 The metaphor of oneness is useful to explain how all things near and far from each other are ultimately connected to each other and ultimately influence each other. The failure to recognize the interconnectedness of all things and people, people with what we call nature, animals with what we call people is certainly one of the problems. The conditional recognition that we are not the same person is a healthy precondition for my gaining a greater understanding of the universe by listening to you carefully. One has to acknowledge that, you know, sometimes very highly educated people, people who are very thoughtful, very careful, they check their data, they check their syllogisms, they ask for criticism, and they work really hard to get things right, sometimes they get it wrong too. But that doesn't mean that people just based upon their instinct or their gut and their dismissal of those who analyze carefully would be making better decisions. Let's see, the foundation of it is that I study religions of African inspiration around the Atlantic perimeter. West African Yoruba religion, West Central African Congo religion, Brazilian Candomblé, I think I got all of them. And ever since about 1981, I've been researching and my major mode of study is to read as much as I can but then to go out and hang out deeply with people, to live with people, eat what they eat, dance what they dance, worship what they worship, you know, just think about the world in their terms by living that life. That's the fundamental shared technique of sociocultural anthropology. I am a person of both worlds. I'm a person of Afro-Atlantic religions. I'm a person of the Western Academy. I'm an anthropologist trying to understand the web of relationships that people create through these objects and I'm trying my best to learn how Africanist art historians understand them as well. You know, the ability to describe the differences among colors, to notice the textures, to examine the historical precedents in Rococo style as opposed to neoclassical style. Each of these traditions makes a somewhat different set of assumptions about the world, a somewhat different set of assumptions about what kind of objects best embody the forces that penetrate us and overlap within us and each of them is structured by a different kind of mythology. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two... What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are on site at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting for our second partnership with them, now in Vancouver, British Columbia. We are now going to be sitting with Dr. J. Lorand Maturi, aka Randy. Hi, Randy. Hi, Alan. Thanks for going on the show. It's a pleasure. I'm very excited for our conversation. Randy is a Lawrence Richardson professor of cultural anthropology at Duke, also director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project at Duke. And we'll be diving into those two subjects before we start. I want to ask you some of our very deep questions that we've been obsessed with recently. Are we really all one? Well, to me, oneness is a metaphor. I believe that all of the substances, beings, and things around us are connected with each other, and that our tendency to give each of them a noun is really only approximate reality. Each thing is a halo. It's a halo of atoms. And in culture-specific and language-specific ways, we artificially presuppose the boundedness of each of those things, the conceptual boundedness and the physical boundedness of those things. And again, all of these things are halos. Things interdigitate with each other. Things depend on each other. This table couldn't sit where it is were it not for this floor. You and I couldn't sit here were it not for this floor. The thoughts that I'm articulating are now part of your thoughts, and the visual impression of you is part of my thoughts. So many things in us would be very different were I not looking at you, and many things in you would be different synaptically were you not listening to me. So the metaphor of oneness is useful to explain how all things near and far from each other are ultimately connected to each other and ultimately influence each other. But I don't think it's a fiction for me to call you Alan and for you to call me Randy in so far as we are conditionally separate halos. We are conditionally separate clouds of atoms whose contents don't thoroughly overlap, but it's very useful for us to recognize that already after three days of acquaintance there is not an insignificant overlap between who you are and who I am already. And then given this deep level of interconnectedness to each other, to nature, to all of existence, would this then be the most upstream issue, our lack of acknowledgement of that deep interconnectedness that is then causing all the downstream issues that our society faces? The failure to recognize the interconnectedness of all things and people, people with what we call nature, animals with what we call people is certainly one of the problems. The exaggerated premise of individuality in the West, the exaggerated premise of the uniqueness of human beings and our rights, the exaggerated premise of the uniqueness of the rights of Westerners or Europeans or men or straight people lend themselves to a good deal of unkind treatment of others which result in degrading effects to the world that we need to share. On the other hand, my appreciation of you is partly related to the fact that your bundle of molecules has had different experiences from my bundle of molecules. You look different. You grew up speaking a set of languages that's different from the set of languages that I grew up speaking. You are looking in that direction and