Diasporic Cultures in the Americas

From 1492 on radical changes took place in the Americas as the European conquest and the ensuing colonial period brought ideas of race into the classification and treatment of all peoples. Those of European descent occupied the top of a pyramid that placed people classed as Indians and Africans as slaves and lesser beings on the bottom. In the late nineteenth century concepts of culture either fused with or replaced the idea of "race" but preserved the same system of ranking and classification that worked to the advantage of the few and the detriment of many others.

Culture

Four approaches to culture are in vogue in the twenty-first century: the elitist, the hegemonic-diffusionist, the historical, and the paradigmatic. The first affirms that only some people in a given society are cultured (as in high culture), while others are not. Those others exist in "subculture," something below that of the elite. From this perspective, cultured people are formally educated, speak language correctly, and worship in a well-known religious manner. By contrast, other people, especially Native Americans and African Americans, are seen as illiterate or unable to learn correctly, speak dialects, and practice "cults."

The second concept is associated fundamentally with the anthropology of the early twentieth century. In this hegemonic-diffusionist approach, associated especially with Melville J. Herskovits and later with Robert Farris Thompson, cultural elements are diffused from specific distant origins. In such diffusion the pristine and authentic becomes retained as corrupt retentions and reinterpretations. To understand the ways of life of an African-American people, one searches the "high" donor cultures of Africa (as though they have remained essentially unchanged for centuries) for elements "found" in the Americas. The result is a view of all African diasporic cultural systems in the Americas as syncretic hodgepodges. By this scheme, the self-liberated Saramaka people of Suriname and French Guiana (Guyane), and more recently Brazil, rank "high" in the "scale of intensity of Africanisms," but the self-liberated Afro-Lowlanders of Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama are said to "lack" Africanisms and by implication to be "without authentic culture" and "acculturated." African Americans of the United States were ranked by Herskovits at the very bottom of the scale of intensity, thereby denying their past, present, and future contributions to the cultural systems of the Americas.

The third concept, historical, is well stated by Daniel Boorstin: "'Culture' (from the Latin cultus for 'worship') originally meant reverential homage. Then it came to describe the practices of cultivating the soil, and later it was extended to the cultivating and refinement of mind and manners. Finally, by the nineteenth century 'culture' had become a name for the intellectual and aesthetic side of civilization" (1983, p. 647). In 1977, at the First Congress of Black Culture in the Americas, held in Cali, Colombia, black people confronted self-styled intelligentsia and insisted on the Spanish definite article "la " before the Spanish word cultura and initiated a foundational concept of la cultural negra, black cultural systems that are sophisticated, existential, experiential, and adaptable. They constitute entwined processes of tradition, history, and modernity moving toward higher and higher levels of black civilization in the Americas. The idea here of emergent culture is just as important as history, tradition, and legacy, and it is far from any concept of bits and pieces of Africa retained, and much culture lost.

A critically important dynamic in this perspective is that of cultural continuity. Culture is always changing. People make it as it is and interpret their own lifeways dynamically. People are not at the periphery of culture but at its center, its generative heart. There are also, as Amiri Baraka makes clear in his discussion of "the changing same," remarkable continuities in cultural systems as well. Examples include some of the art forms of the Saramaka people and the marimba music of the Afro-Ecuadorian and Colombian lowlanders. This historical perspective differs significantly from the imperialist-diffusionist, however, because it draws on paradigmatic approaches to decide what to study.

Stated briefly, the paradigmatic perspective stresses an understanding of what real people living their own way of life take to be significant. One studies how culture unfolds in real life in real places and works outward from people-in-action to broader and more distant systems to make comparisons, without evaluating the "degree" or "intensity" or "level" of culture. Taken together, historical and the paradigmatic approaches establish a contemporary critical perspective in the social sciences and the humanities. They are used in the remainder of this article.

History

African-American systems of life and thought are profoundly cultural. They are clearly African descended and African diasporic. Any study of Afro-American cultural systems must comprehend commonalities of experience and especially of local interpretations of experiences at specific places in given periods in time, and also some degree of cultural construction of a meaningful historical past that may be obliterated, or highly distorted, by written literature. In Silencing the Past (1995), Michel-Rolph Trouillot discusses two dimensions of history that must always be considered: that which happened (an event such as a forced passage from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to be sold in a slave market in the Americas, or the myriad revolts, rebellions, and movements of self-liberation of Africans in the Americas) and the stories told about the event. When stories are not told, or are not remembered, or are hidden, history is silenced. The stories themselves must be opened up and studied to be reasonably sure that they reflect events critical to the real cultural histories of people, not bent and distorted to the canons of a rigid educational system.

