Marcela Perdomo

As a cultural anthropologist of religion, my research examines the intersections of spirit possession, historical memory, ethnogenesis, and race across the Caribbean and the Americas. My work is grounded in long-term ethnographic and historical research with Garifuna communities in Honduras and brings the anthropology of the African diaspora into conversation with Carib-Amazonian cosmologies and Amazonian shamanism. At the center of this work is the historically improbable encounter between Africans and Island Caribs in the colonial Caribbean and the new forms of kinship, racial identity, and peoplehood that emerged from it. I am particularly interested in how this African-Indigenous historical and cosmological convergence shaped Dugu, and how relations with ancestors and spirits continue to transmit histories of displacement, collective belonging, and peoplehood across generations.

My current book project, Chosen by the Ancestors: A Binding Gift. Spirit Possession and Historical Memory in the Garifuna Dugu of Honduras, reconsiders Dugu not simply as an ancestor cult or healing ritual, but as a historical-initiatory possession complex embedded in Garifuna social and religious life. The book traces the historical world carried by Garifuna ancestors, from the formation of Garifuna society in the Caribbean and the rupture of deportation from Saint Vincent to contemporary communities in Central America and the diaspora. It examines spirit election, mediumship, initiation, material religion, and ritual practice as interconnected dimensions of a possession system through which relationships between the living and the dead continually make this historical world present.

More broadly, my research asks how religious practices can preserve forms of historical knowledge that are not primarily transmitted through texts or formal narratives. Bringing scholarship on African and African diasporic possession-based religions into conversation with Amazonian theories of shamanism, kinship, and personhood, my work examines the historical and cosmological convergences through which religious worlds are formed.