Description
"Christmas with the Ancestors" centers on the Afro-Atlantic cultural complex known as Jankunu (of John Canoe)--an enigmatic Yuletide festival tradition once practiced on plantations in Virginia, North Carolina, Jamaica, British Honduras, and several points in between. Based on extensive library and archival research and original fieldwork completed in several different sites, this study constitutes one of the most comprehensive and in-depth studies of the Jankunu phenomenon to date--and certainly the most enthnographically grounded one. Using comparative methods together with an ethnographic approach, it sheds much needed light on the varient of Jankunu (known as "John Kuner," or by various other names) once practiced in the Virginia and Carolina Tidewater region, as well as cognate versions elsewhere in the Americas. It does this with the help of new ethnographic findings that have brought to light clearly African-based religious/spiritual practices and meanings in contemporary conservative varieties of Jankunu still practiced in Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Belize. Using insights gained from close ethnography to (re)interpret both historical and present-day materials, this study places Jankunu, past and present, clearly and definitevely in its proper religious context, alongside other forms of African and African-American spirituality.
