one another using this greeting and relational marker, subsequently converting the phrase into an ethnonymic noun .
A competing historiographical thesis, articulated by Ojo and Lovejoy, links the label to the historical Olukumi linguistic enclave in the Delta and Edo borderlands . According to this view, the term was mediated through the Kingdom of Benin, where it designated eastern Yorùbá-speaking frontier populations and palace servitors long before large-scale transatlantic departures commenced from the Bight of Benin .
In colonial Cuba, Lucumí functioned not as an undifferentiated monolith, but as a broad umbrella nation divided into precise sub-ethnonyms mirroring West African polities :
The ethnonym Nagô (also recorded as Nago, Nagot, or Anagonu) became the dominant term across the Portuguese, French, and Dutch Atlantic, particularly in Bahia, Pernambuco, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and Suriname .
Morphologically, Nagô represents the Fon and Ewe truncation of Ànàgó, an indigenous sub-ethnic Yorùbá population situated along the southwestern borderlands of modern Nigeria and the Republic of Benin (including the kingdoms of Ipokia, Ifonyin, and coastal settlements near Porto-Novo) . In Fon, the suffix -nu designates people or citizenship, yielding Anagonu ("people of Anago") . Because the Kingdom of Dahomey frequently waged war against and enslaved these adjacent Ànàgó communities during the eighteenth century, Dahomean slave merchants at Ouidah applied Anagonu or Nagô indiscriminately to all Yorùbá speakers delivered to European ships .
In Brazilian Portuguese, Nagô expanded from a slave trade label into an ethno-religious descriptor . Over the course of the nineteenth century, urban Africans in Salvador da Bahia embraced Nagô as an overarching identity opposed to Central African (Angola, Congo) and Gold Coast/Gbe (Mina, Jeje) groups . Sub-classifications persisted within ritual networks:
The ethnonym Aku (or Aku Mohammedans) arose in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone and spread across British colonial administrative contexts in West Africa and the Caribbean .
The etymology is purely locutionary, derived from the ubiquitous Yorùbá honorific prefix used in daily greetings: ẹ kú . The morpheme ẹ functions as the second-person plural or honorific singular pronoun, while kú conveys a blessing of endurance, greetings, or appreciation . Standard Yorùbá greetings include:
Non-Yorùbá populations in the colony of Freetown, noticing the constant repetition of this greeting formula among recaptives landed from intercepted slave ships, labeled the entire group Aku . In his 1854 comparative linguistic work Polyglotta Africana, the missionary Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle recorded twelve distinct dialects of the "Aku" language, demonstrating that while the population recognized their shared speech, they maintained sharp awareness of their original sub-national origins .
The term Yorùbá (originally Yariba or Yárùbá) originated as a northern exonym . While internal oral traditions often favored regional designations or mythical parentage as Ọmọ Odùduwà ("Children of Odùduwà"), the Songhai and Hausa scholars used Yariba strictly to describe the people of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire . The earliest extant written record appears in Ahmad Bābā’s 1615 legal treatise Mi‘rāj al-Ṣu‘ūd, which evaluated whether non-Muslim populations of Yariba were licit for enslavement .
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| THE STANDARDIZATION OF "YORÙBÁ" |
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| 1615: Ahmad Bābā al-Timbuktī uses "Yariba" for Ọ̀yọ́ in Arabic text |
| 1812: Sultan Muhammad Bello uses "Yarba" in Infaq al-Maysūr |
| 1826: Hugh Clapperton records "Yarriba" during northern explorations |
| 1843: Samuel Ajayi Crowther publishes *Grammar of the Yoruba Language* |
| 1852: Crowther publishes *Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language* |
| 1897: Samuel Johnson finishes *The History of the Yorubas* |
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The adoption of Yoruba as an umbrella ethnonym for all related dialects was spearheaded by Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the Church Missionary Society from the 1840s onward . Crowther recognized that the dialect of Ọ̀yọ́ possessed the demographic and political prominence necessary to serve as a written standard for evangelization, education, and printing .
The consolidation of disparate West African sub-groups into cohesive Atlantic "nations" was facilitated by specific civic, religious, and legal institutions .