For example, in 1991 a dramatic discovery was made in Lower Manhattan in New York City: A graveyard was unearthed by construction workers. It was found to contain the bodies of African people—men, women, and children—buried there from the 1600s through 1794. Although clear evidence of the importance of enslaved Africans in the development of New York City existed, it was ignored and silenced by historians and archivists. Eventually, African-American archaeologist Michael L. Blakey received permission and funds to excavate the site and demonstrated that the presence of Africans constituted "the earliest and largest African cemetery found in North America." Africans were fundamental to the building of New York City, but their lives and deaths were not written into history, even though their presence was quite clear in the archives of New York City. An estimated twenty thousand Africans were buried near what is now Wall Street. They were brought to New Amsterdam in 1626, so were part of the founding of New York. Indeed, "Ian Rodriguez, a free black trader, had set up the first long-term trading post in Manhattan prior to the establishment of the Dutch colony, making a person of African descent Manhattan's first foreign (i.e. nonindigenous) businessman" (Blakey, 2001, pp. 222–223, emphasis added).

Stories such as this one, well documented in the official city archives, go far to contradict U.S. educational stereotypes, such as the one that says slavery began in the South and existed until Northerners freed black people there. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which obligated Northerners to return escaped Southern slaves to their owners, revolts and movements of self-liberation increased throughout the northern United States, where slavery also existed.

Another story—that an enduring ideology of a history of slavery and a cultural legacy of deprivation per force predates a sense of freedom for black people in the Americas—must also be contested. In 1712 in New York City, for example, enslaved African-American people rose up and killed at least nine whites (Bennett, 1964, p. 101). In the Americas, wherever slavery existed self-liberation also occurred (Laguerre, 1989; Taussig, 1980; Whitten and Torres, 1998). The true stories reveal the early presence of black people where national educational literature says they never were, and that freedom of African and African-European peoples in the Americas may precede, or coexist with, systems of enslavement.

Space, Time, and African-Descended People

We reflect now on the breadth of the African diaspora and important dimensions of the history of African-descended people. We must first set aside notions of cultural or racial purity of the few and contamination of the rest. The African diaspora does not begin in the Americas, and certainly not in North America, as is so often supposed, nor is Africa divorced from Europe and Christianity prior to the horrors of the European-sponsored Middle Passages that brought Africans to the Americas against their will to build the very systems that may now deny their existence.

In 711, as the Muslim conquest of Iberia began, black soldiers were present in the Islamic forces. Further north, according to the historian Folarin Shyllon, Irish records suggest that during a Viking raid on Spain and North Africa in 862, a number of Africans were captured and some carried to Dublin, where they were known as "blue men." In the tenth century, black Africans who fought alongside North African Moors made up a significant part of the conquering army of the Iberian Peninsula.

By the eleventh and twelfth centuries (and on into the sixteenth) images of black Africans were present in European monumental art and architecture, Christian iconography, and heraldic shields throughout western Europe. Between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, representations of Africans appear in religious works involving the land of Ethiopia, the coming of the Magi to confirm the birth of Christ, the realm and person of Prester John in India or Africa, the queen of Sheeba, St. Maurice, and the meaning of Old Testament legends and prophecies about the cosmic relationship between darkness and light.

In the mid-fifteenth century, sailors under the command of the Portuguese entrepreneur Prince Henry the Navigator began purchasing diverse people at ports in West Africa and shipping them to Lisbon for sale throughout Europe. As Prince Henry's sailors color-coded their chattel, Africans previously known on the Iberian Peninsula by multiple cultural and ethnic designations such as Biafara and Mandingo, in all their diversity, were designated by a single color term, negro (black). Such pejorative and dangerous labeling of diverse African peoples ironically coincided with large-scale conversions of Africans to Christianity in the region of the Congo and by the emergence of "racially mixed" people in the coastal towns of West Africa.

