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Paul C. Johnson
Director, Anthro & History PhD Prog, Assoc. Prof.
Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1997
Other U of M Affiliation:
Director, Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History;
Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS)
Contact Information:
University of Michigan
4628 Haven Hall (CAAS)
Phone:
734-763-5518
E-mail:
paulcjoh@umich.edu
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Field(s) of Study:
History and ethnography of the religions of the African Diaspora in Brazil and the Caribbean; religion and race; religion and migration; modern history of Brazil; theories of religion, and history of the study of religion
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Selected Publications:
Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa (The University of California Press, 2007)
Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association.
Secrets, Gossip and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (Oxford University Press, 2002).
Winner of the “best book” award from the American Academy of Religion for the analytic-descriptive category.
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Current Projects:
My current book project is called, To Be Possessed: “Religion” and the Purification of Spirits. An excavation of the category of "spirit possession," I consider first its creation as an early project of civil religion, next the ways the construct was implemented in colonial regulations of religion in the Americas, and finally the positive appropriation of the category by ethnographers and religious actors themselves. By closely examining philosophical, theoretical and discursive invocations of spirit possession as well as the empirical studies those models infiltrated, but also were influenced by, this study aims to show how the category worked not only as a descriptor of “primitive” religions but also, even primarily, as an exorcism the West performed on itself.
Johnson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
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