I'm looking at this direction. So to my mind, the conditional recognition that we are not the same person is a healthy precondition for my gaining a greater understanding of the universe by listening to you carefully. My delighting in a new kind of human connection because you are not exactly like some people I grew up with or not exactly like my wife or child or not exactly like my colleague. My acknowledging the difference between you and all of them is a precursor to my appreciating you fully and learning as much as I can from you. Given the amount of wisdom and intelligence that comes with the awareness of the behaviors and the insights of indigenous people around our world and then the younger brother out in the metropolis is that is creating engineering, tinkering, making things that are useful at times. Would it be a happy marriage between these two, this indigenous intelligence with some of the abilities of modernity for there to be a better path moving forward? Yes, I assume that richer and more sincere conversations across all social categories will make the world a better place. I'm not sure that I know enough people who define themselves as indigenous to generalize about what they have to contribute. I certainly know a lot of people who understand themselves to be modern, which category I think includes a wide diversity of people. I consider myself to be a modern person. I tend to think of you as a modern person, both of whom have sampled a range of ways of thinking and are trying to find our way to the best ones. I'm a bit hesitant to credit a whole population of people called indigenous with a greater wisdom because concretely and honestly speaking I am aware of more than a few Native Americans who disregard the rights of the African-descended people who are members of their nations. For example, the Seminoles and the Cherokees have since the 1980s voted about a dozen times to exclude their African-descended citizens from rights of citizenship. That is to say, these tribes like several others in the southeast owned African people. When Andrew Jackson displaced these populations from the southeast, giving them parts of Oklahoma, their enslaved people went with them and often helped to mediate relations with white U.S. Americans so as to get the best deals for these tribes. Yet these tribes have repeatedly voted to disenfranchise the descendants of Africans. So if we consider these populations indigenous, I would also consider that indigenous people are equally vulnerable to the sorts of inhumanity, kindness, and out of proportion thinking that modern populations are capable of. Yeah, this is a really important example to bring up and I appreciate you doing so. That's very helpful. This complexity of this reality that we find ourselves in, is this the purpose of this all being here, of this reality being here is us figuring out how to harmonize our reality and direct us in a more positive, flourishing direction. Well, I take the word purpose to be metaphorical too. The way that I think the universe doesn't have purposes. I don't think of the universe as a human-like being that has intentions or strategies to get toward a particular goal. I think things happen. Some things make it much more likely that other things will happen and each living being can make choices in a sense. The most obvious way in which one has choices is based upon analogy to human thinking. So for example, I had the choice to come and participate in this interview or not. You had the choice to ask one question or another, to ask it one way or another, to hold your silence when I gave a response or to interrupt me. We do things like that all the time that do reverberate. They have consequences afterwards that we hope will be consistent with our intentions and the purposes that we had in mind when we chose to do thing X as opposed to thing Y or to do X in one way rather than another way. Of course we know that our intentions and our purposes don't always predictably lead to the objectives that we're pursuing. Sometimes we accidentally did it the wrong way or the other person received it the wrong way. So the outcome is not what we intended. So there's only a certain degree to which the purpose, even of human beings, of highly thoughtful, well-planning individuals can be described as purposive in the sense of really achieving that end. Each of us, when we choose a way of doing things, is also being affected by the state of our bodies, whether we're feeling sick or healthy, drunk or not drunk, whether we're seeing clearly or not, what assumptions we're making, what demons trouble us, all sorts of irrational stuff, intervenes in our decision making such that even when consciously we're trying to be purposive, there's a lot more going on in shaping our behavior than the purposive or than the intentional. The universe likewise, there are some social theorists who emphasize or claim that objects have agency as well. The fact that even though this table is made up of a halo of molecules, electrons, atoms, nuclei, it's really hard for me to, if I want to lower my arm to this level, it would be really hard for me simply to pass through the table. There's a small probability that I could, that my arm would go straight through the table. There's a small probability given the way that atoms and molecules work, but it's very unlikely and chances are I would have to push extremely hard to move my arm low without going around the table. On that grounds, some argue that tables have agency. This building has agency in a sense that it's cooling the room in a certain way and enabling us to talk without the effects that heat would have on us, but it is having the effects that being a little too cold is