The multiple cultural heritages and histories of Afro-Americanity stem from African and European sources, including, after 1492, indigenous contributions (e.g., Whitten and Corr, 2001). Cultural systems were suppressed tremendously by slavery but rejuvenated, recreated, and revitalized by revolt and revolution, wherein Maroons (from the American Spanish–Arawak word cimarrón ) came to stand for the core values of freedom itself, a concept built into African-American cultural systems across the entire hemisphere. Most of the prominent black areas of eastern and northern South America, Central America, and the Caribbean stem directly from creative processes of rebellion, self-liberation, and sovereign territoriality that were initiated and sustained by African-American people.

They include various regions of Brazil; the yungas (deep Andean valleys) of Bolivia; the northwest coast of Ecuador; the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and Cauca Valley of Colombia; the Venezuelan llanos (plains) and northern coastal crescent; the interior of the Guianas, including Amazonas; the Darién, coasts, and interior of Panama; the Mosquitia of Honduras and Nicaragua; the west coast of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua; the mountains of Haiti and the Dominican Republic; the Jamaican Blue Mountains and Red Hills regions; the Cuban eastern highland region; and the list goes on. When combined with similar lists from Canada and the United States and fused with the reality of extensive travel of African Americans across the entire continent, the image of profound continuities and innumerable radical changes is sustained and fortified.

Maroon People in History and Contemporary Culture

To begin to understand African-American cultures in the Americas from intertwined paradigmatic and historical perspectives, we turn now to two dynamic, contemporary peoples, each with deep roots in multiple pasts: the Afro-Lowlanders of Esmeraldas Province, northwest Ecuador, and the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname, French Guiana, and more recently Brazil. The latter were regarded by Melville J. Herskovits (1941) as the most African in the Americas, while the former long languished in historical and cultural scholarship by an apparent "lack" of African cultural features (e.g., Whitten, 1974/1996; Rahier, 1999). Both cultural systems are highly dynamic and have made and are making their presence felt in their respective nations. One does not find them represented in textbooks on the history of the Americas, as taught in high schools, nor are they represented as exemplars of cultural dynamics in the innumerable introductory texts to anthropology, ethnology, or history used in colleges and universities. The formal education system of the United States silences their past and their present.

afro-lowlanders of northwest ecuador

Esmeraldas, so named for its three-tiered canopied rain forest in northwest Ecuador, became home to self-liberated African and Afro-Hispanic people in the mid-1500s (Lane, 2002). Different groupings seized their freedom in the north and south of the province after fortuitous shipwrecks, inter-married with indigenous people, became the dominant force in the Emerald Province, and resisted all attempts by the Spanish military and the Roman Catholic Church to subdue and subvert them. In 1599 direct descendants of one grouping of the original Maroons, fifty-six-year old don Francisco de Arobe and his two sons, don Pedro and don Domingo (ages twenty-two and eighteen, respectively), journeyed to Quito to pay homage to the Spanish court (Lane, 2002). Their portrait was painted by an indigenous artist, Andrés Sánchez Gallque, in a magnificent work entitled Esmeraldas Ambassadors. Today, a restored version of this painting hangs in the Museo de Américas, Madrid. Kris Lane captures the elegance of these Esmeraldan lords in this manner:

The men's noses, ears, and lips are studded with strange crescents and balls and tubes of gold. Beneath starched white ruffs flow finely bordered ponchos and capes of brocaded silk, their drape lovingly rendered by the painter: here a foil-like blue, there bronze, now bright orange against velvety black. Only don Francisco's poncho appears to be woolen, perhaps fashioned from imported Spanish broadcloth. The three are further adorned with matching shell necklaces, and don Francisco holds a supple, black felt hat with a copper trim. Don Domingo holds a more pedestrian sombrero…and all three appear to be wearing fitted doublets of contemporary, late-Renaissance European style. These are all but hidden, nestled beneath flowing Chinese over-garments, which are, in turn, cut in a distinctly Andean fashion. (2002, p. xi)

The African-American ambassadors from the Emerald land constituted in 1599 a global presence in a parochial Spanish court of the Americas. Over 460 years have passed since the first moments of cimarronaje (marronage) in Esmeraldas, and over four centuries have gone by since the aesthetic moment of magnificent representation of three of the elite of the earliest Afro-indigenous American republic. Through three hundred years of colonial rule that featured European-dominated gold lust, slavery of indigenous and African peoples, and a shift from a Renaissance to a baroque ethos, Afro-Hispanic Esmeraldanians endured (Lane, 2002). They fought in the wars of liberation and later in the Ecuadorian Liberal Revolution. In 2005 they regard themselves proudly as the true Christians of Ecuador. They manifest some of the most Spanish and the most African music and storytelling in the Americas, and they are among the poorest people in modern twenty-first-century Latin America.

