Vodou, a Phylum: Transmission, Cosmic Ecologies, and Global Circulation in African Indigenous Spirituality
RELS Colloquium
Angelantonio Grossi (Penn Center for Experimental Ethnography)
Apr 16, 2026 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204
Much scholarship on the postcolony in West Africa emphasizes the hegemony of Abrahamic religions, and stresses the racializing political-economy of witchcraft and the occult while reproducing the localization and ethnic segmentation of Indigenous traditions. Putting into question these conceptual tendencies, this talk introduces the expansive geography of spiritual traditions commonly lexicalized as Vodou and Akom in the ethnological archive of present-day Ghana. My ethnography follows Ghanaian and Ghanaian diasporic spiritual practitioners who move through locales in Ghana, Italy, Japan, and the US, and how they contend with questions of race and global Blackness, themes long cast out from the scope of the scholarship on Africa. Traversing colonially inscribed ethnic lines (Ewe and Akan), and engaging with different forms of transmissions (mediumship and filmed ethnography, music-making, Internet circulation), this talk thinks with a cosmological ecology formed around the conjunction of spirits of the land, ancestors, racialization, and the work of the Internet in the global afterlives of slavery and colonization.
Angelantonio Grossi is a Fellow in the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. He works at the intersection of religion, political anthropology, media studies, and Black studies, thinking on questions of translation, racialization and transmission of spiritual traditions.
Our final RELS colloquium of the year is happening this Thursday!
"Vodou, a Phylum: Transmission, Cosmic Ecologies, and Global Circulation in African Indigenous Spirituality"
Angelantonio Grossi (Penn Center for Experimental Ethnography)
Apr 16, 2026 at 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Cohen 204