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| INSTITUTIONAL CRUCIBLES OF RE-ETHNOGENESIS |
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| CUBA: Cabildos de Nación |
| - Ethnic mutual aid associations organized under patron saints |
| - Functioned as legal entities, burial societies, and dance clubs |
| - Preserved royal lineages, sacred drumming, and Lucumí liturgical corpora |
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| BRAZIL: Irmandades & Candomblé Terreiros |
| - Lay Catholic brotherhoods (e.g., Irmandade de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte) |
| - Autonomic Candomblé houses (Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká / Casa Branca) |
| - Reconstructed Nagô cosmology as civic counter-hegemony in Bahia |
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| SIERRA LEONE: Liberated African Settlements & Aku Communities |
| - Freetown communal organization and mutual benefit societies |
| - Formation of Christian Saro elite and Muslim Aku identity |
| - Systematic documentation and grammatical standard-setting (CMS / Koelle) |
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| TRINIDAD & CARIBBEAN: Rada/Orisha Compounds |
| - Post-emancipation indentured African settlements |
| - Inter-island networking of Shango shrines and ancestral songs |
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In Spanish colonial Cuba, the state and Catholic Church permitted and regulated mutual aid societies known as cabildos de nación . Structured nominally under the patronage of a Catholic saint, these associations allowed enslaved and free Africans of the same "nation" to gather on Sundays and feast days .
Within the cabildos, members elected kings (reyes) and queens (reinas), pooled financial resources to purchase the freedom of enslaved brethren (coartación), organized elaborate funeral rites, and celebrated public festivals with traditional sacred drums . The Cabildo Lucumí served as an arena where captives from Ọ̀yọ́, Ìjẹ̀ṣà, Ẹ̀gbá, and Kétu negotiated linguistic differences, unified their distinct local oríṣà lineages into a single liturgical system (Regla de Ocha), and presented a united political front to Spanish colonial authorities .
In Portuguese Brazil, particularly in Salvador da Bahia, lay Catholic brotherhoods (irmandades) and underground religious compounds (terreiros) fulfilled analogous roles . While brotherhoods such as the Irmandade de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte in Cachoeira organized Nagô women around Catholic devotions and collective mutual aid, the domestic sanctuaries of Candomblé served as sovereign spaces of re-ethnogenesis .
The establishment of early nineteenth-century Bahian terreiros, such as Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká (Casa Branca do Engenho Velho), institutionalized the dominance of the Nagô-Ketu liturgical nation . Priests and priestesses synthesized the divergent local pantheons of Yorùbáland into a unified hierarchy governed by sixteen central orixás, embedding Yorùbá cosmology within Brazilian urban geography .
Following the 1807 British Abolition Act, the colony of Sierra Leone became an involuntary destination for over 90,000 liberated Africans . In Freetown and surrounding villages such as Regent, Hastings, and Waterloo, Yorùbá recaptives constituted the single largest demographic contingent, comprising roughly one-third of the total population .
Faced with colonial administration and multi-ethnic competition, the Aku established extensive mutual aid networks, credit societies (esusu), and municipal self-governance structures under elected headmen . The Aku community split into two interconnected wings: a Christianized, English-educated bourgeois class (Saros) that staffed missionary and administrative posts across West Africa, and a distinct Muslim community (Aku Mohammedans or Aku Marabouts) in the Fourah Bay and Aberdeen districts that maintained strict Islamic dress, jurisprudence, and Yorùbá linguistic vitality .
Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, colonial planters imported over 8,000 liberated Africans as indentured laborers to Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana between 1841 and 1867 . A high proportion were Yorùbá speakers landed directly from intercepted vessels .
In rural settlements such as Belmont and Diego Martin in Trinidad, these workers established autonomous communal hamlets known as "Yarraba" settlements . As documented by linguist Maureen Warner-Lewis, these communities retained fluent conversational Yorùbá into the mid-twentieth century, preserving oral literature, oríkì poetry, and the liturgical framework of the Trinidad Orisha religion .
Diasporic oral performance preserves foundational texts that document this historical dispersion, the trauma of Atlantic dislocation, and the enduring memory of ancestral identity . The following oral poem was recorded among elder Yorùbá descendants in the Caribbean by Maureen Warner-Lewis, capturing the collective memory of maritime transport and resettlement .
Layer 1: Original Yoruba Transcription
Ayé ń lọ, ayé ń bọ̀,
Àwọn ọmọ Yorùbá wà lórí erékùṣù.