In the twenty-first century the cultural system of these Afro-Ecuadorians is rich in its diversity and deep in its African, European, and indigenous legacies. During the conquest and colonial era the Spanish divided up the people of their vast empire into two republics: that of the Spanish, and that of the indios. No place was ever created under colonial rule for black people, los negros, nor was a construction of blackness, lo negro, recognized. Afro-Latin American people created their own niches, environmental adaptations, ideologies, and cosmologies. Among the core features of blackness in Ecuador, as in Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, is the enduring emphasis on freedom. One is either free or not. There is no middle ground (Price, 1996; Whitten and Torres, 1998).

In 1992 blackness in Ecuador clearly emerged as a national quality spanning coastal, Andean, and Amazonian regions. Its ethnic nationalist expression was called négritud, coined initially (as négritude ) by the Martinique writer Aimé Césaire. As the movement surged under such cultural rubrics as "the advancement of the black community," and identification of the movement among white and black intellectuals was expressed by the representations afro-ecuatorianos(as) (Afro-Ecuadorians) and afro-latinoamericanos(as) (Afro-Latin Americans), varied associations between those so identifying and the surging indigenous movement came into being. As the concept of Afro-indigenous peoples also became salient in national discourse, the concept of zambaje entered the Ecuadorian literary lexicon. Zambo(a), long a term of identity and reference in Esmeraldas and elsewhere in the Americas, signifies freedom and dignity; it refers to the genetic blending of African peoples with indigenous peoples, the epitome of such blending historically embodied in the painting of the three cosmopolitan ambassadors and lords from Esmeraldas, described above. Significantly, perhaps, in the restoration of the Museo de Américas' painting, the features of zambaje described by Lane were transformed to very black, denying thereby the representation and significance of mixed heritage of the Afro-indigenous cimarrones. Once again, history was silenced, this time through powerful museum imagery.

Christianity pervades the cosmology of the Afro-Esmeraldians. Some aficionados of Afro-Americana and other scholars and activists are bothered by the self-assertion of black people in this area that they are true Catholic Christians, people who resisted subversion by the imperialism of the Roman Catholic Church and resisted the ideology and praxis of inquisitorial curates. Esmeraldians nonetheless cooperate with priests, nuns, and brotherhoods who respect their beliefs and practices. Respect is a key to understanding the resilience of black people of Esmeraldas, as elsewhere. Those who respect people and their customs may move freely in and out of the Afro-Esmeraldanian world, but those who seek to deprecate or humiliate their persons and their lifeways may find them uncooperative and unresponsive. Respect and freedom are clearly tied together in the twenty-first century as in the sixteenth through the twentieth, and before.

Salient cultural features of the black lowlanders that go back into deep antiquity and stretch into the present with the promise of a dynamic future include the marimba dance, featuring the most African musical and rhythmic styles in the Americas; the songs of praise (arrullos ) to saints, with origins in both Africa and Iberia; and wakes and second wakes for adults with strong roots in Moorish Iberia and North Africa.

La tropa

This cultural performance—called the troop (or troops)—is the most dramatic ceremony held in the province of Esmeraldas and in the neighboring departments of Nariño, Cauca, and Valle, Colombia. It is a forceful enactment of the capture, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that some take to be an extended dramatic metaphor for the formation of an Afro-indigenous Maroon settlement and the resurrection of Christ within it. La tropa is enacted during the week leading up to Easter Day and ends with a secular parade, sometimes called Belén, on Easter Sunday. La tropa brings outmigrants back home from urban areas to small villages such as Güimbí on the Güimbí River and Selva Alegre (Rahier, 1999) on the Santiago River. Community ties are very important to many outmigrants, who spend considerable sums of money and take up to two or three weeks from their urban lives to make their way up the coast of Ecuador, and thence upriver by launch or canoe, to attend this important and dramatic communal event.

