{"title":"J Lorand Matory","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"fetish-revisited-book-j-lorand-matory-9781478001058","title":"The Fetish Revisited","description":"Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49732044357905,"sku":"NGR9781478001058","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51028626833681,"sku":"NIN9781478001058","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52698823491857,"sku":"CIN1478001054G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1478001054.jpg?v=1752314969"},{"product_id":"sex-and-the-empire-that-is-no-more-book-j-lorand-matory-9780816622276","title":"Sex and the Empire That is No More","description":"Amid the diverse ideological currents of colonial and post-colonial Nigerian national society, few personae seem more ironic than the priestesses and transvestite priests of the Oyo-Yoruba gods. This detailed ethnography penetrates the social order and internal logic behind these figures and their roles. Combining historical investigation with observations of contemporary religion and politics, this book brings to light changing conceptions of gender and agency among the Oyo Yoruba, and reveals their significance in the shifting constitution of local political hierarchies. In so doing, the book gives a view of Oyo Yoruba culture that challenges conventional definitions of gender, accepted ideas about the expressive nature of metaphor, assumptions about ideological consensus in African cultures, and de-historicized readings of both Yoruba ritual in particular and African ritual in general. This work is a theoretical contribution to the comparative literature on metaphor, transvestism, spirit possession, religions of the oppressed and marginalized, minority religions in the Islamic world, and the politics of writing ethnography.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49909474394385,"sku":"CIN0816622272G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816622272.jpg?v=1751139037"},{"product_id":"black-atlantic-religion-book-j-lorand-matory-9780691059440","title":"Black Atlantic Religion","description":"Illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomble religion. This book contests the conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50357313208593,"sku":"CIN0691059446A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51005597352209,"sku":"NIN9780691059440","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51839114281233,"sku":"CIN0691059446G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691059446.jpg?v=1750977082"},{"product_id":"sex-and-the-empire-that-is-no-more-book-j-lorand-matory-9781571813077","title":"Sex and the Empire That Is No More","description":"J. Lorand Matory researches the trans-Atlantic comings and goings of Yoruba religion, as well as ethnic diversity in Black North America. With the support of the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, he has conducted extensive field research in Brazil, Nigeria, and the United States. Dr. Matory is also the author of Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton University Press). He is currently researching a book on the history and experience of Nigerians, Trinidadians, Ethiopians, black Indians, Louisiana Creoles and other ethnic groups that make up black North American society. It focuses on the creative coexistence of these groups at the United States' leading \"historically Black university\"—Howard University","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50382553415953,"sku":"CIN1571813071VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037336437009,"sku":"NIN9781571813077","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1571813071.jpg?v=1751276478"},{"product_id":"stigma-and-culture-lastplace-anxiety-in-black-america-book-j-lorand-matory-9780226297736","title":"Stigma and Culture  LastPlace Anxiety in Black America","description":"In Stigma and Culture, J. Lorand Matory provocatively shows how ethnic identification in the United States-and around the globe-is a competitive and hierarchical process in which populations, especially of historically stigmatized races, seek status and income by dishonoring other stigmatized populations. And there is no better place to see this than among the African American elite in academia, where he explores the emergent ethnic identities of African and Caribbean immigrants and transmigrants, Gullah\/Geechees, Louisiana Creoles, and even Native Americans of partly African ancestry. Matory describes the competitive process that hierarchically structures their self-definition as ethnic groups and the similar process by which middle-class African Americans seek distinction from their impoverished compatriots. Drawing on research at universities such as Howard, Harvard, and Duke and among their alumni networks, he details how university life-while facilitating individual upward mobility, touting human equality, and regaling cultural diversity-also perpetuates the cultural standards that historically justified the dominance of some groups over others. Combining his ethnographic findings with classic theoretical insights from Frantz Fanon, Fredrik Barth, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and others-alongside stories from his own life in academia-Matory sketches the university as an institution that, particularly through the anthropological vocabulary of culture, encourages the stigmatized to stratify their own.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52693240709393,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52693240906001,"sku":"GOR008551618","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780226297736.jpg?v=1762348718"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-j-lorand-matory.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}