A Party for Lazarus: Six Generations of Ancestral Devotion in a Cuban Town | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs

A Party for Lazarus: Six Generations of Ancestral Devotion in a Cuban Town

By Todd Ramón Ochoa (NHC Fellow, 2017–18)

Afro-Cubans; Afro-Cuban Religions; Religious Studies; Ethnography; Cultural Anthropology; Cuba; Caribbean

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020

From the publisher’s description:

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.

Subjects
Religion / Anthropology / Afro-Cubans / Afro-Cuban Religions / Religious Studies / Ethnography / Cultural Anthropology / Cuba / Caribbean /

Ochoa, Todd Ramón (NHC Fellow, 2017–18). A Party for Lazarus: Six Generations of Ancestral Devotion in a Cuban Town. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020.