New from the University of California Press: A Party for Lazarus: Six Generations of Ancestral Devotion in a Cuban Town by Todd Ramón Ochoa.About the book, from the publisher:
A Party for Lazarus is the story of a Cuban family, six generations removed from slavery, struggling to honor its ancestors amid changing fortunes and a crumbling state. This intimate intergenerational account centers on an annual feast celebrating ancestors and orisás—the life-changing spirits at the heart of Black Atlantic religious life. Based on twenty years of fieldwork, Todd Ramón Ochoa’s masterful ethnography shows how orisá praise and everyday life have changed in revolutionary Cuba over two decades of economic hardship.Todd Ramón Ochoa is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba.
--Marshal Zeringue