The la tropa ceremony begins in the fringes of the community as groups of soldiers with shotguns, machetes, spears, and knives run off in directed squads to search for the lost or hidden Christ, but they find only the biblical thief, Barabbas. They then march in step on the church and enter it, march within it, and eventually enact the killing of Christ, his removal from the cross, the reign of the devil on Saturday, the bringing of the forest into the Catholic Church within the black and free village, and perhaps the liberation of the people of the forest and of the true free church from oppression of crown, church, and later state (Rahier, 1999). During this ceremony women sing sacred hymns of praise to Christ and to the assembled "sinners." The tropa formation itself, composed strictly of adult men, marches in a stylized manner to a drumbeat not used in any other ritual. The stylized manner of marching and walking to and from the church and within the church has been recorded on film and audiotape since the 1940s.

On Easter Sunday, after the enactment of Christ's resurrection, women take over the entire ceremony and lead the participants to and fro through main streets, back streets, and house yards to the songs of praise of the arrullos and to national popular music. This street parade, called Belén ("Bethlehem," and also "bedlam"), is led and controlled by women, just as in the hymns and dances to saints and to deceased children. Members of marimba bands participate and are controlled by women, who dance, sing, and shake tube rattles or maracas. With the beginning of the Belén the transformation from sacrality and connectivity with the realm of the divine to secularity and severance from that realm is instantaneous. Life in the realm of the human, which is connected to hell (Quiroga, 2003)—with its myriad of dangers—is fully restored in festivity and joy.

Barrio de los negros Barrio of blacks de calles oscuras of dark streets preñadas de espantos, bursting with spooks que llevan, que asustan, that carry off, that frighten, que paran los pelos that make hairs stand [rise] en noches sin luna on moonless nights Barrio encendido, Inflamed barrio de noche y de día by night and by day infierno moreno, dark hell, envuelto en las llamas enveloped in the flames de son y alegría of rhythm and happiness. (Preciado Bedoya, 1961/1983, pp. 121–122)

maroons of the guianas

Marronage began in a burst of freedom off the coast of Ecuador in the mid-1500s, led by both Africans and ladinos, black people of Afro-Hispanic descent. It was preceded by the first such movements in Hispaniola (contemporary Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1502, which continued. Enslaved Africans fled to the forested mountains in the interior, known as haiti in the Taíno (Arawak) indigenous language, merged with indigenous Taíno people, and began to raid and trade with new slaveholding colonists. Such movements became salient in African-American stories about their cultural origins and vigorously denied by white historians (Price, 1996; Trouillot, 1995).

Self-liberation in the Guianas (Guyana, Suriname, Guyane) took place on highly profitable sugar plantations operated by white European owners and overseers. As Sally Price and Richard Price note, "Between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, the ancestors of the present-day Maroons escaped from the coastal plantations on which they were enslaved, in many cases soon after their arrival from Africa, and fled into the forested interior, where they regrouped into small bands" (1999, p. 15). In Suriname, the Saramaka people tell the stories of First-Time (fesi ten ) to commemorate not only such monumental events but also to evoke the dangers therein. In one case, at the plantation run by a Sephardim Jewish Brazilian named Imanüel Machado, two relatively newly arrived Africans, first Lanu by himself, and then his younger brother Ayako with his sister and sister's baby daughter, fled the local plantation atrocities and escaped into the rain forest hinterland where, after trials and tribulations, they founded the Matjáu clan of the contemporary and historical Saramaka cultural nationality. The soul of Lanu, it is said, returned to Africa, while the souls of his siblings remained in the Americas as founders of the Saramaka people.

It was supposed to be impossible to escape from the plantations, but these Maroons did so because, as a First-Time story goes, Ayako saw that following the brutal killing by a plantation overseer of his sister's son, he would have no kinspeople left when (as seemed to be inevitable) the overseer killed his sister's daughter the next day. Thus, not only was the concept of freedom at any cost established in the cultural system of the Saramaka, but the seeds of African-American structural matriliny were sown there, to mature eventually into an incredibly full social system of matrilineal descent reminiscent of West African systems but forged in the crucible of self-liberation and the often silenced wars of black liberation in the Americas.

Saramaka people and the five other Maroon peoples—Kwinti, Matawai, Ndyuka, Paramaka and Aluku—raided plantations to liberate more of their African congeners and fought a war of one hundred years against the Dutch, which they won. They were then instrumental in establishing the peace of 1762, which lasted until 1986. Richard Price studied the cultural system of First-Time while undertaking long-term ethnography with the people, where he listened with care to Maroon tellers, who located their own ancestry in the tales of significant events. Then, unlike most anthropologists, he worked in Dutch archives (the Algemeen Rijksarchief of The Hague), and there he found references to the very events that the Saramaka preserved orally, ritually, and in many other ingenious cultural ways, in their own historicities. Later, however, when he returned to the archives in Holland, he found that the documents were missing. Again, the Dutch silenced the past that the Saramaka tellers maintained in a reverential manner.

