Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century

摘要

For many enslaved Africans, the baptismal ceremony carried out on the shores of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century West Africa before they were loaded onto the terrible transatlantic slave ships was a fearsome ritual that signified the first step in a process which they believed would end in their consumption by Europeans, either as food or as an ingredient of gunpowder. Joan Cameron Bristol not only draws the reader's attention to the initial distance of newly enslaved Africans from Christianity, but also constructs a wide-ranging narrative that penetrates and illuminates a significant sector of Christian society in New Spain, and in fact shows that Colonial Afro-Mexicans were, as she writes, defined by 'shared values, cultural practices and communities' (p. 5).