having on me. That's shaping how I talk, that's shaping how I move, that's shaping how well I'm able to think, but I think there were some living thinking beings who more or less made some choices that caused the building to do this. It's hard for me to see, to attribute to the building agency even though I know that whatever button the engineer pushed, the building might do something different. Whatever the building was expected to do when the button was pushed might be shaped by geological and atmospheric electrical forces that make it do something different. All of that interconnection of things, those events that intervene between our intention and the outcomes that we generate, those are powerful forces. I don't necessarily call them intentions or purposes. I don't have exactly the vocabulary for that, but the universe is full of stuff like that. Whether there's a single ultimate purpose, I don't know, but I do believe it's fair for human beings like you and me to assign, to rank our goals. For example, if it is your goal to help us all to behave with a recognition that a harm to one of us is a harm to all of us, or a harm to him is also a harm to me, that is a perfectly laudable human purpose. One of the messages of oneness to me might be that each of us must show a degree of humility with regard to the fact that no matter what our intentions are and how well we've thought them out, including the intention to encourage oneness, we must constantly pay attention to the consequences on the other. Some utopian dreams of oneness that have been pursued too dogmatically, whether it's Stalinist socialism or a Polpuk's socialism or Mussolini and Hitler's fascism, some such pursuits of oneness that then dogmatically fail to check back in on whether the harm done to many sufficiently justifies the expectation of comfort once we're whole. It's a good reminder that the one does not answer or serve the same purposes as our utopian dreams of oneness. Sometimes it manifests realities that are beyond what we could think of when we named the one. Another purpose of pursuit of oneness was eugenics, the premise that all of society would be improved if we sterilized certain people whom the eugenicists, the wholeness thinker, thought weren't contributing to the whole properly, or were diminishing the whole, and they actually sterilized people with the premise that the whole was more important than those people. And so I would urge that the pursuit of the one, the practical philosophy and premise that we are one, interpreted according to a certain set of expectations about how we treat each other, even articulated by the wisest person, should be accompanied by a certain humility by that person about what oneness should really mean. And those that seek to build that next world of the one carrying humility in the process and enabling really deep discourse around morals, ethics, philosophies, architectures, designs for maximal flourishing is paramount. I agree. Yeah. And thought is really important. They're these people who think that just because they intuit something, they can go for it, like the Donald Trump philosophy. He doesn't believe that he has to pay attention to people who analyze things carefully, who spend years and years trying to figure out something with the humility that they're not always right, but they're trying to gather as many perspectives as possible and double check their inferences very carefully. There are some people and a large part of the U.S. American population who, like Donald Trump, thinks, oh, well, if a claim feels right for me, then it's the truth. And they'll look at the mistakes that highly educated people and journalists who are trying to be careful sometimes make. And they'll say, you see how those educated people got it wrong? Those people who analyze things down to the nth degree, you see how they get it wrong? And they're willing to leap from there to the conclusion that if you analyze things very carefully and with self-scrutiny, you're just as likely to get it wrong as if you go on your gut. And most of the people who say that are not very highly educated. One has to acknowledge that sometimes very highly educated people, people who are very thoughtful, very careful, they check their data, they check their syllogisms, they ask for criticism, and they work really hard to get things right. Sometimes they get it wrong, too. But that doesn't mean that people just based upon their instinct or their gut and their dismissal of those who analyze carefully would be making better decisions. In fact, regularly, people dismiss facts, refuse to double check their syllogisms, and refuse to listen to criticism because from the very start they wanted to do something unkind to somebody else and they want to get away with it and not be scrutinized for it. So in other words, I'm affirming yes, humility, careful thought, careful investigation are a much better way to improve the world than these people who refuse careful thought because they think their gut is just as good. It's also another one of these feels like a marriage of rationality with intuition when you can merge both of those together. I want to pass some time on the focus of yours on the sacred arts of the Black Atlantic project. This is beautiful. I saw your handout that you were delivering and the talk that you were delivering today. Oh, you came to my talk. Well, I was able to listen to it because of reading over the talk yesterday. Oh, yeah. Oh, so you didn't actually attend the talk. I was doing another interview. Oh, I understand. Yeah, it changed a lot. It was all of my talk. It changed a lot. Yeah, because, you know, I rethink things. I'm never satisfied with the last version. I rethought