J. Lorand Matory
Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies
Address:
Harvard University
Department of Anthropology
33 Kirkland Street, Rm. 310
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617.495.7826
Fax: 617.496.8355
Email: matory@wjh.
Courses | Biography | Recent Publications | Curriculum Vitae
Courses
FC 86--"West African Cultures"
Anthro 2650a--"History and Theory of Social Anthropology" (required introductory graduate proseminar)
Anthro 1600--"Watching Us, Seeing Them: A General Introduction to Social Anthropology" (chiefly for undergraduates)
AAAS 11--"Introduction to African Studies"
AAAS 140z--"The Other African Americans: Ethnic Diversity in the Black Population of the US"
AAAS 141--"Afro-Atlantic Religions"
AAAS 12/142--"Afro-Latin American Society and Politics"
AAAS 140z--"Syncretism"
AAAS 302--"Graduate Pro-Seminar: Key Controversies in the Social Scientific Study of African Americans"
Biography
Professor Matory studies the diversity of African, African American, and Latin American culture, with an emphasis on how differently various peoples understand identity. He is also interested in Haitian "Vodu," Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Santería, which, although rooted in Africa, have deeply penetrated our urban landscape in the wake of immigration from the Caribbean to the United States. These fields inform his lecturing and writing on the poetics and politics of daily language in the United States, which explores such topics as how culturally idiosyncratic metaphors of lightness, darkness, time, money, size, and direction often guide and misguide our thinking about the world.
Professor Matory has published Sex and the Empire that Is No More (1994), which concerns male wives and female husbands in Yoruba religion and politics, and was noted by Choice magazine as one of the outstanding scholarly books of 1994. Gender, nationalism, and the role of manumitted black travelers in shaping the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion are the subject of his latest book--Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationlism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (paperback edition, 2005). It won the Melville J. Herskovits Prize, for the best book of the year, from the African Studies Association.
Professor Matory grew up in Washington, D.C. He earned his A.B. in anthropology from Harvard in 1982 and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1991. He speaks French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Yoruba fluently. He has won numerous fellowships and awards and continues to serve on the advisory board of GLQ, a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, as well as the editorial council of Brazil's flagship journal of black studies, Afro-Asia.
Recent Publications
The Other African Americans: Race, Ethnicity and Education in Black America and Beyond (book manuscript in progress). Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture and Monograph Series. Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press.
"Is There Gender in Yorùbá Culture?," Òrìşà Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture. Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey, eds. (2008) pp. 513-558
Obituary: "David Maybury-Lewis: Anthropologist keen to protect the interests of the peoples of central Brazil" (2008). The Guardian (London), 5 February
On Rings amid Somersaults There: Poetry, Parody, Parenting (2007). Cambridge : Two Birches Press.
" Orwellian Uses of 'Free Speech'," The Crimson, Harvard University (30 November 2007).
"Israel and Censorship at Harvard," The Crimson, Harvard University (14 September 2007).
"Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions," Journal of Religion in Africa Vol. 37, (2007).
"The Progressives' Prejudice," (June 6, 2007) The Crimson, Harvard University.
“Islands are Not Isolated: Reconsidering the Roots of Gullah Distinctiveness” (forthcoming). In Transcendent Traditions: Baskets of Two Continents , Dale Rosengarten, Theodore Rosengarten, and Enid Schildkrout eds. Long Island City , NY : Museum for African Art.
"Tradition, Transnationalism and Gender in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé” (2006). In Cultural Agency in the Americas . Doris Sommer ed. pp.121-45. Durham , NC : Duke University Press.
Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (2005). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ( Winner of the Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the best book of the year by the African Studies Association).
Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion --second, revised edition (2005). New York and London : Berghahn Books.
“The Homeward Ship: Analytic Tropes as Maps of and for African-Diaspora Cultural History” (under review). In Testimonies and Transformations: Reflections on the Uses of Ethnographic Knowledge , Kamari Clarke and Rebecca Hardin eds.
“The Many Who Dance in Me: Afro-Atlantic Ontology and the Problem with ‘Transnationalism'” ( forthcoming ). In Transnational Transcendence , Thomas Csordas ed.
“An African Empire in America : the Rise of Yoruba Religion in the United States .” In Religion Outside the Institutions (forthcoming). Karen McCarthy Brown and Lynn Davidman, eds. Princeton , NJ : Princeton University Press.
“Why I Stood Up: the Case against Summers” (2006). Harvard Crimson , 7 June.
“The ‘New World' Surrounds an Ocean: On the Live Dialogue between African and African-American Cultures” (2006). In Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora , Kevin Yelvington ed. Pp.151-192.. Santa Fe , NM : School of American Research.
