Forde, Maarit

Preliminary abstract: The workshop brings together 15 anthropologists interested in the cultural construction and practices of death and mourning in the Caribbean context. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss and develop ethnographically informed theory of the anthropology of death and to publish the proceedings as an edited volume. The workshop provides a forum for anthropologists specialized in religion and kinship not only in the Anglophone Caribbean, but in the Spanish, French and Dutch-speaking areas as well as in Caribbean diasporas to discuss and further their analyses of mortuary rituals and understandings of death and the hereafter. These analyses intervene in current debates in the anthropology of religion in the Caribbean in which writers have sought to answer how, and by whom, religious beliefs and practices have been produced and reproduced, rather than concerning themselves with pinning down the essence or boundaries of particular religious formations. Problematizing epistemologies of religion, this debate, and the research produced by the proposed workshop, build on important theorizing on Atlantic modernity, in which the Caribbean has a central space. While the focus of the workshop is decidedly regional, the theoretical debates to with it seeks to contribute are more generally relevant ones in the anthropology of death, ritual, and kinship.