it. I cut stuff. I added stuff and I don't think it was filmed. But that's another thing that Triple H I was hoping to pass along to them is I wouldn't love for the talks to begin being filmed and then put up on the Triple H's YouTube and that type of stuff. I mean, I'll be passing along that to their team tomorrow in a small meeting. So the talk around the sacred arts of the Black Atlantic project, all of this the story that you have of going out and making these beautiful connections with different priests and then being able to share with other students these incredible artifacts that tell stories and awaken people. Take us down this path. OK, well, the let's see. The foundation of it is that I study religions of African inspiration around the Atlantic perimeter. West African Yoruba religion, West Central African Congo religion, Brazilian candomblé, Haitian voodoo, Cuban and Cuban Santillian ocha. I think I got all of them. OK. And ever since about 1981, I've been researching, trying to figure out and writing about these traditions coming up on 40 years. That's right. Yeah. That's right. And my major mode of study is to read as much as I can, but then to go out and hang out deeply with people, to live with people, eat what they eat, dance what they dance, worship what they worship. You know, just think about the world in their terms by living that life. That's the fundamental shared technique of sociocultural anthropology. There are a few of us who will just sit in a library and analyze a book. A few of us who will examine lives online and think we're painting a world. But most of us value the idea that the foremost learning happens when we're hanging out with people, not just interviewing them, but, you know, whatever comes up, we learn from. The deepest experiential levels. Exactly. And listening to the stuff that people say in the middle of a fight when they're not, you know, when they're not, you know, sort of programming a self representation for the world to see or when they don't feel they're being surveilled, how they act spontaneously, how they under what they take for granted about the shape of the world and the nature of people. That's what we most want to get at, whether we're studying religion or the economics of that society, the political aspects of that society, their kinship or what have you, want to understand what they're taking for granted and how, for historical and learned reasons, it differs from what other people are taking for granted about the world. And so the understanding of how the practitioners of spirit, possession, religions and people who consecrate objects, turning them into gods think has been profoundly transformative to me as someone who grew up middle class in U.S. American society, who regarded things as just technological instruments or tools of our will and who grew up regarding himself as an individual without any fundamental and undeniable obligation to anybody. And with the thought that nobody had any fundamental and undeniable obligation to me either, independence was regarded as a virtue. So in encountering Afro-Atlantic priests, I had experiences like this. My best friend in Brazil, witnessing me sewing a button that had popped off a shirt of mine back in 1987 during my first Brazilian field research. And he said to me, he looked at me, put his hands on his hips and said, you're so self-sufficient and it was not intended as praise. It was a criticism. So these traditions so assume the interconnectedness of people and our interdigitation with forces of the universe, that the ideal of personal autonomy and self-sufficiency that the products of the Enlightenment that are the U.S. American middle class are perceived as odd as they can understand why we're the ones destroying the universe. They can understand why we have very high suicide rates. This is how our world is seen by them. Wow, this really loops us back to the oneness again. Yes. Yeah, wow. And so, you know, I'm still the post-Enlightenment Western middle class, me, the child of privilege. I mean, I love owning beautiful things. I love living in a comfortable house. I love having my own income and enough money in the bank so that I don't need to depend on as many people as a poor person would. On the other hand, I am also aware of fully able to understand and grasp and internalize how the being that is me interdigitates with the being that is the river. The being that is me interdigitates with the being that is the mountain. The being that is me interdigitates with the being that is you. The being that is me interdigitates with and depends on the being that this is built, that is this building. I can, I can think that way too. And I can feel it. Yeah. And one of the sources and embodiments of that feeling are the sacred, the consecrated objects and embodied gods that have been given to me by the priests of Haitian voodoo of Brazilian candombla of West African Yoruba religion and Cuban Santiria. And I have developed a collection of sacred arts that I began collecting back in 1982 at my first trip during my first trip to Nigeria, beautiful objects that embody the spirit and the thinking and the taking, takens for granted of people in these religious traditions. And over the last maybe 15 or so years, I have been acquiring gods. The priests who have worked with me, even though I'm not fully initiated, have come to believe that I would benefit from and I would take good care of gods that they have made for me. And I have done so. They give them to me and I take very, very good care of them. The ones that like candles and perfume. I light candles for and give perfume on a daily or almost daily basis to the goddess of the river Ogu, whose name is Yemajia. I light her