“Sexual Secrets: Candomblé, Brazil, and the Multiple Intimacies of the African Diaspora” (2004). In Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture , Andrew Shryock ed. pp.157-190. Palo Alto , CA : Stanford University Press.
“Gendered Agendas: the Secrets Scholars Keep about Yoruba-Atlantic Religion” (2004). In Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas (A Gender and History special edition), Sandra Gunning, Tera W. Hunter and Michele Mitchell eds. Pp.13-43. Malden , MA , and Oxford , UK : Blackwell.
“Gendered Agendas: the Secrets Scholars Keep about Yoruba-Atlantic Religion” (2003). Gender and History 15[3]:408-38.
“Contradiction and Forgetting among the Yewésseys” (2002). Transforming Anthropology 10(2):2-12.
“El nuevo imperio Yoruba: Textos, migración y el auge transatlántico de la nación lucumí” (2001). In Culturas encontradas: Cuba y los Estados Unidos , Rafael Hernández and John Coatsworth, eds. Pp. 167-188. Havana : Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Juan Marinello and Cambridge , MA : David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University .
“Surpassing ‘Survivals': On the Urbanity of ‘Traditional Religion' in the Afro-Atlantic World” (2001). The Black Scholar , 30 (3): 36-43.
“The Gullah and the Black Atlantic” Footsteps: African American History and Heritage Magazine , (March/April 2001), pp. 10-11.
“Africans in the United States” Footsteps: African American History and Heritage Magazine, (March/April 2001), pp. 6-9.
“The Other African Americans” Footsteps: African American History and Heritage Magazine, (March/April 2001), pp. 24-25.
“The ‘Cult of Nations' and the Ritualization of their Purity” (2001). South Atlantic Quarterly (special issue on “Atlantic Genealogies”) 100(1):171-214.
"Jeje: Repensando Nações e Transnacionalismo” (1999). Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social ( Rio de Janeiro ) 5(1): 57-80.
“Afro-Atlantic Culture: On the Live Dialogue between Africa and the Americas.” In Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999). Henry Louis Gates and K. Anthony Appiah, eds. Pp. 36-44. New York : Basic Civitas Books.
“The English Professors of Brazil : On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation” (1999). Comparative Studies in Society and History 41(1):72-103.
"Yorubá: As Rotas e as Raízes da Nação Transatlântica, 1830-1950" (1998). Horizontes Antropológicos ( Porto Alegre , Brazil ) 4(9):263-292.
Book review (1998) of Yoruba Sacred Kingship: “A Power Like that of the Gods ” (1996) by John Pemberton, III, and Funs? Af?layan. Anthropological Quarterly 71(3):155-156.
"Yoruba: A World Civilization" (1998). Calliope: World History for Young People, February, pp. 4-8, 39.
"Religions, African, in the Americas" (1997). In The Encyclopedia of Sub-Saharan Africa , ed. John Middleton. New York : Simon and Schuster.
"African and Afro-Caribbean Religions in the United States " (1997). In On Common Ground: World Religions in America , Interactive CD-ROM, ed. Diana Eck. New York : Columbia University Press.
"The King's Male-Order Bride: the Making of a Yoruba Priest in a Post-Modern Age" (1997). In Queens , Queen Mothers, Priestesses, and Power: Case Studies in African Gender , ed. Flora Kaplan. Vol. 810 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences , pp.381-400. New York : New York Academy of Arts and Sciences.
"Revisiting the African Diaspora" (1996) --book review essay concerning Joseph M. Murphy's Working the Spirit (1994), George Brandon's Santeria from Africa to the New World (1993), and Ysamur Flores-Peña and Roberta J. Evanchuk's Santería Garments and Altars (1994). American Anthropologist 88(1):167-70.
Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (1994). Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press. A Choice outstanding scholarly book of the year.
"Rival Empires: Islam and the Religions of Spirit Possession among the Oyo-Yoruba" (1994). American Ethnologist 21(3):495-515.
"Government by Seduction: History and the Tropes of 'Mounting' in Oyo-Yoruba Religion" (1993). In Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Africa , eds. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
Review article (1993) on Creativity of Power: Essays on Cosmology and Action in African Societies (1989), eds. Ivan Karp and William Arens. Journal of Religion in Africa 23(2):175-80.
Book review (1991) of Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway. American Anthropologist 93: 489-90.
"Homens Montados: homossexualidade e simbolismo da possessão nas religiões afro-brasileiras" ("Mounted Men: homosexuality and the symbolism of possession in the Afro-Brazilian religions," 1988). In Escravidão e Invenção da Liberdade , ed. João José Reis. São Paulo : Editora Brasiliense).