A dé orí àpáta,
A ò gbàgbé ilé Baba wa.
Àwọn Òrìṣà ń gbè wá lókè òkun,
Ẹ kú àbọ̀, ẹ kú àtìpó.
Layer 2: Word-by-Word Gloss
Ayé (world/life) ń lọ (is going), ayé (world/life) ń bọ̀ (is coming),
Àwọn ọmọ (the children of) Yorùbá (Yoruba) wà (exist/are) lórí (on top of) erékùṣù (island).
A (we) dé (arrive/reach) orí (head/top of) àpáta (rock),
A (we) ò (not) gbàgbé (forget) ilé (house/home of) Baba (father) wa (our).
Àwọn Òrìṣà (the deities) ń gbè (are supporting/delivering) wá (us) lókè (across/over) òkun (ocean),
Ẹ kú (honorific greeting for) àbọ̀ (arrival), ẹ kú (honorific greeting for) àtìpó (sojourning/exile).
Layer 3: Idiomatic English Translation
The world turns and cycles continue,
The children of Yorùbá now dwell upon an island.
We have landed upon a barren rock,
Yet we do not forget our ancestral homeland.
The Òrìṣà sustain us across the great ocean,
We greet each other in arrival, we honor each other in exile.
(Translation: corpus standard based on Maureen Warner-Lewis, Trinidad Yoruba, 1996 [S20])
The mechanisms governing diaspora ethnogenesis and the survival of Yorùbá identity have generated intense debate within Atlantic historiography and anthropology .
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| MAJOR HISTORIOGRAPHICAL INTERPRETATIONS |
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| CREOLIZATION MODEL (Mintz & Price) |
| - Radical rupture of Middle Passage destroyed institutional social structures|
| - New World cultures built through rapid syncretic improvisation |
| - African ethnicities viewed as loose aggregate categories |
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| AFRICAN CONTINUITY & ETHNOGENESIS (Thornton, Lovejoy, Sweet) |
| - Specific, clustered provenance patterns preserved intact ethnic memory |
| - Late surge of 19th-century Yorùbá captives created demographic dominance |
| - Ethnonyms represent conscious reconstruction of African institutions |
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| TRANSNATIONAL DIALOGUE MODEL (Matory, Yai) |
| - Yorùbá identity co-produced simultaneously in West Africa and Americas |
| - Bilateral travel of merchants, priests, and returnees (Saros and Agudas) |
| - Diaspora institutions directly influenced homeland nationalist movements |
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| DISCURSIVE CRITIQUE (Palmié) |
| - Cautions against projecting modern ethnic categories retroactively |
| - Emphasizes that "nations" were colonial legal administrative devices |
| - Identity formed through dialectical tension with state surveillance |
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The foundational debate in African diaspora studies centers on the degree of cultural continuity versus rapid New World innovation .
Sidney Mintz and Richard Price formulated the "rapid creolization" model, arguing that the middle passage stripped enslaved Africans of institutionalized social structures . Under this framework, captives arrived as an atomized aggregate who could share only deep-level cognitive orientations rather than specific ethnic institutions . Mintz and Price argued that diaspora "nations" like the Lucumí or Nagô were novel Caribbean and South American creations built out of necessity under colonial domination, with little direct continuity from pre-existing African political structures .
Conversely, historians John Thornton and Paul Lovejoy demonstrate that demographic clustering, trade patterns, and political crises in specific African regions created concentrated cohorts of captives who shared mutually intelligible dialects, religious liturgies, and military skills . Lovejoy emphasizes that the collapse of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire during the early nineteenth century flooded the Atlantic trade with hundreds of thousands of Yorùbá speakers over a concentrated forty-year span . This demographic influx allowed direct institutional transfers to take place, enabling the reconstitution of sophisticated religious networks and mutual aid cabildos that preserved continental identities .
Anthropologist J. Lorand Matory challenges unidirectional models of cultural transmission by proposing a transnational dialogic framework . Matory argues that modern Yorùbá identity was not simply generated in West Africa and transported to the Americas, nor was it invented independently in the diaspora . Instead, it was co-produced through a sustained nineteenth-century Atlantic dialogue involving:
In Matory's analysis, the prestigious status of Nagô culture in Bahia directly influenced the cultural nationalist pride of elite returnees in Lagos, which in turn accelerated the adoption of pan-Yorùbá identity in Nigeria . Olabiyi Yai reinforces this paradigm, urging scholars to view the Black Atlantic as a continuous communicative circuit rather than a binary divide between homeland and diaspora .