candle virtually every day. I ring her bell. Oh, and the Haitian gods, I salute the way they like with the rattles that correspond to their service. And usually that rattle called the asa belongs to the highest rank of initiate in the tradition of Haitian voodoo. But the priestess regarded me as fit to receive it. So I salute the gods as they wish to be saluted. And you follow these rituals to their sacred. Their most sacred practices that then connect you to the deepest roots of who they are and what they especially with the interdigitation of all. Yeah. And each of these traditions conceives of what we're interdigitated with slightly differently. But I'm trying my best to learn from each form of interdigitation. And I take it very seriously. I have not done the most sacred things and that has undergone full initiation because the enlightenment itself in me and I'm a third child too finds subordination very difficult. It's not easy for me to absolutely submit in ways that are required by the fullest initiation. But but I am very conscientiously attentive to the needs of these gods. I with regard to religious matters, I obey the priests. If they express subtle hints, they say, well, maybe you know, maybe you shouldn't do it that way. Or they laugh at me when I do it a certain way. Like I was, you know, one time the last time my priestess friend from Haitian voodoo was leading a sacred ceremony on behalf of my gods for a large group of people. I, in the matter of participant observation of anthropology, I went and got my ass on. And as she shook the ass on saluting the gods and leading the ceremony, I would shake mine in exactly the same way. But then she she said in my in my she said to the other priests who were, you know, performing the ritual with us after the first part of it or the second part ended. She she said, oh, my torii poin asson maturi has taken the asson. And she was laughing at me, but I think implying, wait, you're doing something that's beyond your rank. You shouldn't be doing that. So I said, oh, and so I took me in. So I put my ass on down. But yeah, so I'm I am I'm a person of both worlds. I'm a person of Afro-Atlantic religions. I'm a person of the Western Academy and end of the Western middle class. And and so what you brought up was the sacred art. I that would be the prime rubric for an art historian. But I'm too humble to take on the title of expert on African art, per se, because there are people who do this with such, such excellence. I'm an anthropologist trying to understand the web of relationships that people create through these objects. And I'm trying my best to learn how Africanist art historians understand them as well. I admire what they do, but sometimes they look back at me and they say, no, you're doing the right thing. We want to do what you're doing. But they don't realize how much they know and how much I would like to grasp. But, you know, the ability to describe the differences among colors, to notice the textures, to examine the the historical precedents in Rococo style, as opposed to let's see what's neoclassical style. I wish I could grasp the history well enough because I want to know not only the present nature of these objects, but the history of form that contributed to them and why my best priestess friend chose that form as opposed to other forms. I would like to be able to name why I find her Paquet Kongo, the embodiments of the gods in Haitian tradition, why I find them so deeply beautiful. But I don't find everybody else's Paquet Kongo deeply beautiful. And I would like to understand historically what I'm responding to in the form that she gives to the gods. Yes, what is it about these sacred arts from these are very different diverse regions, Nigeria, Brazil, the Caribbean. And Cuba. Yes. And these are very, Cuba, Brazil, Nigeria, my folks are. Yeah. Yeah. And that when you look at sacred arts from these different diverse places, there's different historical purposes for these sacred arts through their lineages. Then there's what the actual sacred art itself is. Yes, that's right. And then the way the ritual that they do with it. And then what is that unlocking? What is that unleashing with their spirit? And then what is it that the students that you get to bring into that experience, what do they awaken to? Good. Thank you for asking me that question. OK, so first of all, these traditions are united historically by the fact of the Atlantic slave trade from the late 15th century until the end of the last third of the 19th century. Western Europeans traded in huge numbers of captive Africans, bringing them to the new world above all to produce sugar more cheaply than free labor could have produced it, but also to produce cotton and rice to generate enormous profits, not only for the European monarchies and nation states that taxed the slave trade, but for the the planters in the Americas who purchased those enslaved people and drove them often to their deaths for the benefit of the planters. Subsequently, free African diaspora people traveled back and forth between, on the one hand, Cuba and Brazil, on the other hand, West Africa. And these populations interacted with Europeans, they interacted with Native Americans, and in each of these places a religious formation came about that combined their shared Western African premises in different ways and combined them with different European traditions and combined them with different Native American traditions, and in some cases combined them with different Asian traditions, be they Indian tradition or Chinese tradition, because in different parts of Western Africa and the African diaspora, we interacted with Chinese people and Indians as well, or at least Western