Maroon arts of the Guianas are particularly rich, and reminiscent of Africa in their tales, sense of historicity, kinship system, drumming, and especially the aesthetics of wood carving by men and the quilts and carved gourds made by women. But the timing for direct transmission ("diffusion") from Africa to the Americas is all wrong. The arts of the Suriname Maroons are not to be taken as "retentions" or "survivals" or "relics" of Africa, as followers of the hegemonic-diffusion position would, did, and still hold. They are African-American creations that resemble African forms through a series of cultural and aesthetic templates first forged among different African people and reconstituted from deep aesthetic patterns in the Americas. They share broad African traditions found especially in West and Central Africa (Price and Price, 1999, p. 280), but it was and is their creative use of such complex but recognizable aesthetic templates in the Americas, some influenced by Native American arts and crafts, that forged the African American cultural systems of Suriname, as elsewhere.

In Maroon Arts (1999) Sally Price and Richard Price address this issue, as they have been doing since the 1970s. To understand cultural systems of African Americans we must understand continuity-in-change, what Amiri Baraka (who was once known as Leroi Jones) called "the changing same." By so doing we appreciate culture in its own right, as created by real people in real places, and abandon the archaic search for traces of a lost past and a lost culture. Such a perspective, together with that of the real power of professional silencing of salient voices and suppressing of historical evidence that is disturbing to entrenched educational systems, opens African-American Studies to new vistas of understanding. As Price and Price note:

Where scholars once strained to discern the stylistic essences of particular arts in particular cultures, they are now directing their gaze more frequently toward the doorways where artistic and aesthetic ideas jostle with each other in their passage from one cultural setting to the next. Where the emphasis was once on abstracting back from an overlay of modernity to discover uncorrupted artistic traditions, modernization now lies at the heart of the enterprise, providing a springboard for explorations of cultural creativity and self-affirmation. (1999, p. 6)

Differences and Similarities

This entry makes broad statements, buttressed by long-term serious ethnographic research with two distinct peoples from western and eastern South America (the Afro-Lowlanders of Ecuador and the Saramaka of Suriname). The same sort of description could be written of hundreds of different African-American people in the Americas, who share legacies of enslavement and self-liberation, who speak many languages, and some of whose ritual activities and religious beliefs and practices are fairly well known, if often distorted (Haitian Vodoun, Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería).

With regard to similarities in the two case presentations, the concept and practice of freedom undergirds secular and religious ideology in both systems, as it does in the rest of the Americas. Another foundational concept is that of the viability of soul, not as something detached from the body but as an enduring and empowering concept of expanded brotherhood and sisterhood across innumerable boundaries and barriers. Expression of complex ideas through rhythm and stylized motion together with considerable improvisation in text and performative modes also characterizes both peoples, as in other African-American systems in the Americas.

Reverential homage to ancestors takes a very different, indeed opposite, track in the two dynamic cultural systems, but even here there are similarities. The Saramaka place themselves in huge matrilineal (but not matriarchal) systems with ascendant male authority. But the ancestors can be dangerous, so little by little they are "forgotten" and the torts that may have been made from one clan or lineage member to another in recent and past times are somewhat diffused of an awful power of spiritual revenge. In the Pacific Lowlands of Ecuador, there are no unilineages, and a complex network system of kinship exists, also reminiscent of African systems. Ancestors are dismissed at death, but lingering worries hang on that they may return in a vengeance mode, either as a real ancestor or as one transformed into a dangerous spirit, ghost, or ghoulish creature. In both cases, which in some ways seem so very different, the closeness of the living and the dead combine with a world of sentient spirit, water, and forest beings to create a rich if at times frightening image of contemporary existence.

Finally, to add one more feature of comparison, in both systems people have, because they initiated their own heritage and ideology of freedom and defended it against many adversaries, learned to live effectively in two radically different economic systems: the global, expanding, and contracting money economy dictated by world demands of capital gain, and the local, sustainable system of subsistence life that provides their basis for survival.

See also African Diaspora; Identity and Race in the Americas

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norman e. whitten jr. (2005)