The Skeleton Key

Dreams That Matter

For those of you interested, here’s a blog post by Amira Mittermeier on dreams and Egypt’s current political situation after the anti-Mubarak revolution and the anti-Muslim Brotherhood military coup: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2014/06/25/the-politics-of-divine-intervention/

Mama Lola

The 3 Ezili Sisters

Ezili Danto

  

Ezili Freda

  

Lasyrenn

  

The Serpent and the Rainbow

Wade Davis’ book The Serpent and the Rainbow was made into a film, directed by Wes Craven, best known for directing slasher/horror films, including The Nightmare on Elm Street series. Here is the trailer for the film. It’s interesting to think about the process of translation at work here, i.e. how Haitian practices are first “translated” by anthropologist Davis in his book, which is then “translated” into a Hollywood film. What gets lost in translation?

Chakrabarty/Trouillot

Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Part II/The Crucible

Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism — Taussig

Image of Tio and miners

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Diderot’s “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage”

Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1729-1811) was the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe. He set sail from Nantes in 1766, rounded the Straits of Magellan, and crossed the Pacific via Tahiti. He sailed on to Samoa and the New Hebrides, then headed north through the Coral Sea and on to New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Moluccas, and Batavia before heading home and reaching Saint-Malo, France, in March 1769.

He published his Voyage autour du monde (Voyage around the world) in 1771.

Diderot published his “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage” in 1772. Here is a recent copy of the French publication of that book — note the cover, which uses an image of Paul Gauguin’s (“Two Tahitians,” 1899). Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist painter who went to Tahiti in 1891 to escape Europe and “everything that is artificial and conventional.”

           

Here are some other paintings of Tahiti by Gauguin.