images of Indians. Each of these traditions makes a somewhat different set of assumptions about the world, a somewhat different set of assumptions about what kind of objects best embody the forces that penetrate us and overlap within us, and each of them is structured by a different kind of mythology. So, Brazilian con nombre is highly structured by a hierarchy of relative purity in imitation of what's supposed to be an African original. Haitian voodoo is divided between largely two ritual modalities, one focused on royalty that looks almost equally African and European, and one focused on the adoration of and working with rebel slave spirits. One set of spirits is cool and you can pray to them and they'll more or less do what you ask if you're patient enough. The other spirits are hot and fiery and angry and defensive and are more likely to do immediately what you ask as long and be very effective at doing so. The Cuban tradition is similarly divided between, well, much more, let's see, it dichotomizes West African traditions from West Central African traditions, representing one as more royal, more divine, more beneficent, and one as working with forces that are not as beneficent, one's more related to the dead, one's more related, easier to assign elements of mercenary behavior. So, the moral configurations in these places are somewhat different. In West African Yoruba religion there's an emphasis on the difference between cool gods and hot gods. All of them can be equally malevolent or beneficent. They're just forces in the universe. They handle properly, respect it properly, they generate good for us, handle improperly, they can generate bad for us. So there's an emphasis on, in all of these traditions, there's an emphasis on balancing the forces that are shaping us. It did sound very much like a yin and yang. Exactly, it's very, very similar, which is why one of the reasons that Chinese ritual authorities and African ritual authorities got along so well in China and the Africans embraced Buddha, the Buddha and Guan Yin, and also Guan Gong, who's a god of the, and saint of the martial arts in China. Anyhow, so each of these is an idiom of awakening and inspiration about the wholeness of the universe, but they name the particular roots a bit differently and alert us to different kinds of connection in the world. But I always imagine that the thing that unites them is the ocean. Yes, yes. There's a repeated, very important theme of the ocean and its ambivalent modalities. And so I always come back to the goddess Yemaja or Yemaya. In the Cuban and Brazilian tradition, she's regarded as the goddess of the sea. In the Nigerian tradition, she's regarded as the goddess of a river, but it's the river, among all the rivers in Nigeria that flows most directly to the sea, and her altars contain a lot of marine seashells. So the ocean that unites us all is for me an important touchstone and metaphor of the wholeness that these polytheistic traditions presuppose. And so that speaks to the wholeness of the universe that you're very concerned about too. I love how within the study of sacred arts from no matter really where on the planet we study the sacred arts, thematically such a similarity around the ocean, around the one, and then whatever ways of archetypally, mythologically describing these forces, elements, powers, it's just so gorgeous, the story that is being told about... But you notice it seems to me that Western Christian, that the Abrahamic religions focus much more on the sky than the sea. And one might also observe that the Abrahamic religions are the ones that have terrorized the rest of us the most. The material logic of the ocean is very different from the material logic of our hierarchical relationship with the sky. One tends to be called a father and one tends to be called a mother. They're really different logics and there is no population of people more than Christians and Muslims who have classified and Jewish people or Hebrews who have classified the gods of other people as demons. It needed being wiped out. And no populations more than Christians and Muslims have conquered land all over the planet with the intention of dominating those populations and eliminating their gods. Which also includes regularly the project of enslaving other people, murdering them and taking their land based upon the fact that they worship another set of gods. And there has been no greater victim of the Abrahamic religions than Africa. So Africa has a special lesson for us and the religions of the enslaved have a special lesson for us about the wrong way to pursue the one. About the very unkind results of monotheism. Wow, what a very profound way to synthesize what has been happening here on our planet for the longest time and for us to be able to awaken to where we want to go in the future. Ashe. Ashe. Amen. Yeah. Thank you very much for joining us on the show everyone. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on that episode. Let us know what you're thinking. Check out all the links in the bio below to Randy's work. Check that out. Support him please. Support the American Anthropological Association as well. You can find their links in the bio and you can support us as well on the show. And go and build the future everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in. We will see you soon. Can I plug something? Randy's plug? If your institution might be interested in hosting an exhibition called Spirited Things, Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic, which I have curated to illustrate some of these points, please contact International Arts and Artists in Washington D.C. And they can arrange to have the exhibition visit your institution.