Stephan Palmié offers a critical intervention against essentialist readings of African diaspora identities . Palmié demonstrates that ethnonymic labels such as Lucumí were primarily colonial technologies of categorization deployed by Spanish authorities to manage, segregate, and surveil captive urban populations .
According to Palmié, scholars must avoid confusing colonial administrative classifications with innate African ethnic consciousness . The cabildos de nación were spaces where Africans actively negotiated Spanish legal mandates, internal status hierarchies, and creole generational tensions, producing a synthetic "Lucumí" identity that cannot be treated as an unmodified relic of pre-colonial West Africa .
In the twenty-first century, historical diaspora ethnonyms maintain vibrant civic, liturgical, and academic significance across the globe .
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CONTEMPORARY SURVIVALS OF DIASPORA YORÙBÁ DESIGNATIONS
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[ CUBA & GLOBAL SANTERÍA ]
- Liturgical language designated as "Habla Lucumí"
- Initiates identify religiously as "Lucumí" or "Olorisha"
- Global spread via Cuban diaspora to Miami, New York, Madrid, San Juan
[ BRAZILIAN CANDOMBLÉ ]
- Dominant ritual federation known as "Candomblé Nagô-Ketu"
- Sacred vocabulary termed "Língua Nagô" or "Iorubá Litúrgico"
- Bahia recognized as a global center of Afro-Atlantic religious prestige
[ SIERRA LEONE & THE SARO DIASPORA ]
- "Aku" identity preserved as a distinct Muslim community in Freetown
- "Krio" ethnic identity incorporates deep Yorùbá linguistic substrata
- Saro cultural traditions maintained across West African coastal cities
[ TRINIDAD & EASTERN CARIBBEAN ]
- "Orisha Shango" tradition preserves Yorùbá songbooks and drum liturgies
- Cultural revival movements asserting links to continental Yorùbá heritage
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In Cuba and its worldwide diaspora (concentrated in Miami, New York, Madrid, and San Juan), Lucumí designates both the liturgical language of Regla de Ocha and the collective community of initiated priests (santeros or olorichas) . Dictionaries of liturgical Lucumí continue to be compiled, maintaining thousands of Yorùbá nouns, verb phrases, and praise verses used in divination and ritual sacrifice .
In Brazil, the prestige of the Nagô-Ketu tradition remains central to Afro-Brazilian identity politics and cultural tourism in Bahia . Major historical terreiros such as Casa Branca, Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, and Gantois are designated as National Historic and Artistic Heritage sites, celebrated as epicenters of Nagô civilizational memory .
In Sierra Leone, the Aku remain an officially recognized ethnoreligious minority with historic leadership in commerce, Islamic scholarship, and civic administration . Meanwhile, the wider Krio language of Sierra Leone retains extensive Yorùbá loanwords, idiomatic calques, and proverbs originating from nineteenth-century recaptive settlement .
Through this continuous historical circulation, diaspora ethnonyms that began as external slave-trade markers have transformed into global badges of cultural resilience and ancestral connection .
The history and structure of Candomblé in Brazil, why the nations matter, the great Bahian terreiros and the women who led them, the regional variants, Umbanda as a distinct formation, and the current situation under evangelical pressure.
The CMS mission and Crowther, how and why Yoruba people converted to two world religions, the British annexation, indirect rule and what it did to kingship, and the making of "Yoruba" as one identity.
An examination of the historical formation, institutional structures, ritual practices, demographic realities, and scholarly debates defining Yoruba cultural and religious life in contemporary Brazil.
An analysis of Candomblé Ketu in Bahia, covering its nineteenth-century origins, institutional kinship structures, ritual practices, divergence from West African prototypes, and historiographical debates.
An examination of the Yoruba-derived Nago rite in Haitian Vodou, detailing the consolidation of the Ogou pantheon, liturgical structures, scholarly debates, and divergences from West African practice.
An analysis of the historical formation, ritual structure, demographic landscape, and theoretical debates surrounding Lucumí religion and its divergence from West African Yorùbá practice in contemporary Cuba.