David MURRAY, Matter, Magic, and Spirit. Representing Indian and African American Belief, Philadelphia, Penn Press, 2007, 224 p.
ISBN 978-0-8122-3996-6
SUMMARY
The spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of NativeAmericans and African Americans have long been sources of fascinationand curiosity, owing to their marked difference from the religioustraditions of white writers and researchers. Matter, Magic, and Spiritexplores the ways religious and magical beliefs of Native Americans andAfrican Americans have been represented in a range of discoursesincluding anthropology, comparative religion, and literature. Thoughthese beliefs were widely dismissed as primitive superstition andinferior to "higher" religions like Christianity, distinctions werestill made between the supposed spiritual capacities of the differentgroups.
David Murray's analysis is unique in bringing togetherIndian and African beliefs and their representations. First tracing thedevelopment of European ideas about both African fetishism and NativeAmerican "primitive belief," he goes on to explore the ways in whichthe hierarchies of race created by white Europeans coincided withhierarchies of religion as expressed in the developing study ofcomparative religion and folklore through the nineteenth century.Crucially this comparative approach to practices that were dismissed asconjure or black magic or Indian "medicine" points as well to theimportance of their cultural and political roles in their owncommunities at times of destructive change.
Murray also exploresthe ways in which Indian and African writers later reformulated themodels developed by white observers, as demonstrated through the workof Charles Chesnutt and Simon Pokagon and then in the laterconjunctions of modernism and ethnography in the 1920s and 1930s,through the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Zitkala Sa, and others. Latersections demonstrate how contemporary writers including Ishmael Reedand Leslie Silko deal with the revaluation of traditional beliefs asspiritual resources against a background of New Age spirituality andpostmodern conceptions of racial and ethnic identity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Murray is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of many books, including Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Early Indian-White Exchanges.