Elizabeth Pérez Awarded Leonard Norman Primiano Book Prize on Vernacular Catholicism

The American Folklore Society’s Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section is happy to announce the recipient of the Leonard Norman Primiano Book Prize on Vernacular Catholicism, established to recognize and stimulate new work in vernacular Catholicism and to commemorate the life and work of distinguished scholar Leonard Norman Primiano (1957-2021).

Elizabeth Pérez’s (University of California, Santa Barbara) The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores a lesser known and undervalued aspect of lived religious practices and cosmologies (the gut) from which to articulate and engage with a wider, complex cosmological whole, including with aspects of vernacular Catholicism. The author skillfully expands on the metaphor of the gut, drawing on historical, ethnographic, and religious studies scholarship to analyze magic at the heart of Afro-Caribbean religions including Lukumí, Vodou, and Candomblé. The Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract is used as a lens from which to address oracular practices, myths, rituals, food, eating, the senses, communities, magic, and material cultures, fully engaging with vernacular, lived religious practices in keeping with Primiano’s scholarship. It would be hard to overstate the innovation of this work.

View the video abstract for Pérez’s The Gut.

Pérez is best known for her work on the ‘micropractices’ of food preparation in the Yorùbá-derived religion of Lucumí, and her first book Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, & the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (NYU Press, 2016) was awarded the 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion. However, she grew up in a vernacular Catholic Cuban home, attended parochial school, and wrote an undergraduate thesis at Hampshire College entitled, ‘Cosa Sabrosa: The Writing of Saint Teresa of Avila.’ Her first single-authored scholarly article was an analysis of the Cuban Virgin of Regla and her iconography as an unambiguously Black ‘Black Madonna,’ used to represent the African deity Yemayá. More recently, Pérez contributed the chapter on ‘Afro-Cuban Catholicisms’ in The Oxford Handbook of Latinx Christianities (2022), edited by Kristy Nabhan Warren. Her courses at UCSB have included ‘Dark Goddesses & Black Madonnas,’ which examines female deities and apparitions of the Virgin Mary historically depicted as dark-skinned, and ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe: From Tilma to Tattoo,’ which concentrates on the most compelling contexts in which Guadalupe has negotiated Mexican and Xicanx religious, racial, sexual, and national identity.

Watch the video below for Pérez’s lecture about vernacular Catholic iconographic conventions and the relationship of saints to Lucumí practitioners.

Watch the video below for Pérez’s discussant comments at a Seminar in American Religion at the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism in 2022 for Kristy Nabhan-Warren’s book Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland.